Pauline Camp
Pauline Camp was the first state supervisor of speech correction in the United States, a job she assumed around 1923. Earlier in her career she served as the Director of Child Guidance and Special Education in the Madison Wisconsin Public Schools and before that she was the Director of Speech Correction in the Grand Rapids School in Michigan. Her official title in Grand Rapids was Supervisor of the Oral School for the Deaf and of the Corrective Speech Work in Grand Rapids Michigan.
When Camp was supervisor of the Oral School for the Deaf, beginning around 1916, children with speech problems were taken from their home schools and enrolled in schools for the deaf. It was there that they received speech therapy. Camp worked to change that arrangement, arguing that children with speech problems should not be moved from their home schools (Camp, 1921).
Camp was among those most active in the early years of ASHA. She was a charter member, along with 24 others in 1925, and, in 1930 served on the national subcommittee on the Child Defective at the 1930 White House Conference on Child Protection. She also helped formulate the policy in ASHA that its focus should be on treatment as well as on research and diagnosis. Charles Van Riper describes the fight for clinical emphasis as follows:
Fortunately, among them we also had some founding mothers -- Mabel Gifford, Pauline Camp, Eudora Estabrook, Sara Stinchfield -- speech teachers who were already offering remedial services in the schools. These women, together with some of us who stuttered (C.S. Bluemel, Sam Robbins, Wendell Johnson, and I) and who had been victimized by the quacks of the day, insisted that treatment should also be emphasized. So in 1934 we became the American Speech Correction Association. This shift in purpose was strongly opposed. Indeed, when I listen to the voices of the past, all I hear are arguments (Van Riper, 1989)
In 1919, Pauline Camp assigned two members of her staff to survey 9,000 children in the Grand Rapids, MI, Public Schools, finding 12% who had speech defects (Camp, 1919).
Camp also argued that speech clinicians should be trained in college speech clinics (there were no college or university departments of Speech Pathology at that time). Van Riper writes of her influence in this regard:
These should be the backbone of your membership," Camp insisted. "If we can put a speech correctionist in almost every school system, and certainly there is sufficient need for one, then many of our survival problems will vanish and our growth will be amazing. Build your college speech clinics and have them do the research we need so badly, but more importantly have them train special teachers we need to help and heal the hundreds of thousands of speech defectives who are to be found there (Van Riper, 1989, p. 858).
In recognition of her contributions to ASHA, Paula Camp received the award of honorary life fellow (Malone, 1999, p. 79).
References written by and about Pauline Camp, arranged chronologically
Camp, P. (1917) Correction of speech defects in a public school system, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 3, 4, 304-309.
In this article, Camp argued that speech disorders can have a profound impact on a child’s future. She saw children being held back because of their inability to express themselves; as being poorly adjusted to social and economic conditions when through with school; as prone to industrial accidents; as prone to emotional problems (discouragement, anxiety, family distress, embarrassment, and as having diffidence and shyness. In her view speech problems affect moral character. Camp’s bottom line was that speech correction can prevent children from moral degeneration.
Camp, P. (1918). Book review of Walter Swift’s Speech defects in school children and how to treat them. Quarterly Journal of Speech Education, 4, 457-461.
Camp, P. (1919). Speech correction in the Grand Rapids Schools. Volta
Review, 21, 732–736.
Camp, P. (1921) Speech treatment in the schools of Grand Rapids: A report of cases, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 7, 2, 120-138, DOI: 10.1080/00335632109379324 (5 years after department created.)
Camp, P. (1923) Speech correction in Wisconsin public schools, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 9, 3, 280-283, DOI: 10.1080/00335632309379440
Camp, P. (1931). Can clinical procedure in the treatment of stuttering be used in the public schools? Proceedings of the American Speech Correction Association, 1, 17-19.
Van Riper, C. (1989a) An early history of ASHA, ASHA, 23, 11, 855-858. https://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/kuster/vanriper/articles/hx/ashaearlyhx.html
Van Riper, C. (1989b) Recollections from a pioneer. ASHA, 72-73. Retrieved from: https://www.asha.org/siteassets/publications/0689ashamag2.pdf