Origin of The Ladd School
Copyright © 2006, The Ladd School.com - Written by Ladd Curator

Over the course of the nineteenth century, a number of men in the early academic circles of medicine and mental health were largely responsible as the inventors of a modern monster, namely, the feeble-minded institution.

As early as 1800 the saga of institutionalization began with the capture of a feral child; Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, France. Admitted to an asylum for the deaf and dumb in Paris, Victor quickly became a scientific model for the training of idiots; a trend that would swell in Europe by the middle of the century, and make it’s way across the ocean to America by the centuries close.

Phillipe Pinel, the French psychologist later known for liberating one of the most notoriously arcane institutions in France, may be credited as being the first to diagnose Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, as being an “incurable idiot”. Though however prevailing this assertion as was held by Pinel and many of his contemporaries - that the Wild Boy of Aveyron was not a feral child in the truest sense but rather a developmentally disabled orphan - was not immediately embraced by all. While to the future generations of modern science Pinel’s prognosis would be of little debate, there was as yet an opposing school of thought born from the science and medical circles of European academia. (Seguin,1856)

The Doctor Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, Chief Physician at the National Institution for Deaf Mutes, in Paris, was one such man whose convictions made him a disciple of this latter school. Itard believed that in fact the boy in captivity was to some degree a savage, abandoned in his later youth to the wilderness, his subsequent condition rendered by his prolonged isolation from humanity – a condition, Itard asserted, that could be overcome. (Yousef, 2001)

So the Doctor Itard took the boy, whom he named Victor, under his charge at the Parisian institution. For the next five years, the Doctor dedicated his time to the intensive work of “educating” the boy in such ways as the institution was versed in training the deaf and dumb, a method of sensory training that, little could Itard know then, would some day be recognized as the precursor to the modern special education program. (Yousef, 2001)

When in 1806 Itard concluded his experiment, the fruits of his labor were scant – or perhaps that is too critical a phrase, for certainly, Itard’s efforts indeed showed improvement in young Victor. In those five years, Victor had since become capable of carrying out simple commands; he wore clothes and seemed to no longer pine for his escape into the wilderness; he could speak, albeit with very few words, and evidently even learned to feel affection for his captors. However, in spite of what could otherwise very well be considered the most famous and reasonably successful attempt to educate the clinically idiotic, Dr. Itard carried his experiment no further. Victor lived the remainder of his years under the care of Dr. Itards housekeeper, Madamme Guerin, and died of natures cause twenty-two years later, as strange and tragic a creature of fate he was on the day he was found. (Yousef, 2001)

Even if Itard himself saw the result of his work with Victor mostly for it’s failings, the ideals that were the foundation of his noble experiment were of no uncertain consequence. Itard’s student and successor, Edward Seguin, so impressed by his teacher’s experiment nearly twenty years earlier, undertook a new experiement at the elder doctor’s behest. In 1837, under Itard’s supervision, Seguin employed his expertise as an educator in the experimental training of a so-called feeble-minded youth from a children’s hospital in Paris.

When Itard in ill health died but only a year later, Seguin continued his work. establishing classes for the training of the idiots and the feeble-minded at the aged and notorious Bicetré institution of France. Within ten years of Itard’s death, the experimental training of the feeble-minded had begun to earn the acceptance of scientists across Europe, the application of which must surely have elicited success enough that Seguin was inspired to establish one among many of the first schools for the feeble-minded. While Europe will have it’s historic institutions for which it is regarded, Seguin’s school and the circumstances of its fate have no doubt been long since buried in the annals of recorded history. In 1848, barely a year after having established the institution, Dr. Seguin fled France for fear of his life in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and abandoned the institution. (Yousef, 2001)

Seguins arrival in America was not likely unreceived. The methods and ideologies employed in the academic fields of education and psychology in Europe were slowly gaining popularity across the pond, so there were many American academics well acquainted with, indeed admirable of , the progress being made by their Eruopean contemporaries.

Doctor Samuel Gridley Howe, founder of the Perkins Institute for the Blind in South Boston, Massachuessetts, may well have been New Englands last and greatest philosopher to have been born from the Nineteenth Century. His compassion for the children of the disatnvantaged classes exceeded perhaps even that of those European pioneers of philanthropy, Itard and Seguin. In fact, Dr. Howe was rather an enthusiast for Seguins ideologies, the two having become acquanited in the course of Dr. Howe’s travels to Paris during the 1830’s; and as it is well known that Dr. Howe spoke very openly and eloquently in praise of Edward Seguin, it may therefore be of some consequence, if not merely coincidence, that Dr. Howe established the Masachusetts School for the Idiotic and Feeble-minded on the very year of Seguins arrival in the United States. (Dana, 1849)

Dr. Howe’s feeble-minded school was among the first of it’s kind in America. In the years to follow, the success seen at his new school no doubt played some hand in the establishment of similar schools throughout the country, in States such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. Though Samuel Howe died in 1876, the seeds of his creation had long begun to take root, and so the Massachussetts School for the Feeble-Minded continued to thrive. In 1887, the School was moved to a larger tract of land, a farm in the town of Waltham, MA, under the charge of Dr. Howe’s successor, Dr. Walter E. Fernald.

Dr. Fernald was, in certain cricles, a world renouned crusader in the field of eugenics, the scientific art of genetically perfecting the human race by such methods as enforced sterilization and infanticide. In the years following the death of Dr. Samuel Howe, advances in the genetic sciences proved instrumental to the evolution of societies regard for the poor, the addicted, the most unfortunate of its own ilk; a darkly fatalistic attitude reflected most plainly by the words penned by Dr. Fernalds very own hand,

“As a matter of mere economy, it is now believed that it is better and cheaper for the community to assume the permanent care of this class before they have carried out a long carreer of expensive crime.” (Fernald, 1903)

By the dawning of the Twentieth Century, the so-called Feeble-Minded Schools had been well established more as colonies than did they resemble schools any more. Increasingly, these institutions were becoming just that – institutions, for the permenant retention of an unwanted class, a class growing to include not only crippled, physically deformed and mentally retarded children, but also for the poor, for prostitutes and alcoholics, immigrants and other so-called deviants. Rather to the point, one of Dr. Fernalds more outspoken contemporaries, Dr. E.R. Johnstone, Director of the New Jersey Training School, may have best expressed the prevailing attitude among their peers in a dramatic speech given before the Association of Medical Officers of American Institutions for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Persons in 1904:

“Our great aim is to eliminate this class, and in order to do this we must of necessity consider the elimination of the neurotic, blind, deaf, and consumptives, tramps, paupers, petty criminals, prostitutes etc., as well as the hereditary insane, epileptics and Imbeciles.” [Johnstone, 1904]

As red-bricked institutions blossomed all along the east coast, Rhode Island legislators began to take concern; for the little State of Rhode Island did not have an institution for the feeble-minded of it’s own. Up until now, it’s feeble-minded were locked inside prisons and asylums for the insane, while yet others were sent to the neighboring State of Massachusettes, to the institution in Waltham. It is for this reason, perhaps, that Dr. William F. Gleason, Chairman of the Providence School Committee, payed visit to Dr. Fernald in 1907. They met at the administration building on the hill, commanding a view of a snowy campus of red brick buildings on the outskirts of hundreds of sprawling acres of farmland. On a tour of the institution, Dr. Gleason was impressed by the cleanliness and orderliness of the thriving colony, as it vied very much so for it’s own survival in the manufacture of it’s own necessities; the tending to the crops and the keeping of the grounds, all done by the inmates themselves, under supervision. (Gleason, 1907)

In a matter of only a year, minds had been made in the Rhode Island senate; Gleason and Fernald in tandem managed to lobby the support of Rhode Island Senator McKenna, who presented a bill passed for the establishment of a State School for the Feeble-Minded in the isolated and picturesque village of Exeter, Rhode Island. By the following winter, the land upon which the fateful institution would grow was purchased by the State, and Dr. Fernalds very own assistant, Dr. Joseph Ladd, moved into the farmhouse in Exeter on February 1st, 1908.

So begins the legacy of the Ladd School.

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