How easy to forget..................

She (Jane Addams) found that the people she was trying to help had better ideas about how their lives might be improved than she and her colleagues did.  She came to believe that any method of philanthropy or reform premised on top-down assumptions - the assumption, for instance, that the reformer's tastes or values are superior to the reformee's, or more simply, that philanthropy is a unilateral act of giving by the person who has to the person who has not - is ineffectual and inherently false.

-Louis Menand,  The Metaphysical Club:  A Story of Ideas in America