We close this week with the staggering fact that the term "learning disabilities" was first spoken in 1963, by Dr. Samuel Alexander Kirk, to a small group of parents and educators at a conference taking place at the Palmer House in Chicago. At the time he was almost sixty years old, and he had lived a full life, starting with being a farmer`s son, which is where he first learned the power of teaching people, in this case the farm hands, to read. From there he went to the military, where he was able to create a programme for recruits who fulfilled all the basic needs except being able to read the manuals and instructions. After that he went back to college, and got a Bachelors and a Masters degree in psychology, and then did a PhD in the same subject. That led him to a school, where he was given the job of working with children written off and lumped together as delinquents. He proved this was not the case, and that if they were allowed to learn in their own ways they were every bit as capable as the rest of the school, and in many cases more so.
He would go on to pass laws that compelled schools to teach all children and give special help to those who needed it. And he also managed to convince the government to set up a scheme to train teachers to help students who needed extra coaching, right across America. He called his children exceptional, not disabled, but that was too groundbreaking a term for those times, and so today we remember him as The Father of Learning Disabilities, rather than the Father of Exceptional Children.
He died on July the 21st, 1996, aged ninety-one.
Now this is not the Palmer House, which never appeared on cards. It was a hotel, and, since 1945, has been a member of the Hilton Chain. However it is in Chicago, and looking online at the Palmer House and the Shell Oil Building brings up the fact that the Palmer House and the Aon Centre, formerly Standard Oil, is only an eighth of a mile. And I presumed that the Standard Oil Building had formerly been the Shell Oil Building, picked up in some kind of merger.. But then more research proved that the Standard Oil Building was not built until 1973. And looking at Shell Chicago brought up the fact that Shell had never had a building by that name.
A search of Shell buildings, however, brings up an almost identical tower, the only problem is that it is in San Francisco. So did Liebig get it wrong ? Looking at the reverse of the card they got something else wrong, as the penultimate line leaves the "L" out of Belgium, making it Begique not Belgique. In fact it is an odd text all round , mostly concerned with New York, and only at the end comparing our building with Le Torengebouw a Anvers, for some reason, because the two are pretty different to my eyes, even with my new glasses.
The cards in this French set are
- Lincoln Building a New York
- Shell Oil Building a Chicago
- Hopital presbyterien a New York
- Universite de Pittsburg
- City Hall de Buffalo
- Le Rockefeller Center a New York