The Best I Have Seen: The White School in Detroit

The Best I Have Seen

I still remember with perfect clarity the day I first asked my mother, "When will I grow up, Mother?" and she answered me, "Patience, my little girl — childhood is the happiest time of life."

That day, for the first time, doubt crept into me about what my mother said. I heard this saying many times afterward, and from many sources, and my doubt grew every time I heard it. My doubt turned to certainty the day I came to understand the condition of children on the roads, in the factories, and in the hospitals. If this condition of theirs is happiness, what future can they hope for? Yet I could not bring myself to give up a saying that matched my mother's in gentleness and tenderness, so I turned it around and said: "Happiness is one of the rights of childhood, and helping children attain it is a great virtue."

And in the "White School" I saw this virtue at its very best... It is a small school, its pupils numbering no more than three hundred. To the onlooker it appears exactly like any other school. Watching this gathering of children, aged between three and eighteen, at their work or at their play, it would never occur to him that all of them are afflicted with the grievous disease of epilepsy.

This school was built in the northern suburb of Detroit by a wealthy American lady in the early years of the present century, and she endowed it with sufficient income to make it a free school for every child afflicted with epilepsy who wishes to enroll. The building of this school differs from other school buildings only in that the eastern wing of its first floor, where the doctor's and nurses' room is located, has been fitted out for use as an infirmary in time of need. Moreover, all the stairs in the building have been padded with cork, for fear a child might be overtaken by a seizure while going up or down and fall and be hurt. The principal of the school speaks of these cork-padded stairs with a laugh, saying that the only person who has fallen down them from the time the school was built until today is the school doctor. His foot slipped and he tumbled from the top to the bottom!! And she adds that the doctor, the moment he found he had taken no harm from his fall, turned to the teachers and pupils who had gathered around him and said: "The woman who built this building was a righteous woman."

As for the teachers, men and women alike, all of them are specialists in special education, which is a branch of the teachers' colleges in the United States in which the student learns the principles of educating handicapped children. The doctor and nurses at this school are permanent staff, and their work is not confined to treating their pupils; they study their cases continuously and issue statistical bulletins showing the causes of improvement or decline in the cases that pass through their hands.

I spent a whole day at this school, visiting the classes and mixing with the teachers and children in their free time. I felt happiness and cheerfulness among them all — a happiness whose source, I believe, is the spirit of acceptance that prevails among them. The children have grown used to the condition of illness and have accepted it. And the teachers, by their guidance, have added to this healthy atmosphere the love of life and the struggle for it... Often a nurse enters a class and asks the teacher's permission for some pupil to go to the doctor's office; the boy picks up his books and leaves the room smiling, and the class goes on with its work. Or a little girl may be struck by a seizure on the playground, and her friends, boys and girls, hurry to her and give her the necessary first aid, while the other pupils go on with their play. The school nurse spoke to us of how well the pupils of this school know the hidden ways of this grievous disease. She says that one of them will come out of a seizure and ask his friends about his condition during it. And their share of all this distress is far less than it would be if any one of them were living among healthy children. For then his going to the doctor's office would be accompanied by a feeling of inferiority — and the sick child very often feels inferior before the healthy child. Moreover, what he and his companions feel at the moment a seizure strikes him differs,

in an atmosphere such as this, from what it would be in an atmosphere made up of healthy children who do not know the meaning of illness. Likewise, the child who lives continuously among children afflicted with the same disease he is afflicted with learns a great deal about this disease — especially when the illness is like that of the epileptic: an illness that shows itself to the eye of the beholder, while the sick person feels nothing during the seizure.

I saw the children of the White School, before leaving school at lunchtime, gathering around the nurse, stretching out their hands for her to give each boy and girl his portion of the medicine the doctor had prescribed for him. Smiles reigned on all their faces. One little girl among them looked at me after taking her portion and said: "Miss gave me a red pill today." I did not answer her. I said to myself: how happy is the one who learns to see only the fair face of life...

Nor does the school administration content itself with caring for the children during their years of study only; it takes upon itself to place those of them who leave the school in employment suited to them.

And it often encourages the bright ones among them to complete their education and enter one of the universities. Those in charge are proud of the number of their graduates who have succeeded in life. The principal says: "If medicine has not succeeded in wiping out epilepsy, modern education in this school has succeeded in wiping out the misery that in times past used to come of it."