MENTAL WELFARE
99
The Border Lime FeeMe-Miiided Child: How can he be catered for in the School System ? By RAYMOND B. CATTELL, M.A., B.Sc., Ph.D., Psychologist to the Leicester Education Committee Before
get to grips with the educational problem we must define the exactly type of child with whom we are dealing?the much neglected border line feeble-minded child, widely scattered in our schools. Current ideas as to the extent of feeble-mindedness remain surprisingly conflicting. We are also in some doubt as to whether defect is increasing or decreasing and at what rates in various types of locality. This being so, it follows that the I.Q. level below which, other things being equal, feeble-mindedness can be said to exist, is a highly debatable matter. As everyone knows, the criterion is not in the first place one of I.Q. at all but of relative educability and aptness of social adjustment. According to this broad criterion the percentage of mentally defective children (idiots, imbeciles and feeble-minded) found by various observers, varies from ^ to 2%. The intelligence quotients of children thus selected fall, with a few exceptions, below 70. Since roughly, one per cent, (let us say) of children are defective and defectives fall below the 70 I.Q. mark, it is frequently but illogically supposed that one per cent, of children have I.Q.'s below 70. Actually the percentage of persons with I.Q.'s below 70, is much greater, since not all of them attract attention or are referred to the certifying officer. In the report of the Mentally Deficiency Committee the proportion of children with I.Q.'s below these figures varies from 2.2 to 5.1%, according to whether urban or rural areas are concerned. The recent investigation of the Scottish Research Council, however, points to a much greater scatter of intelligence quotients among school children than has hitherto been revealed by the Binet Tests which, after all, are noted rather for their antiquity than for their conformity to the demands of modern research. In an adult population the present writer recently found some 12 to 14% of people with I.Q.'s below 70.1 Evidently the exact percentage of children with I.Q.'s below 70 remains a matter for investigation, but this much is certain : that there is a considerable number of retarded children having such low I.Q.'s and who yet cannot be accommodated in the special schools. The special school accommodation in most towns is decidedly smaller than that which would be recommended by an scientific witness having no regard to the feelings of the people impartial concerned. Most right thinking people, having regard to the popular stigma which still attaches to mental defect, are keen to keep the child in the normal school if he can possibly be educated there. The teacher is loathe to report we can
more
o
1
Test."
"
Occupational Norms of Intelligence and Standardisation Journal of Psychology, July, 1934.
British
o
of an Adult
Intelligence
MENTAL WELFARE
100
the border line defective; the parents resent his being transferred and the medical officer is generally highly cautious. In short, the cumulative effect of a whole series of reluctances is to keep in the normal schools a considerable number of children of no greater mental capacity than the certified feebleminded. These children contrast with the certified feeble-minded, not in mental capacity but in their relative freedom from behaviour difficulties, in their steady application and ability to scrape along in a normal class without exciting too much attention. Occasionally, by dint of great industry and application, they achieve a skill in such matters as reading, mechanical arithmetic and handwork equal to that of the average C Class (dull) child with whom they are classified, but in true arithmetic and composition?performance in which is more limited by actual mental capacity?they are generally little better off than their coevals in the special school. They differ from the special school child in one other important respect, namely, that they succeed much more readily in obtaining and retaining employment when they leave school. So much for the general state of affairs. The next question is what can be done for the education of this type of child?the retarded or border line feeble-minded child?a type numerically much more important than the certified feeble-minded? The solution adopted by certain education authorities, notably by Leicester, and the one which I am purposing to describe, consists in setting up in the ordinary elementary schools a number of special classes in which the general aims and methods of teaching are akin to those in the special school. Thus the school system is equipped on the one hand with a special school for children who are definitely feeble-minded and who are unlikely to be in employment in later life (even under normal economic conditions) and, on the other hand, with classes specifically designed to cater for border line feeble-minded children who nevertheless have a good chance of finding useful employment of a simple kind if they are not labelled as special school children. This question of employment needs stressing for it reminds us of the important discrepancy that exists between the legal definition of mental defect among adults and that among children. As everyone with experience of this matter knows, the school life criterion of feeble-mindedness, namely, ineducuts off than the a slice of the adult criterion, recability larger population one half of the school and control." care, Probably only quiring supervision, feeble-minded feeble-minded." As a result many inbecome adult dividuals who as children are placed in special schools do not continue to have institutional care as adults but are pushed out into the world to fend for themselves with the added handicap of having been classified as feeble-minded. It is not the object of the present paper to ask how this cruelty can be avoided or to question whether the adult standard might not be adjusted to the childhood one, e.g., by the provision of agricultural colonies to accommodate adult feeble-minded who otherwise swell the ranks of the unemployed. Suffice it that the problem is partly solved by sending to the special school only o
"
"
"
"
"
"
MENTAL WELFARE
those who
101
unlikely to become successful wage earning citizens and special classes those who may reasonably be expected to earn
are most
by drafting
into
in later life. It is found that the accommodation required in the Special Classes is five or six times as great as that available in the Special Schools. This, in any case, is exactly what one would expect from the normal distribution curve of ina
living
the section of the curve immediately above the feebleminded level includes a considerably greater number of children than the feeble-minded section itself. In organising, the aims have been to provide one special class in an infant school, one in a junior school and one in a senior school, in each division of the city (since these children cannot be collected by bus as is done with Special School children). In some instances, two classes have been provided in each school department in order that the age range in one class may not have to include the whole school range. Unless this is done, the age range in the junior school classes, for example, may extend over three or four years. Nevertheless, the range of mental age is not as great as this, since, on an average, these children only make two-thirds of a year's progress in mental age for every year's increase in actual age. In practice there is no scatter of mental with the whatever in difficulty dealing age that exists in such a class, for a little calculation will show that it is no greater than that which exists in a class of normal children. But in order to avoid differences of physical size it seems desirable, wherever possible, to halve this age range by having two special classes?one taking the higher and one taking the lower ages?in each school department, infant, junior or senior, of the school that is handling special class children for a given city area. In Leicester, which has a school population of about 30,000 (and a total population of about 239,000), the City schools are divided into five regions, each being supplied with three or more special classes. These regions are not of equal area because it is found that the incidence of special class children is much higher in some?notably in slum areas and slum-clearance estates?than in others. All the children who enter these classes are given intelligence tests and attainment tests by the Psychologist or his Assistant and are examined again from time to time. Except in rare instances, a child who has been drafted into a Special Class in the infant school will continue to pass from one special class to another throughout his school life. This is a necessary consequence of the of the I.Q. Thus he receives a suitable education at every stage of constancy his school life. This conception of the special class as a permanent home for certain children at first surprised many teachers who were accustomed to placing in the old-style special class a good proportion of children accidentally backward but of good intelligence. In fact there is considerable confusion of thought as to the real object of Special Classes. They contained a mixture of children of low intelligence quotients and others who had good intelligence quotients but who, through accidental circumstances, had low scholastic attainment. As a result,
telligence quotients;
MENTAL WELFARE
102
unless the classes were very small, neither type of child received a suitable education. Under the present arrangement, children with scholastic disabilities are drafted to an Experimental School where the staff is specially trained and constantly concerned in remedying, in a comparatively short time, years of retardation in school subjects. The Special Classes, on the other hand, contain only those children who are of definitely low intelligence. Under the new conditions just described, the teaching can be much better adapted to the particular mentality of the children for whom these classes are designed. The classes can also be much larger. Such a statement, though it may have an instant appeal to administrators, needs some defence before teachers. So long as special classes were a mixture of types requiring completely different treatment, the teaching had to be highly individual and in consequence the numbers could only be about one third or one quarter of those in the normal classes. Individual teaching may, of course, be considered as the ideal in all education, but it is unfair and foolish to owive to the child of small promise what we cannot afford to give to the normal child. Administrators, moreover, are in practice unwilling to create adequate special class accommodation on these extravagant terms. The belief that these classes must be extremely small arises from the tradition of mixed classes just described and from misconceptions about the goals of teaching in special classes. A special class containing children carefully selected to be of approximately uniform I.Q. and mental age need be only slightly smaller than a normal class providing the goals of school attainment aimed at by the teacher are suited to the natural abilities and interests of these children. The principal modifications of curriculum consist of (i) the introduction of more handwork and manual skills generally, (2) the postponement of reading, etc., until the children have more nearly attained the mental age at which normal children make progress in reading, (3) the couching of arithmetic and allied studies in concrete terms, and practical situations designed as direct training for after-life, (4) the introduction of lessons akin to the infant school sense training to encourage alertness, to increase the sense of achievement success in matters in which these children are under no by handicap relative to children of good intelligence and, again, to provide direct training in habits required in after school life. Arithmetic becomes practical training in buying and selling, with a shop set up in the classroom. Boys and girls who cannot work out the simplest sum in abstract terms can nevertheless acquire calculating habits which enable them to give correct change, to calculate tram and bus fares, and realise the value of various wages, etc. Reading is, in the last resort, more important to the child than arithmetic, for without it he cannot find his way about or respond to the simplest notices. Although reading is postponed until the child has a mental age of five or six, i.e., until he is in the junior school, it then receives considerable attention. Here, too, the teaching method involves an emphasis on reading for practical purposes. Some action follows on the sentence read. Dramatisa"
"
MENTAL WELFARE
103
tion has been very successfully employed here. The handwriting of special class children is frequently decidedly better than that of children in the normal classes, though, owing to the association of motor inco-ordination with low intelligence, there are some marked exceptions to this. The emphasis on handwork is symbolised by a re-shaping of the classroom itself. It becomes, primarily, a work room, with tables and benches desks. In addition to ordinary woodwork or metal-work, there is a replacing good deal of training in weaving, basketwork, bookbinding and varieties of needlework. In a few places where gardening has been tried out, it has evoked considerable interest and, if taught on suitable lines, can have great training value, but the distribution of special classes, unfortunately, does not permit of its being a regular subject of instruction in most of them. It is a common observation that the majority of entrants to special classes come with a sense of failure and frustration from the ordinary schools in which have been One of to the most important aims of they trying struggle along. the special class instruction is to remove this attitude and substitute for it a positive one, involving a sense of achievement, self-respect, "and ability to do as well as other children. In the school work itself, the sense training lessons go> a long way to produce this result. Here the child achieves skill in selecting colours and shapes, and in various games such as that in which the child attempts to judge various substances by smell alone, or to recognise common coins by a sense of touch alone, or tell what objects are passing in the street from the sounds that they make. In these matters, which require alertness and good memory rather than intelligence, the special class child rapidly skill acquires surpassing that of the normal child who does not get so much in this direction. He thus realises that by close application he can training in excel actually competition with children from the other classes. There is still room for considerable experiment in lessons on these lines, i.e., lessons designed to increase alertness, to give a sense of achievement and to supply the child with skills and information which will be directly useful to him when he leaves school. Consequently the policy in Leicester has been to encourage special class teachers to progress on different lines and to come together at regular intervals with the object of discussing the success or failure of the methods they have adopted. One teacher has recently developed a special lesson called Observation," in which the child's capacity for observing useful factors about the locality is brought out. He is asked, for example, Where is the How many grocer's shops are there in a certain street? nearest fire alarm? Where do the coal carts come from that go along such and such a street? Another class has developed a kind of game akin to Man and his object," in which powers of cross-questioning and clear and logical answering are developed. It should not be overlooked that one of the most frequent criticisms from employers and others is that they are unable to a sensible question or answer from this type of child or get him to speak get in intelligible sentences. "
"
"
"
"
"
"
"
"
io4
MENTAL WELFARE
For certain subjects the special class children are dispersed among the other classes. Indeed, it is a definite policy to give them a place in the general work of the school and to do away with any suggestion that they are a special class. They can join in singing, in physical training, in games, and in some handwork activities, with the rest of the school. Wherever psychological testing has been carried out, both in this country and abroad, it has been found that the population below an I.Q. of 80 generally contains an undue proportion of difficult and delinquent people. Consequently, one is not surprised to find that a certain number of the children who are referred for special classes are also delinquent or the subjects of some nervous disability. This arises principally from two causes: (1) the nature of the homes, and (2) from the previous school experience of the child. The parents of these dull children are in nine cases out of ten dull themselves. Although, as Penrose has pointed out, the relatives of idiots fairly frequently are normal people, the relatives of feeble-minded and border line feeble-minded, arc more frequently of the same mental calibre. A good proportion of the homes from which these children come are poor, overcrowded and ill-managed, providing a very fertile soil for all kinds of moral delinquency. The handling of the home problem in these cases is a task for the Psychiatric Social Worker attached to the Psychologist. Rut a surprising number of the difficult and nervous cases are in that condition for no other reason than that they have continually failed in the ordinary school. They have been driven by competition, by threats and by all manner of pressure, to accomplish things which they were inherently incapable of accomplishing. They have been held up to ridicule, branded as dull or, more commonly, as unwilling and idle, and have been generally frustrated in their self-expression. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that some have become highly timid, nervous and lacking in initiative. Others have become rebellious and spiteful, and practically all have developed habits " of inattention, inability to concentrate and a general sense of I can't." One could cite case after case in which glaring symptoms of this kind have completely cleared up under no other influence than that of the special class environment itself. It is no exaggeration to say that the most important function of the special class is to train character, and that frequently in a remedial sense. With children of this level of intelligence direct therapeutic work by the psychologist is rarely possible, for they are not able to achieve insight into the emotional situations in which they are entangled. It is necessary to proceed by modification of environment, e.g., change of treatment at home or in school, separation from undesirable companions, provision of suitable outlets. To such changes they respond very quickly. This ready response has its disadvantages and it is very noticeable that special class children tend to regress in behaviour after even a comparatively short vacation in which they have been exposed to a slack, indifferent or disorderly home atmosphere. Character training in the special classes is largely a matter of habit formation. That freedom from supervision and interference which is essential to the character
MENTAL WELFARE of the special class.
development
in the
highly intelligent
child is
105
inappropriate
in most situations
leaving school, the special class child generally needs some assistance a suitable job. The majority succeed in holding simple repetitive jobs in factories. Among the boys, a fair proportion successfully hold jobs as errand boys, but they are liable to be unemployed again in two or three years time, for the work of a shop assistant to which they would normally graduate is too much for them. Of one girl who had become a shop assistant the employers wrote: She is getting on quite well provided her work is well supervised, but she is not quite up to the standard we usually employ." On
in
finding
"
Considering the
involved in educating the child of this level in finding suitable employment for him in after life, it is obviously incumbent upon society to adopt eugenic measures to reduce the number of children so handicapped. This falls outside the province of the educator, but it is his duty to point it out, for no one else is in a position to observe so clearly the sad fact that the majority of special class children grow up in families of five or six or more. A word about the training of the teacher. There has been in the past a common attitude, rarely frankly expressed, that the poorest teacher should be relegated to looking after the special class. Yet if these children are to be taught?and the price, in crime and uselessncss, of not teaching them is heavier than with the normal child?they will require in most respects a more able teacher than the teacher of A Classes. It has been the policy with the special classes here described to appoint to these classes the teacher who has in the highest degree the true teacher's personality?being more interested in the child than the subject?and who has had some special and additional training in psychology. Courses have been arranged for these teachers in the theory and practice of mental testing and in the handling of problem children. become for who the are They specialists responsible complete mental testing of the children in their classes and for the preliminary testing of children in neighbouring schools who are referred as likely subjects for the special class. The special class is not labelled as such among the children but is vari" " ously designated in each school, e.g., in one it is 3D," in another the Remove." Nevertheless, the methods of organisation are well known throughout the schools. The child in a Special Class moreover has a special record form on which I.Q., attainment on performance tests, school attainment in English and arithmetic on various occasions, and medical and home history are entered. This goes with the child from school to school. As emphasised at the beginning of this article, it is as yet too early to predict exactly what numbers and what I.Q. ranges are the optimum ones for Special Classes. Some senior school Special Classes have been successfully run with 35 children but the infant classes need to be smaller and some have only fulfilled their purpose when they have been cut down to twenty. The I.Q. range promises to settle down at from 65 to 75. of
greater
cost
11.
intelligence
and the
r*
?
difficulty
"
"
99
The Border Lime FeeMe-Miiided Child: How can he be catered for in the School System ? By RAYMOND B. CATTELL, M.A., B.Sc., Ph.D., Psychologist to the Leicester Education Committee Before
get to grips with the educational problem we must define the exactly type of child with whom we are dealing?the much neglected border line feeble-minded child, widely scattered in our schools. Current ideas as to the extent of feeble-mindedness remain surprisingly conflicting. We are also in some doubt as to whether defect is increasing or decreasing and at what rates in various types of locality. This being so, it follows that the I.Q. level below which, other things being equal, feeble-mindedness can be said to exist, is a highly debatable matter. As everyone knows, the criterion is not in the first place one of I.Q. at all but of relative educability and aptness of social adjustment. According to this broad criterion the percentage of mentally defective children (idiots, imbeciles and feeble-minded) found by various observers, varies from ^ to 2%. The intelligence quotients of children thus selected fall, with a few exceptions, below 70. Since roughly, one per cent, (let us say) of children are defective and defectives fall below the 70 I.Q. mark, it is frequently but illogically supposed that one per cent, of children have I.Q.'s below 70. Actually the percentage of persons with I.Q.'s below 70, is much greater, since not all of them attract attention or are referred to the certifying officer. In the report of the Mentally Deficiency Committee the proportion of children with I.Q.'s below these figures varies from 2.2 to 5.1%, according to whether urban or rural areas are concerned. The recent investigation of the Scottish Research Council, however, points to a much greater scatter of intelligence quotients among school children than has hitherto been revealed by the Binet Tests which, after all, are noted rather for their antiquity than for their conformity to the demands of modern research. In an adult population the present writer recently found some 12 to 14% of people with I.Q.'s below 70.1 Evidently the exact percentage of children with I.Q.'s below 70 remains a matter for investigation, but this much is certain : that there is a considerable number of retarded children having such low I.Q.'s and who yet cannot be accommodated in the special schools. The special school accommodation in most towns is decidedly smaller than that which would be recommended by an scientific witness having no regard to the feelings of the people impartial concerned. Most right thinking people, having regard to the popular stigma which still attaches to mental defect, are keen to keep the child in the normal school if he can possibly be educated there. The teacher is loathe to report we can
more
o
1
Test."
"
Occupational Norms of Intelligence and Standardisation Journal of Psychology, July, 1934.
British
o
of an Adult
Intelligence
MENTAL WELFARE
100
the border line defective; the parents resent his being transferred and the medical officer is generally highly cautious. In short, the cumulative effect of a whole series of reluctances is to keep in the normal schools a considerable number of children of no greater mental capacity than the certified feebleminded. These children contrast with the certified feeble-minded, not in mental capacity but in their relative freedom from behaviour difficulties, in their steady application and ability to scrape along in a normal class without exciting too much attention. Occasionally, by dint of great industry and application, they achieve a skill in such matters as reading, mechanical arithmetic and handwork equal to that of the average C Class (dull) child with whom they are classified, but in true arithmetic and composition?performance in which is more limited by actual mental capacity?they are generally little better off than their coevals in the special school. They differ from the special school child in one other important respect, namely, that they succeed much more readily in obtaining and retaining employment when they leave school. So much for the general state of affairs. The next question is what can be done for the education of this type of child?the retarded or border line feeble-minded child?a type numerically much more important than the certified feeble-minded? The solution adopted by certain education authorities, notably by Leicester, and the one which I am purposing to describe, consists in setting up in the ordinary elementary schools a number of special classes in which the general aims and methods of teaching are akin to those in the special school. Thus the school system is equipped on the one hand with a special school for children who are definitely feeble-minded and who are unlikely to be in employment in later life (even under normal economic conditions) and, on the other hand, with classes specifically designed to cater for border line feeble-minded children who nevertheless have a good chance of finding useful employment of a simple kind if they are not labelled as special school children. This question of employment needs stressing for it reminds us of the important discrepancy that exists between the legal definition of mental defect among adults and that among children. As everyone with experience of this matter knows, the school life criterion of feeble-mindedness, namely, ineducuts off than the a slice of the adult criterion, recability larger population one half of the school and control." care, Probably only quiring supervision, feeble-minded feeble-minded." As a result many inbecome adult dividuals who as children are placed in special schools do not continue to have institutional care as adults but are pushed out into the world to fend for themselves with the added handicap of having been classified as feeble-minded. It is not the object of the present paper to ask how this cruelty can be avoided or to question whether the adult standard might not be adjusted to the childhood one, e.g., by the provision of agricultural colonies to accommodate adult feeble-minded who otherwise swell the ranks of the unemployed. Suffice it that the problem is partly solved by sending to the special school only o
"
"
"
"
"
"
MENTAL WELFARE
those who
101
unlikely to become successful wage earning citizens and special classes those who may reasonably be expected to earn
are most
by drafting
into
in later life. It is found that the accommodation required in the Special Classes is five or six times as great as that available in the Special Schools. This, in any case, is exactly what one would expect from the normal distribution curve of ina
living
the section of the curve immediately above the feebleminded level includes a considerably greater number of children than the feeble-minded section itself. In organising, the aims have been to provide one special class in an infant school, one in a junior school and one in a senior school, in each division of the city (since these children cannot be collected by bus as is done with Special School children). In some instances, two classes have been provided in each school department in order that the age range in one class may not have to include the whole school range. Unless this is done, the age range in the junior school classes, for example, may extend over three or four years. Nevertheless, the range of mental age is not as great as this, since, on an average, these children only make two-thirds of a year's progress in mental age for every year's increase in actual age. In practice there is no scatter of mental with the whatever in difficulty dealing age that exists in such a class, for a little calculation will show that it is no greater than that which exists in a class of normal children. But in order to avoid differences of physical size it seems desirable, wherever possible, to halve this age range by having two special classes?one taking the higher and one taking the lower ages?in each school department, infant, junior or senior, of the school that is handling special class children for a given city area. In Leicester, which has a school population of about 30,000 (and a total population of about 239,000), the City schools are divided into five regions, each being supplied with three or more special classes. These regions are not of equal area because it is found that the incidence of special class children is much higher in some?notably in slum areas and slum-clearance estates?than in others. All the children who enter these classes are given intelligence tests and attainment tests by the Psychologist or his Assistant and are examined again from time to time. Except in rare instances, a child who has been drafted into a Special Class in the infant school will continue to pass from one special class to another throughout his school life. This is a necessary consequence of the of the I.Q. Thus he receives a suitable education at every stage of constancy his school life. This conception of the special class as a permanent home for certain children at first surprised many teachers who were accustomed to placing in the old-style special class a good proportion of children accidentally backward but of good intelligence. In fact there is considerable confusion of thought as to the real object of Special Classes. They contained a mixture of children of low intelligence quotients and others who had good intelligence quotients but who, through accidental circumstances, had low scholastic attainment. As a result,
telligence quotients;
MENTAL WELFARE
102
unless the classes were very small, neither type of child received a suitable education. Under the present arrangement, children with scholastic disabilities are drafted to an Experimental School where the staff is specially trained and constantly concerned in remedying, in a comparatively short time, years of retardation in school subjects. The Special Classes, on the other hand, contain only those children who are of definitely low intelligence. Under the new conditions just described, the teaching can be much better adapted to the particular mentality of the children for whom these classes are designed. The classes can also be much larger. Such a statement, though it may have an instant appeal to administrators, needs some defence before teachers. So long as special classes were a mixture of types requiring completely different treatment, the teaching had to be highly individual and in consequence the numbers could only be about one third or one quarter of those in the normal classes. Individual teaching may, of course, be considered as the ideal in all education, but it is unfair and foolish to owive to the child of small promise what we cannot afford to give to the normal child. Administrators, moreover, are in practice unwilling to create adequate special class accommodation on these extravagant terms. The belief that these classes must be extremely small arises from the tradition of mixed classes just described and from misconceptions about the goals of teaching in special classes. A special class containing children carefully selected to be of approximately uniform I.Q. and mental age need be only slightly smaller than a normal class providing the goals of school attainment aimed at by the teacher are suited to the natural abilities and interests of these children. The principal modifications of curriculum consist of (i) the introduction of more handwork and manual skills generally, (2) the postponement of reading, etc., until the children have more nearly attained the mental age at which normal children make progress in reading, (3) the couching of arithmetic and allied studies in concrete terms, and practical situations designed as direct training for after-life, (4) the introduction of lessons akin to the infant school sense training to encourage alertness, to increase the sense of achievement success in matters in which these children are under no by handicap relative to children of good intelligence and, again, to provide direct training in habits required in after school life. Arithmetic becomes practical training in buying and selling, with a shop set up in the classroom. Boys and girls who cannot work out the simplest sum in abstract terms can nevertheless acquire calculating habits which enable them to give correct change, to calculate tram and bus fares, and realise the value of various wages, etc. Reading is, in the last resort, more important to the child than arithmetic, for without it he cannot find his way about or respond to the simplest notices. Although reading is postponed until the child has a mental age of five or six, i.e., until he is in the junior school, it then receives considerable attention. Here, too, the teaching method involves an emphasis on reading for practical purposes. Some action follows on the sentence read. Dramatisa"
"
MENTAL WELFARE
103
tion has been very successfully employed here. The handwriting of special class children is frequently decidedly better than that of children in the normal classes, though, owing to the association of motor inco-ordination with low intelligence, there are some marked exceptions to this. The emphasis on handwork is symbolised by a re-shaping of the classroom itself. It becomes, primarily, a work room, with tables and benches desks. In addition to ordinary woodwork or metal-work, there is a replacing good deal of training in weaving, basketwork, bookbinding and varieties of needlework. In a few places where gardening has been tried out, it has evoked considerable interest and, if taught on suitable lines, can have great training value, but the distribution of special classes, unfortunately, does not permit of its being a regular subject of instruction in most of them. It is a common observation that the majority of entrants to special classes come with a sense of failure and frustration from the ordinary schools in which have been One of to the most important aims of they trying struggle along. the special class instruction is to remove this attitude and substitute for it a positive one, involving a sense of achievement, self-respect, "and ability to do as well as other children. In the school work itself, the sense training lessons go> a long way to produce this result. Here the child achieves skill in selecting colours and shapes, and in various games such as that in which the child attempts to judge various substances by smell alone, or to recognise common coins by a sense of touch alone, or tell what objects are passing in the street from the sounds that they make. In these matters, which require alertness and good memory rather than intelligence, the special class child rapidly skill acquires surpassing that of the normal child who does not get so much in this direction. He thus realises that by close application he can training in excel actually competition with children from the other classes. There is still room for considerable experiment in lessons on these lines, i.e., lessons designed to increase alertness, to give a sense of achievement and to supply the child with skills and information which will be directly useful to him when he leaves school. Consequently the policy in Leicester has been to encourage special class teachers to progress on different lines and to come together at regular intervals with the object of discussing the success or failure of the methods they have adopted. One teacher has recently developed a special lesson called Observation," in which the child's capacity for observing useful factors about the locality is brought out. He is asked, for example, Where is the How many grocer's shops are there in a certain street? nearest fire alarm? Where do the coal carts come from that go along such and such a street? Another class has developed a kind of game akin to Man and his object," in which powers of cross-questioning and clear and logical answering are developed. It should not be overlooked that one of the most frequent criticisms from employers and others is that they are unable to a sensible question or answer from this type of child or get him to speak get in intelligible sentences. "
"
"
"
"
"
"
"
"
io4
MENTAL WELFARE
For certain subjects the special class children are dispersed among the other classes. Indeed, it is a definite policy to give them a place in the general work of the school and to do away with any suggestion that they are a special class. They can join in singing, in physical training, in games, and in some handwork activities, with the rest of the school. Wherever psychological testing has been carried out, both in this country and abroad, it has been found that the population below an I.Q. of 80 generally contains an undue proportion of difficult and delinquent people. Consequently, one is not surprised to find that a certain number of the children who are referred for special classes are also delinquent or the subjects of some nervous disability. This arises principally from two causes: (1) the nature of the homes, and (2) from the previous school experience of the child. The parents of these dull children are in nine cases out of ten dull themselves. Although, as Penrose has pointed out, the relatives of idiots fairly frequently are normal people, the relatives of feeble-minded and border line feeble-minded, arc more frequently of the same mental calibre. A good proportion of the homes from which these children come are poor, overcrowded and ill-managed, providing a very fertile soil for all kinds of moral delinquency. The handling of the home problem in these cases is a task for the Psychiatric Social Worker attached to the Psychologist. Rut a surprising number of the difficult and nervous cases are in that condition for no other reason than that they have continually failed in the ordinary school. They have been driven by competition, by threats and by all manner of pressure, to accomplish things which they were inherently incapable of accomplishing. They have been held up to ridicule, branded as dull or, more commonly, as unwilling and idle, and have been generally frustrated in their self-expression. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that some have become highly timid, nervous and lacking in initiative. Others have become rebellious and spiteful, and practically all have developed habits " of inattention, inability to concentrate and a general sense of I can't." One could cite case after case in which glaring symptoms of this kind have completely cleared up under no other influence than that of the special class environment itself. It is no exaggeration to say that the most important function of the special class is to train character, and that frequently in a remedial sense. With children of this level of intelligence direct therapeutic work by the psychologist is rarely possible, for they are not able to achieve insight into the emotional situations in which they are entangled. It is necessary to proceed by modification of environment, e.g., change of treatment at home or in school, separation from undesirable companions, provision of suitable outlets. To such changes they respond very quickly. This ready response has its disadvantages and it is very noticeable that special class children tend to regress in behaviour after even a comparatively short vacation in which they have been exposed to a slack, indifferent or disorderly home atmosphere. Character training in the special classes is largely a matter of habit formation. That freedom from supervision and interference which is essential to the character
MENTAL WELFARE of the special class.
development
in the
highly intelligent
child is
105
inappropriate
in most situations
leaving school, the special class child generally needs some assistance a suitable job. The majority succeed in holding simple repetitive jobs in factories. Among the boys, a fair proportion successfully hold jobs as errand boys, but they are liable to be unemployed again in two or three years time, for the work of a shop assistant to which they would normally graduate is too much for them. Of one girl who had become a shop assistant the employers wrote: She is getting on quite well provided her work is well supervised, but she is not quite up to the standard we usually employ." On
in
finding
"
Considering the
involved in educating the child of this level in finding suitable employment for him in after life, it is obviously incumbent upon society to adopt eugenic measures to reduce the number of children so handicapped. This falls outside the province of the educator, but it is his duty to point it out, for no one else is in a position to observe so clearly the sad fact that the majority of special class children grow up in families of five or six or more. A word about the training of the teacher. There has been in the past a common attitude, rarely frankly expressed, that the poorest teacher should be relegated to looking after the special class. Yet if these children are to be taught?and the price, in crime and uselessncss, of not teaching them is heavier than with the normal child?they will require in most respects a more able teacher than the teacher of A Classes. It has been the policy with the special classes here described to appoint to these classes the teacher who has in the highest degree the true teacher's personality?being more interested in the child than the subject?and who has had some special and additional training in psychology. Courses have been arranged for these teachers in the theory and practice of mental testing and in the handling of problem children. become for who the are They specialists responsible complete mental testing of the children in their classes and for the preliminary testing of children in neighbouring schools who are referred as likely subjects for the special class. The special class is not labelled as such among the children but is vari" " ously designated in each school, e.g., in one it is 3D," in another the Remove." Nevertheless, the methods of organisation are well known throughout the schools. The child in a Special Class moreover has a special record form on which I.Q., attainment on performance tests, school attainment in English and arithmetic on various occasions, and medical and home history are entered. This goes with the child from school to school. As emphasised at the beginning of this article, it is as yet too early to predict exactly what numbers and what I.Q. ranges are the optimum ones for Special Classes. Some senior school Special Classes have been successfully run with 35 children but the infant classes need to be smaller and some have only fulfilled their purpose when they have been cut down to twenty. The I.Q. range promises to settle down at from 65 to 75. of
greater
cost
11.
intelligence
and the
r*
?
difficulty
"
"
