Education
In 1893, Abbott graduated from Brownell Hall, a girls' boarding school in Omaha. However, her family could not afford to send her to college, so she began teaching high school in Grand Island. She took correspondence courses and attended summer sessions until she earned a degree from the University of Nebraska in 1901. After two more years as a teacher, Abbott attended the University of Chicago and received a Ph.D. in economics in 1905.
In 1906, Abbott received a Carnegie Fellowship and continued her studies at University College London, and the London School of Economics. She learned from social reformers Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, who championed new approaches to dealing with poverty. The Webbs influenced the direction of Abbott's career. The Webbs were in favour of repealing the British "poor laws" that they viewed as demeaning to people in poverty, and they supported establishing programs to eliminate poverty. While studying in London, Abbott lived part of the time in a social reformers' settlement in a poverty-stricken area of the East End, where she gained experience in social work. The next year, Abbott returned to the United States and taught economics for a year at Wellesley College.
Read more about this topic: Edith Abbott
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.”
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“If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man’s future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual’s total development lags behind?”
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