Sixteen years ago private citizens, interested in the possibilities of helping childhood to find its right adjustment of life, established in Chicago, with funds out of their own pockets, an institute for juvenile behavior research.
It was not long before the institute had made such demonstration of its usefulness that it was taken over by the state. It has since been conducted as a state activity maintained by the biennial appropriations of the legislature. Its service has widened as the years have passed. Its comparatively small staff has found its time largely occupied with attention to individual children who are in state schools and institutions and in private schools for delinquents. To these are added many cases of problem children referred to the institute by schools, doctors and perplexed parents, while traveling clinics, extending the help of the institute into remoter parts of Illinois, make further draft upon the energies of the trained workers.
All of this is of utmost importance and practical value. But those who are directly engaged in the tasks of the institute, and those citizens who have come to appreciate its worth, are aware that it is only laying the foundation for a much greater service -- a service which may be of national, and even world, significance. In these sixteen years of work there has been accumulated a mass of invaluable data, creating a field for research which only awaits scientific exploitation to provide a harvest of knowledge and understanding. Under the state appropriations, which are necessarily made for only two years at a time, it is not possible to map out an extensive and continuous program of research such as the opportunity and the world's need demand. It is proposed, therefore, to raise a private endowment fund of $275,000, the revenue of which will be used to employ and equip the experts necessary to carry on research work while the regular functions of the institute are discharged at the expense of the state. Of this sum $107,000 has already been raised by a committee of citizens consisting of men and women whose names are eminent in the fields of medicine, law, social service and business.
That the interest aroused by this movement is much more than local is proven by the fact that at a luncheon, to be given tomorrow at the Hotel Sherman, the principal speakers will be Dr. Adolf Meyer, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins university, and Dr. William Allan Neilson, president of Smith college. These men are coming to discuss the scientific study of human behavior, under the auspices of the Friends of the Institute for Juvenile Research, because they believe that an opportunity exists in Chicago for the promotion of knowledge in this field such as can be found nowhere else.
Chicago is the pioneer in this field; it has created the conditions for laboratory work; it is already in possession of materials for research which are unavailable in any other city in the country, and which, probably, cannot be paralleled in any other city in the world.
Chicago, we are confident, will not fail to improve this opportunity. The endowment fund will be provided, doubtless, and the citizens who have stood by this work so loyally, who nursed it [through] its experimental stages, and now seek to establish it in full maturity of usefulness, will be rewarded by the knowledge that they have set up another source of light to help in the solving of those problems which a complex and high-tension age has made so numerous and so disturbing.
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