BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 By 
 ARTHUR HOLMES 
 
 Dean of the General Faculty of the Pennsylvania 
 
 State College and Author of The 
 
 Conservation of the Child 
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH SERIES 
 
 Edited by M. V. O'SHEA 
 Professor of Education, The Univosity of Wisconsin 
 
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Copyright 1915 
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 DILIGENCE 
 
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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 
 
 We are these days reading and hearing a good deal 
 about backward children. When is a child backward ? 
 May he be backward in some ways and forward in 
 others? Are children backward by birth, or are they 
 made so by neglect or bad methods of training? What 
 are the signs of backwardness? Is there any way of 
 determining accurately whether or not a given child 
 is permanently arrested? Could the parent and the 
 teacher help an unfortunate child if they could early 
 detect his shortcomings ? What part do physical causes 
 play in mental and moral backwardness? Is retarda- 
 tion in childhood and youth ever due to the use of 
 stimulants such as tea, coffee, cocoa and alcoholic bev- 
 erages? What part does food play in determining 
 whether or not a child will be normal intellectually and 
 morally ? 
 
 These questions and others like them are of supreme 
 importance to-day to teachers and parents. People are 
 seeking light from every source on the problems of 
 the backward child. It is the purpose of this volume 
 to discuss all these matters in a scientific but at the 
 same time simple, concrete and practical way. The 
 author, Dean Holmes, has had unusual opportunities 
 to study the subject of backwardness in its various 
 aspects, theoretical and practical. He is one of the 
 very small number of persons in this country who have 
 dealt with the subnormal child in the laboratory and 
 tiie clinic as well as in the home and the school. He 
 has given us new conceptions of what bade war dness 
 
editor's introduction 
 
 means, and especially of its varieties, its causes, and 
 practical remedies therefor in home and school. 
 
 There is not much literature available in English on 
 the subject of backward children, and even the few 
 books and articles that are accessible deal with the 
 subject in a rather general way. Dean Holmes, how- 
 ever, as the title of his volume indicates, treats con- 
 crete cases of backwardness. He pictures vividly the 
 typical varieties of children who give parents and 
 teachers trouble. He goes into sufficient detail so that 
 the type can be easily recognized. Instead of discuss- 
 ing the characteristics of the various types in abstract 
 terms, he simply lets us see a genuine representative 
 of each type. Physical characteristics are described, 
 and shortcomings depicted. The method of treatment 
 is given in the same detailed way; and many of these 
 cases have been followed by Dean Holmes far enough 
 so that he has been able to observe the results of the 
 remedies that have been applied. This is the mode of 
 procedure throughout the book, which gives it a very 
 objective, concrete and practical value. 
 
 The parent, teacher, medical inspector, or clinician 
 can use Dean Holmes' book in much the same way 
 that a botanist, say, would use a key to the flowers he 
 is identifying and classifying. Most books dealing 
 with human nature do not describe types so that they 
 can be recognized by the non-expert. But this is one 
 of the virtues, and it is an important one, of Back- 
 ward Children, It has the further virtue of being 
 written in a sympathetic spirit. The author feels ten- 
 derly for these children who in one way or another 
 
editor's introduction 
 
 can not adapt themselves to the situations in which 
 they are placed. No one will doubt that he is eager 
 to instruct those who have to deal with such children 
 how to discover the cause of their abnormality, 
 whether of intellect or of character, and then how to 
 apply effective remedies. 
 
 The book is written in a simple graceful style with- 
 out affectation or pretense. It is particularly free 
 from technical or professional terminology so that the 
 layman can read it with ease and with pleasure. 
 
 M.V.O'Shea. 
 Madison, Wisconsin. 
 
AUTHOR'S PREFACE 
 
 This volume is an inductive study of backward chil- 
 dren. It presents in a series of concrete illustrations 
 studies of cases to exemplify the principles and meth- 
 ods underlying the diagnosis, treatment and training 
 of backward children. It aims to describe the cases as 
 simply, non-technically and humanly as the subject- 
 matter will permit, in order to be of service to the 
 care-taker of children who does not have a technical 
 education in abnormal psychology. The style is pur- 
 posely as popular in vein as possible without offending 
 scientific principles or sacrificing scientific exactness in 
 essentials. 
 
 The larger consideration is given to those backward 
 children who can be reclaimed. The feeble-minded 
 are touched upon only incidentally and for the purpose Hfj^ 
 of showing the dangers to society lurking in their neg- -♦ 
 lect and misunderstanding by the public. Their sepa- 
 ration from the temporarily backward requires a clin- 
 ical diagnosis of each child. How far such a diagnosis 
 can be carried by the ordinary layman is illustrated 
 and explained. 
 
 For aid and advice in writing this volume I am in- 
 debted to many friends, to whom, on account of the 
 form of the book, acknowledgment can not always be 
 made in the proper place. Miss Elizabeth E. Farrell, 
 Doctor William Burdick and Doctor L. W. Rapeer 
 most kindly read portions of the manuscript and made 
 
AUTHOR S PREFACE 
 
 valuable suggestions ; Mr. Charles K. Taylor permitted 
 me to use some of his material on coffee-drinking and 
 on manual training; Miss Effie Reimensnyder read the 
 whole manuscript. To the Psychological Clinic at the 
 University of Pennsylvania, of which Doctor Lightner 
 Witmer is founder and director, and with whom I was 
 associated a number of years, I owe a large number 
 of the illustrative cases used. To the editor, Doctor 
 O'Shea, I am indebted most of all, for his patience 
 and uniform courtesy, for his suggestions and practical 
 direction, and for his unfailing inspiration. 
 
 My hope is that the volume may be of help to those 
 who are striving to help the slow boys and girls in the 
 home or the school, and that it may contribute its mite 
 toward a better understanding of these unwilling lag- 
 gards and a more sympathetic support of their efforts 
 to march with the great army of their more fortunate 
 fellows. 
 
 Arthur Holmes. 
 
 State College, Pa. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I Measuring Rods for Children 1 
 
 The individual standard for measuring retarda- 
 tion illustrated — The social standards in the home 
 — Pedagogical standards of retardation — Age and 
 grade — Progress — Playground standards — Scien- 
 tific standards — Their objection — Binet tests — 
 Standards in general — Meaning of backwardness 
 depends upon standards — Backwardness some- 
 times good. 
 
 II Varieties of Backward Children 18 
 
 The two great classes of backward children illus- 
 trated — Temporarily and permanently retarded 
 children — Those who immediately recover lost 
 ground after medical treatment — Those who re- 
 quire brief special training after medical treat- 
 ment — Those who require long and patient train- 
 ing after medical treatment. 
 
 III Typical Retardation Due to Physical Defects 36 
 The story of Joe — The diagnosis of his case — 
 Study of his environment — The physical exami- 
 nation — His appearance, posture, hair, nose, teeth, 
 mouth — Mental symptoms of adenoids — Reading 
 tests — Eye and ear tests — Adenoid and tonsil op- 
 eration — Other treatments — Training — Constitu- 
 tional treatment — Results. 
 
 IV Minds in Straight Jackets 58 
 
 Many types of mind among backward children — 
 The slow boy — His school troubles — Success in 
 
 his profession — The boy with the mechanical turn 
 — Saved by high school manual work — The girl 
 with almost no interests — The developmen.t and 
 growth of the germ-interest. 
 
CONTENTS— C(7«//«a^^ 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 V Bad and Backward 83 
 
 Badness sometimes causes mental retardation — 
 The fighter — A hopelessly bad girl — A pseudo- 
 moral imbecile — Laziness — A truant made and 
 cured — A truant born. 
 
 VI Retardation Due to Environment 110 
 
 The causes of mental retardation reside either 
 within or without the child — Minute and ridicu- 
 lous causes — Unhygienic home conditions — Coifee, 
 tea, candies and sweets, as causes — Under-nour- 
 ishment — The influence of the gang — The home 
 and the gang — A boy among bad companions — - 
 The conversion of a gang — The gang-spirit organ- 
 ized for study. 
 
 VII The Backward Child in the Home 134 
 
 A case of no home training and its results — A 
 diagnosis necessary — Home training in self-help 
 — Chores for boys and girls — The teacher in the 
 home — Feeding children — The amounts and kinds 
 of foods — Surgical treatment for special cases — 
 The discovery of simple childish diseases. 
 
 VIII The Clinical Diagnosis of Backward Children 162 
 The process of diagnosis as a whole — Definition 
 of feeble-mindedness — What we measure in clas- 
 sifying backward children — Mental potentialities 
 — The physical examination and its twofold pur- 
 pose — The physical marks of a typical imbecile 
 — General appearance and organs — Mental tests — 
 Mental signs of permanent backwardness — Slow 
 in mental development — Various stages of devel- 
 opment — Particular mental defects. 
 
 IX The Teacher's Diagnosis 190 
 
 It is difficult to observe a child — Two cases mis- 
 judged by exterior appearances — The mental con- 
 tent — The child's interests — Play — Some particu- 
 lar instincts — Temperaments — The types of 
 perceptions — Intellectual, volitional and emo- 
 tional children — The intellectual processes and 
 their peculiarities. 
 
CO NTENTS-^ConiinueJ 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 X The Teacher and Equipment for a Special 
 
 Class 219 
 
 The vital kind of teacher illustrated — ^Two types 
 of teachers — A teacher's physical attributes — Her 
 temperament — Her special training — Her age and 
 experience — Need of teachers — Rooms — Their lo- 
 cation — Equipment in detail — Hints for courses. 
 
 Index 245 
 
BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 MEASURING RODS FOR CHILDREN 
 
 "^TT^HERE is a boy/' said a school-teacher re- 
 1 cently, pointing to a pale-faced, high-browed, 
 well-dressed pupil, "who ought to be at the head of 
 his class, and here he is just above the average!" 
 At such an unpolitic speech made to a visitor in his 
 presence, the boy dropped his head and a deep flush 
 of shame went over his pallid features. The visitor 
 became interested and inquired into the matter. He 
 found that the boy was the only child of the lead- 
 ing physician in the town, a man who had done well 
 materially in his profession, but much better in his 
 matrimonial venture. He had married the richest 
 young woman in the neighborhood, a girl noted for 
 her beauty and for her ambition. She persuaded 
 her husband to try his fortune in a large city, which 
 he did for a few years, but, seemingly, he did not 
 succeed there, and upon the death of his father-in- 
 law, the family returned to the wife's native town. 
 The Individual Standards. — After Harold's 
 birth, his mother's ambition, disappointed in its so- 
 
 1 
 
2. . .^ BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 cial aims, turned to her son, and his education was 
 begun almost from the cradle. He went through 
 the kindergarten, with its training supplemented at 
 home by all the forcing processes his mother could 
 command. When the family returned to their na- 
 tive village, Harold was entered in the public school 
 with his mother's certain conviction that, having had 
 such exceptional opportunities at home and such per- 
 fect preparation in kindergarten, he would easily ex- 
 cel his less fortunate fellow pupils. 
 
 But his mother was doomed to a second life-dis- 
 appointment. The boy developed into only an or- 
 dinary student. He kept up in his classes, did 
 average work in all his studies, but was not brilliant 
 in any. Though his mother ceaselessly urged him 
 on and held frequent conferences with his teachers, 
 though she superintended his lesson preparation at 
 home, and was often present at his recitations in 
 school, still Harold moved on only at the usual pace. 
 Of course the school and the teachers came in for 
 their share of blame delivered in a thoroughly polite 
 and half-veiled way, but delivered nevertheless. The 
 argument was this : Considering his exceptional op- 
 portunities and the intellectual superiority of at 
 least one of his parents, Harold ought to be much 
 farther advanced than he is. In short, Harold was 
 compared with himself or with what he might have 
 been, and he was found wanting. Therefore, he 
 was called "backward," was nagged by his mother 
 and twitted by his teachers, and saved only from 
 
MEASURING RODS 3 
 
 open rebellion or complete depression by that same 
 blessed mediocrity which called down all the con- 
 demnation upon his head. Possibly, also, his kindly 
 father helped by his comforting way of hinting to 
 his son that, though he was not so brilliant as he was 
 expected to be, yet he was not so bad as he might 
 have been. 
 
 Harold was judged by the individual standard. 
 That means that any one who is not developed to 
 his fullest capacity is retarded. His fullest capacity 
 is what he might have been according to the judg- 
 ment of himself or of others who know him. Ac- 
 cording to that standard all sincere persons must 
 feel themselves retarded; for none of us will affirm 
 that we have had the fullest opportunity possible, 
 nor that we have availed ourselves fully of the op- 
 portunity we did have. Hence, by that standard, yvt 
 are all backward. 
 
 The Social Standard in the Home. — Quite dif- 
 ferent is the story of another boy who lived in a 
 family of two brothers and two sisters in an ordi- 
 nary home where the children had the usual liberty 
 to follow their own bent. Ernest was the unusual 
 child. He was the dreamer of the family, so called 
 because of his vacant and aimless way of doing 
 things at home. At an age when his brothers and 
 sisters could get up in the morning, wash their faces, 
 comb their hair, and dress themselves without aid 
 from any one, helpless Ernest would have to be 
 pulled out of bed by his energetic mother, washed 
 
4 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 and partly dressed by her, and almost driven down 
 to breakfast. When he went to school, he was 
 usually late and always the last. The distraction of 
 that mother can well be imagined. She had to pre- 
 pare breakfast for her husband who had to go to 
 work, and get ready five children with all their odds 
 and ends, one of whom was so exasperatingly slow 
 that a saint would be driven to desperation by him. 
 In other home affairs, Ernest was the same. He 
 either would not or could not learn to do the chores 
 required of him ; he could hardly ever run an errand 
 and come back on time; he would forget half the 
 articles he should bring from the store ; he dawdled 
 over everything; he never touched a tool or per- 
 formed a piece of manual work heartily and ener- 
 getically. He was never so happy as when he could 
 curl up in a big chair or sprawl on the floor over a 
 book. 
 
 At school his reputation was different. While 
 still slow-moving and phlegmatic, his mind worked 
 with remarkable precision; his ideas were translu- 
 cent ; his memory retentive ; knowledge came easily 
 to him; lessons were treated seriously, and though 
 Ernest took his own time about beginning them, 
 once he was started, his attention was absorbing and 
 he never stopped studying until the printed word 
 was a part of the fiber of his being. As a result, he 
 was easily the best pupil of his class, the delight of 
 his teachers, the pride of the school. At home, his 
 practical father and mother shook their heads in 
 
MEASURING RODS 5 
 
 grave doubt ; at school his teachers predicted for him 
 a rosy future. 
 
 Was Ernest really backward or not ? What is the 
 reason for such a clash of judgments? Simply this : 
 he was the victim of a double standard of judg- 
 ment in retardation. At home he was behind his 
 brothers and sisters in self-help and chores. He 
 learned how to do them slowly and he continued to 
 do them slowly and slovenly after he learned them. 
 At school he was deliberate in his study but he was 
 gifted with one of those rare minds that proceeds 
 without a halt in the acquisition of knowledge and 
 retains without a flaw what it learns. Therefore, 
 in the long run he learned many times more than the 
 other pupils. As a result, at home, he was "re- 
 tarded''; at school, "advanced." 
 
 More Accurate Standards. — Because family 
 judgments are lacking in exactness, men have tried 
 to formulate others. Because a child goes to school 
 and because in school backwardness becomes such a 
 vital matter, the problem of pedagogical retardation 
 has received much attention. Two general stand- 
 ards or criteria for judging pedagogical retardation 
 have been used. The first, called the age-and-grade 
 method, calls all children normal who are six years 
 old and in the first grade, or seven years old and in 
 the second grade, and so on ; but in actual practise it 
 allows one year more than the usually allotted time 
 for a grade before calling a child retarded. Gen- 
 eralized, the matter might be stated thus: Every 
 
6 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 child that begins school at the legal age and is pro- 
 moted regularly with its class is normal ; every child 
 who is two years or more behind the grade it should 
 be in for its age is backward. The two-years' allow- 
 ance instead of one is made because the legal age for 
 entering school varies with locality; because again 
 some children start to school six months or more 
 after their legal age for entrance; and because, still 
 further, it has been found that a smaller allowance 
 would place an overwhelmingly large number of 
 school children in the backward list. Even allowing 
 the two-year rule, about one-third of the school chil- 
 dren in the United States are retarded. 
 
 The Second Criterion is the Progress of the 
 Scholar. — According to this standard a normal 
 pupil is one who takes one year, or the regularly 
 scheduled time, and no more, to complete a grade, 
 no matter how old he is when he starts to school. At 
 first sight this seems to be a much juster criterion. 
 For it would appear, and it has been continually ar- 
 gued, that the older child who begins school-life 
 later than he ought legally to do will make more 
 rapid progress in his work and ultimately either 
 catch up with or else pass by the younger pupil. The 
 two sides of the question have been treated by Doc- 
 tor Leonard Ayres, who comes to the conclusion that 
 the two methods really do not disagree very ma- 
 terially in their results. One is as fair to the facts 
 as the other. "Neither the age standard nor the 
 progress standard of measuring retardation," says 
 
MEASURING RODS 7 
 
 Doctor Ay res, "exaggerates the extent of the evil. 
 On the average, results for a considerable number 
 of cities are equal by both methods." The whole 
 problem which at first sight seems reducible to such 
 simple terms, turns out to be exceedingly complex. 
 It will take years of patient labor to arrive at cer- 
 tain and well-accepted results. 
 
 The Standards of the Playground. — In the case 
 of Ernest just described, it will be noted that both 
 his parents and his teachers tacitly assumed that the 
 real criterion of backwardness lay beyond his school 
 and his home in the great world in which he would 
 work out his ultimate success in life. His parents, 
 knowing only one avenue to success and that man- 
 ual labor, were very dubious about their dreaming 
 son's future. His teachers, victims of the limita- 
 tions of their profession, assumed that there was 
 also only one road to success and that lay through 
 book-learning. 
 
 Much more significant for the future, it seems to 
 me, is the estimate made of a child by his fellows on 
 the playground. There are many reasons for this, 
 but I will point out only two. First, regarding the 
 child himself, he is acting spontaneously ; he is urged 
 on by the forces resident within himself; he is try- 
 ing, all unconscious of theories about education, or 
 any future ambitions, or any artificial rewards or 
 punishments, to express all that is in him. Further, 
 it is his own world in which he is making his place. 
 Therefore, it fits him better than any other that he 
 
8 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 IS compelled to live in. Taking these two phased of 
 play together, we see the child as he is. We can 
 therefore make a better and surer estimate of him 
 than when he only partially exhibits his real nature. 
 We know that in play he is not holding back re- 
 serves of energies; that he is not failing because he 
 lacks interest, because he is indifferent through wil- 
 fulness or a desire to do something else. In play 
 he expresses his last atom of energy; he will run 
 his race, or chase his ball, until he falls in his tracks. 
 All of us have heard of girls who dropped dead 
 jumping the rope. None of us has ever heard of a 
 girl who dropped dead washing dishes. No girl 
 can. She will faint first and so save her life. Play 
 alone can exhaust all her energies. Therefore, we 
 can judge the child more truly on the playground 
 than anywhere else, both for the present and the fu- 
 ture. Still, the judgment is our judgment. 
 
 Another reason why the play standard is valuable 
 IS this: from it we get the judgment of the child's 
 peers. Their judgment is not explicit; perhaps they 
 may never have had the slightest conscious acquaint- 
 ance with retardation in their lives, nor even know 
 how to pronounce the word; they may not know 
 that a comrade is backward, but they feel it, and 
 act it. As they react upon one another in their jos- 
 tling play- world each atom of humanity inevitably 
 settles into its proper place with the fatality of po- 
 tatoes on the way to market. As the forces of na- 
 ture fit the stars to their undeviating orbits and the 
 
MEASURING RODS 9 
 
 glaciers to their rocky beds, so do these youngsters 
 fit each companion to his groove. Such classifica- 
 tions of children are as accurate as they are uncon- 
 scious and as significant as they are unprejudiced. 
 Fathers and mothers may be blinded by their love, 
 teachers by the mechanics of their profession, and 
 neighbors by their ambitions for their own offspring, 
 but the clear-eyed citizens of boy-ville and girl-ville 
 look on one another without pride or prejudice and 
 judge one another without fear or favor in the larg- 
 est and most general aspects of their lives. 
 / Not too much weight can, therefore, be given to 
 the place secured by a child in his own world of un- 
 supervised play. The difficulty of applying such 
 judgments to our problem lies in the fact that they 
 so far have not been formulated. They are not only 
 vague but unexpressed in language or symbol. As 
 yet, no genius among adults has arisen to make them 
 exact, to transform them into systems and invent 
 apparatus for making the standards of the play- 
 ground applicable to mental diagnosis. 
 
 Science Will Refine Upon Popular Standards, 
 — Science may come and observe these popular 
 judgments; she may some day take them and refine 
 them and erect them into systems, but it is doubtful 
 if she can ever really improve upon them. The rea- 
 son for her helplessness is to be found in the vague- 
 ness and incomprehensiveness of the * 'general intel- 
 ligence" to be measured. What is intelligence? Is 
 it a single faculty? Surely not; for idiots often 
 
10 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 possess marvelous musical and mathematical facul- 
 ties. Is it reason? Philosophers reason to perfec- 
 tion, yet are the most impracticable people; so im- 
 practicable that they may starve where another man 
 will live well. For witness, read DeQuincey's ac- 
 count of his starving period in London, when he 
 walked the streets for days, being kept alive only 
 by the earnings of his Anne, and never once did it 
 occur to him even to ask for work ! Is intelligence 
 one faculty or many faculties? Is it not more a 
 proper balance among many faculties? If it is, and 
 that seems to be the truest answer, then immediately 
 it can be seen how difficult it will always be to meas- 
 ure this balance under artificial conditions. Added 
 to this is the fact that any mental examination must 
 also labor under the circumstance that even in the 
 smallest bit of human knowledge all the mental 
 processes are involved ; that it is impossible to isolate 
 reasoning, or imagination, or volition, and to con- 
 sider each one separately and apart from other 
 processes, as in an ideal laboratory experiment. The 
 child is a unit ; his consciousness is a unit. Certain 
 phases of the mental process may be emphasized at 
 times, but the others are there and, what is of su- 
 preme importance to the teacher or parent, these, 
 for the moment unobserved and unimportant proc- 
 esses, may be the very ones that will make the child 
 eventually a famous and successful man. For ex- 
 ample, success in life most frequently depends on 
 coolness and readiness in times of great crises. Ar- 
 
MEASURING RODS 11 
 
 tificial tests in clinics and schoolrooms can not, by 
 their nature, afford such situations, while play pro- 
 duces over and over again as a part of its very es- 
 sence critical moments full of originality and burn- 
 ing with excitement. 
 
 The Binet-Simon Standard. — Besides the fore- 
 going standards many others have been worked out 
 for the more accurate measurement of the typical 
 child's mind. One of the most noted in America is 
 the system of the Frenchman Binet, made famous 
 here chiefly by the extensive investigations carried 
 on by Doctor Goddard of the training school at 
 Vineland, New Jersey. These tests attempt to de- 
 scribe in about five simple ways the normal child of 
 any age up to fifteen years. The descriptions are 
 proposed in the form of questions or tasks and in 
 the results thus obtained. The so-called normal child 
 will answer the questions and perform the tasks, or 
 certain proportions of them, in certain ways. The 
 backward child will not perform the tasks or answer 
 the questions suitable to his age, but only those suita- 
 ble to a younger age. These standards have the 
 qualities of simplicity and of giving their measure- 
 ments in the ages of normal children. 
 
 The danger, illustrated by all the examples in this 
 chapter, of judging persons to be backward when 
 tested by only one standard, appears strikingly in 
 the following single test by the Binet method. A 
 class of school-teachers at a summer school were 
 tried by the twelve-year-old tests in the older Binet 
 
12 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 series. Not one of twenty-five adult, well-trained, 
 experienced teachers, whose mentality was unim- 
 peachable, could pass all the tests and some of them 
 failed ignominiously in a majority of them. This 
 statement of an experiment is not intended as a crit- 
 icism of the Binet tests themselves, but as an illus- 
 tration again of the vital truth not too often to be 
 reiterated that backwardness itself and the signifi- 
 cance of backwardness depends upon the standard 
 used to measure it. 
 
 The Standards Should Be Clearly Stated and 
 Studied. — So it appears that the standards for 
 measuring backwardness are many. This condition 
 arises from the nature of the case. Unlike meas- 
 urements of spatial or material objects we are 
 dealing with more or less non-spatial and extremely 
 complex dimensions. We can not take our child to 
 some place where a norm is kept and compare him 
 with that ideal. If we had to measure a stick we 
 could lay down a yard-measure upon it, and see if 
 they agreed. If our measuring stick was in doubt, 
 we could take it to Washington and have it tested to 
 the millionth of an inch and be sure that it was ac- 
 curate. Unfortunately, in dealing with living chil- 
 dren, many difficulties are in the way of such a 
 simple process. First, much of our measuring is 
 subjective and not objective; secondly, the child is 
 such a complex institution, so fearfully and wonder- 
 fully made that to classify one child requires lit- 
 erally innumerable measurements ; thirdly, and espe- 
 
MEASURING RODS 13 
 
 cially, no real, live, normal child exists in all the 
 world to whom we can compare our backward child. 
 If only somewhere, in some sort of an institution, a 
 whole row of perfectly normal children, complete 
 for their age in all their physical, mental, moral and 
 social qualities, were kept on exhibition, and we 
 could take any suspected child there and compare 
 him with the model of the same age, then our prob- 
 lem would be marvelously simplified. But sucH 
 norms do not exist — "Thank goodness," we may 
 almost say under our breath. For if they did all 
 mental progress would be at an end. Beyond them 
 our children could not hope to go. Woe, yea, even 
 worse woe than now, unto any child who would dare 
 to be original ! No, no standard of childish perfec- 
 tion exists ; and though on that account our problem 
 of measuring backwardness is made inimitably 
 harder, on the whole we agree with the child-world 
 and are glad it is so. 
 
 The Meaning of Backwardness. — From the 
 foregoing discussion two important questions may 
 arise. First, what is backwardness ? It is altogether 
 a relative matter and not an absolute condition. It 
 is not a mental defect, nor a physical defect, nor a 
 judgment of Providence, nor a quality of the indi- 
 vidual inherited or acquired. It is merely a relation. 
 The backward child is behind somebody or lower 
 than, he ought to be in some arbitrary scale, accord- 
 ing to somebody's judgment. The mere fact that a 
 child is backward is seen immediately as soon as the 
 
14 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 standard of measurement is stated. Until that is 
 stated backwardness in itself and by itself has prac- 
 tically no significance. That brings up the second 
 question: Is backwardness always to be deplored? 
 Not by any means. 
 
 To be behind does not always mean something un- 
 desirable. Sometimes it keeps children out of dan- 
 ger, as it did the poor little cripple who hobbled along 
 behind the other children following the Pied Piper, 
 and so got to the mountain too late to be swallowed 
 up forever. That backward child might be taken as 
 an example for backwardness in many other re- 
 spects. "Your boy is backward," begins the school- 
 visitor, and mother's face falls and her forehead 
 wrinkles, *'in smoking," or "swearing," adds the vis- 
 itor, and mother's face brightens. All depends on 
 what a child is backward in; and not on the mere 
 fact that he is backward. To express it otherwise, 
 all depends on the standard of backwardness. Be- 
 fore the standard is known the word "backward" 
 means just one thing : the backward one is lagging 
 behind something. As soon as the standard is 
 known, then the implication is clear, and the back- 
 wardness is seen to be desirable or undesirable. I 
 have actually seen a young girl of fascinating appear- 
 ance and an excellent mind brought to a psycholog- 
 ical clinic because, according to the strait and strict 
 standards of conduct in her community and the 
 people who had her under their control, she dis- 
 
MEASURING RODS 15 
 
 played tendencies to degeneracy. The truth was that 
 the girl was simply forward in company, and for- 
 ward too, only according to the exceedingly con- 
 servative judgment of her community. Certainly it 
 would have been better for her, and for all girls, to 
 be ''backward'' rather than "forward" in society. 
 
 In one of the old school-readers there used to be 
 a story about a famine, a bread-line, a crowd of el- 
 bowing children, and one little girl, "with patched 
 clothes neat and clean," who always waited with a 
 heavenly meekness till all the other children had 
 seized the largest loaves from the unscientifically 
 managed charity and had departed, leaving Mar- 
 garet to take the last and smallest loaf. She was a 
 backward child, but her backwardness was not the 
 kind to be condemned. Indeed, such a fine quality 
 was it that one day the rich baker slipped a gold- 
 piece into the smallest loaf and when backward 
 Margaret, as usual, took what was rejected, she 
 found a fortune, and received from her benefactor 
 both the full right to the coin and a homily upon 
 the virtue of backwardness. With this old-fashioned 
 tale we will leave the standards of backwardness 
 and the many measuring-rods applied to this class of 
 children, hoping that the truth of the lesson will 
 come out with fresh force, that all our modern agi- 
 tation on retardation will not obscure, namely, that 
 backwardness is not wholly or always bad and that 
 it needs to be studied in each individual case to de- 
 
16 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 termine its exact nature. To put our inductive study 
 into a form easily assimilable we append the follow- 
 ing summary of standards : 
 
 I. Individual Standards. — A backward child is one 
 who is not so far advanced as he ought to be, 
 when his birth and opportunities are considered. 
 II. Social Standards. 
 
 A. Popular Standards. 
 
 1. In the Home. — A backward child in the 
 
 home is one who learns at a later age than 
 that of his brothers and sisters how to 
 walk, talk, eat, dress himself, etc. His 
 parents' judgment is the measure. 
 
 2. In the Neighborhood. — A backward child is 
 
 one who, in the judgment of the neighbors-, 
 is behind the other children in their activi- 
 ties. Neighbors usually judge less merci- 
 fully than parents and the backwardness is 
 more pronounced if it is noticed by the 
 neighbors. 
 
 3. On the Playground. — A backward child is 
 
 one who can not play the games children 
 of his age can play, and who therefore 
 plays with younger children. 
 
 B. Scientific Standards. 
 
 1. Among Nations. — A child is backward only 
 
 when he falls behind the average for his 
 own race or nation. This is the anthro- 
 pological standard. 
 
 2. In School. 
 
 a. The Age Standard. — ^A backward child is 
 one who, from any cause whatsoever, 
 is two years or more behind the grade 
 he ought to be in for his age. The ped- 
 agogical standard is a child who begins 
 school at the legal age and is promoted 
 regularly with his class. Pedagogical 
 
MEASURING RODS 17 
 
 retardation is a fact, and has nothing to 
 do with causes, is not always a detri- 
 ment, and should not be condemned un- 
 til the causes are known. 
 b. The Progress Standard. — ^According to 
 this standard a backward child is one 
 who takes longer than the regularly 
 scheduled time to complete one grade, 
 no matter how old he is. In the long 
 run, with many pupils, these two stand- 
 ards give about the same results. 
 3. In General Intelligence. — ^According to sev- 
 eral systems like the Simon-Binet, De 
 Sanctis, and others, a backward child is 
 one who can not answer certain sets of 
 prescribed questions and do certain tasks 
 presumably fitted to his years. The stand- 
 ard child is one who can do these tasks and 
 give these answers.* 
 
 * Much of the material in Chaps. 1 and 8 has appeared in the 
 author's The Conservation of the Child, J. B. Lippincott Co., 
 Phila., which treats the diagnosis of backward children fully. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 VARIETIES OF BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 SOME years ago two new pupils arrived on the 
 same day in the special class of a public school. 
 Whence they came, by what pedagogic highways and 
 byways they had reached their destination and what 
 educational vicissitudes they had suffered on the 
 journey, are only of secondary importance to our 
 purpose of tracing their succeeding history. It is 
 sufficient to say that their schooling began at the 
 usual age, in the usual public schools, and had lasted 
 six years, leaving them both at the age of twelve in 
 the fourth grade. To all appearances, they sprang 
 from about the same social conditions. Their dress 
 and manners marked them as coming from ordinary 
 homes of working people. Their names we will call 
 John and Mary because those are not their names. 
 Carelessly viewed, they were just two quite ordi- 
 nary, retarded children, superficially alike, noted 
 only for the fact that they helped to swell the thirty- 
 three and seven-tenths per cent, of backward chil- 
 dren in American schools. 
 
 Their Personal Appearance. — To the hasty ob- 
 server all difference in personal appearance favored 
 
 18 
 
VARIETIES 19 
 
 Mary. She was cleaner and neater, her face and 
 hands were washed, and her hair carefully parted, 
 smoothed and tied back with a red ribbon in a large 
 bow, the loops of which stood out on each side of 
 her head like butterfly wings. She was pretty, quiet, 
 ladylike in her manners, and very well behaved. She 
 came to the special teacher with a good report for 
 conduct and much praise for her serious efforts to 
 learn. As she sat there on the seat that first day, 
 Miss M., the special teacher, found her heart going 
 out to her in a quiet pity, and she made up her mind 
 then and there that she would save this fine girl from 
 any further stigma of failure, if it was at all pos- 
 sible. 
 
 John was not nearly so fortunate. His personal 
 appearance was altogether against him. Boy-like, 
 his face and hands were not very clean, his hair was 
 unkempt, his clothes were untidily worn. His man- 
 ner and manners were both bad. His face wore a 
 sullen and sometimes defiant look, and when he 
 moved, it was with a listless, unwilling, slouchy gait. 
 When he spoke his voice was peculiarly flat and 
 dead, but frequently rising quickly and easily into 
 a querulous, irritated tone. The shape of his nose 
 and his open mouth were sure signs of adenoids, 
 past or present, which his teacher later found, had 
 been just recently removed, so recently that the other 
 signs — crooked teeth, dulled hearing, stoop shoul- 
 ders, flat chest and general debility, with the lus- 
 terless eye and vacuous face — were still very much 
 
20 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 in evidence. He came with no such good report for 
 conduct as Mary had brought. By his former teach- 
 ers he was counted careless, irritable, inattentive, 
 and had been getting worse instead of better in the 
 last years of his schooling, despite the hope of im- 
 provement through the adenoid operation. The 
 hope was slow to materialize and John was sent to 
 the special class. 
 
 The Results. — Space and time will not permit 
 me to give every detail of these two children's peda- 
 gogical treatment and training in the next two years. 
 It must suffice to say that they received the teaching 
 in a modern special class. The manual work was 
 first tried. Here in the beginning Mary distinctly 
 excelled John. She seemed to have a positive genius 
 for basket weaving. The first one she ever produced 
 in her life — a small, bowl-like structure — was as 
 neatly woven, as symmetrically turned and shaped 
 as any teacher's heart could desire, and loud were 
 the praises, both in school and at home, that the 
 amiable and lovable Mary received for her evident 
 skill and application. 
 
 Poor John started bravely, but his interest slack- 
 ened, his fingers got in his way, he made mistakes, 
 became excited, then irritated, had to do it over 
 again, and finally finished a pitiable specimen, out 
 of shape, begrimed with sweat and tears, and not 
 fit for exhibition anywhere. It was a sorry sight 
 though the extremities of its faults were mercifully 
 covered by the patient charity of his teacher and her 
 
VARIETIES 21 
 
 assurance, into which her heart could not enter very 
 warmly, that he would do better next time. 
 
 In many other exercises it was not different. Wher- 
 ever rhythm in any form was involved, Mary fell 
 into it naturally and smoothly. In singing she was 
 not only quick to catch the tune, and to follow it in 
 her sweet, clear voice, but she readily committed the 
 words to memory. She could recite poetry, too, and 
 loved the weekly memory-gems required in school. 
 Her reading was excellent, in fact, good enough to 
 permit her to read easily in a higher grade. Her 
 writing, too, was good in the sense that the letters 
 were well formed and fair to the eye. On the whole, 
 as Miss M. said, if it had not been for her hopeless- 
 ness in arithmetic and a certain lack of vigor in at- 
 tacking original situations and in dealing with ab- 
 stract problems of all kinds, Mary was one of the 
 most satisfactory pupils in the class. At least, Miss 
 M. said that at first. In the course of two years 
 she was surprised to note how little Mary improved 
 in these respects. By dint of much personal atten- 
 tion in school and at home, she did make some prog- 
 ress. Always docile and earnest, she won sympathy 
 and approbation everywhere. As it was evident that 
 she could never learn much arithmetic, it was de- 
 cided, that since she was a girl, she should be pro- 
 moted without it. Her other mental work, depend- 
 ent upon memory, was fair, and her manual work 
 always most excellent. For that she was highly 
 praised, and from that commendation, together with 
 
22 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 the adolescent ripening of her mental powers, came 
 a new-found confidence, which diffused itself 
 through all her other efforts, and united with her 
 unfailing willingness, carried her back into the 
 grades, and at fifteen Mary left school, not grad- 
 uated, but with the praise of her teachers and with 
 no suspicion that she was deficient except in one or 
 two restricted, and, to a girl, not very important 
 subjects. Yet within two years after Mary left 
 school and went to work in a box factory, she was 
 sent by the juvenile court to an institution for the 
 feeble-minded to be all the rest of her life, a ward of 
 the state, an apathetic moron, wrecked in life and 
 morals, a source of sorrow to her parents, and a po- 
 tential danger to society. 
 
 As for John, he stumbled along through the first 
 months of his special class with varying successes 
 and failures, in which failures predominated. The 
 effect of his failures upon the patience of his 
 teacher was heightened by his irritability, wilfulness, 
 carelessness, and general bad behavior. Miss M. 
 struggled on with him only because a few gleams of 
 ability here and there occasionally flashed out of his 
 otherwise bunglesome efforts. Basket weaving, he 
 did not like; singing, he hated with a schoolboy's 
 lusty hatred of anything cultural and beautiful. 
 Wood-working was more to his liking and his ac- 
 complishments therein really saved his career. As 
 he worked at carpentry through the months, his 
 physical condition improved; he took pride in his 
 
VARIETIES 23 
 
 work ; he was anxious to be at it and he did his les- 
 sons in books faithfully so as to get to the bench. 
 Gradually his whole being and activities improved 
 and in two years he went back to the grades, gripped 
 the meaning of things with vigor, developed into a 
 healthy boy, entered a manual training high school 
 at sixteen, and after one year there went out into 
 the world to become a joiner-apprentice in a car 
 shop, where he is to-day, a promising young man. 
 
 What was the difference between these two that 
 made such a tragic difference in their lives? Simply 
 and only the difference between permanent and tem- 
 porary retardation, between feeble-mindedness and 
 pedagogical backwardness due to removable defects ; 
 and this difference might have been detected by the 
 skilled teacher and much of its terrible consequences 
 to the girl and to her parents and to society might 
 have been anticipated and prevented. More than 
 that, these are only two of the many cases identical 
 in the one great essential, coming before the teach- 
 ers of our schools every day. Because teachers do 
 not understand that from one-half of one per cent, 
 to four per cent, of their pupils are feeble-minded, 
 and because they do not have the ability to recognize 
 slight degrees of feeble-mindedness, they not infre- 
 quently labor with such unfortunate pupils only to 
 hide their defects temporarily and to expose them 
 eventually to the rigors of the world peculiar to such 
 defective mental and moral natures. 
 
 Two Great Varieties of Retardation. — Now 
 
24 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 that we have seen something of the meanings attach- 
 ing to the word ^'backward," we will turn to a study 
 of the varieties of the phenomenon itself. Com- 
 plexity and not simplicity confronts us, a complexity 
 in the condition itself to be overcome as far as pos- 
 sible by simplicity in classification. For our purpose 
 a very simple and untechnical classification of back- 
 ward children might be made, one that will both 
 seize upon the essential difference between two great 
 classes of the retarded ones, and will also at the 
 same time serve the practical end of education. That 
 end is the future of the backward child. We want 
 him to grow up and take his place in the world as a 
 self-supporting and self-respecting citizen. Can he 
 do it? With all his present defects, mental and 
 physical, can he be so treated and so taught that 
 eventually he will become a full-fledged citizen of 
 the republic? That is our practical question and 
 upon it we can base our simple classification of all 
 backward children into those temporarily backward 
 and those permanently backward. The first will in- 
 clude all those children retarded on account of re- 
 movable defects; the second will include all that 
 growing army of unfortunate little people whose de- 
 fects are deeply seated within their very being be- 
 yond the present philosophy of man to understand- 
 Hence, it is seen at once how vital it is to all con- 
 cerned that this distribution be made in the case of 
 every backward child, and be made as early as pos- 
 sible. Upon it depends all its future treatment and 
 
VARIETIES 25 
 
 training. Without such a distinction teachers and 
 parents may go on trying to teach their charges 
 things impossible to learn and things positively hurt- 
 ful, and at the same time rob them of the oppor- 
 tunity to learn other things for which their capacities 
 are suited and through which they would reach their 
 highest attainments and most joyful service. On 
 this point too much emphasis can not possibly be 
 laid. I have seen a child brought apparently to the 
 lowest stages of idiocy by the neglect of her par- 
 ents who deemed it impossible to teach her because 
 she was permanently retarded. Yet that same child, 
 under medication and with skilful teaching, changed 
 within a few years to a most polite, beautiful little 
 lady, capable of rudimentary reading and writing 
 and seemingly at that time destined to grow into 
 full womanhood. On the other hand, I have seen 
 a child driven by her mother into almost complete 
 mental bankruptcy by attempting to force the poor 
 benumbed mind to read and write and do arith- 
 metic when such mysteries would be ever beyond the 
 ken of this manually capable and housewifely little 
 girl. In both cases the children suffered ; one from 
 neglect and the other from overstraining, and both 
 from the same cause, namely, the lack of under- 
 standing that differences, absolute and lifelong, exist 
 among backward children. 
 
 Further Study of Temporarily Retarded Chil- 
 dren. — After we have made this basal and vital 
 distinction between the two kinds of retarded chil- 
 
26 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 dren, we have still further sub-classifications to 
 make. These finer divisions chiefly concern the 
 teacher. They have arisen from the needs of the 
 class-room, and therefore fit in very well with our 
 purpose of classifying backward children by their 
 future ability to support themselves in ordinary so- 
 ciety. First, some of these children begin to improve 
 immediately after the removal of their defects. For 
 example, a retarded girl with a good personal history 
 was found to be suffering with enlarged tonsils, poor 
 eyes, and crooked and decayed teeth. Her eyes and 
 tonsils were treated and almost immediately she 
 showed improvement in other ways. Her appetite 
 improved, she became less susceptible to colds, her 
 teeth grew straighter; she was promoted at school 
 and maintained her position in her class without 
 further trouble. 
 
 A boy nine years of age, after going to school 
 three years, had reached only the second grade. He 
 was good in some studies. He usually made eighty 
 to ninety per cent, in spelling, but he could not sub- 
 tract twenty-five from fifty, nor eighteen from 
 twenty-five orally. He could say over words in 
 the second reader, but did not seem to obtain any 
 meaning from the process. His teachers stated 
 that he was not interested in school work and was 
 very careless about everything. Possibly there 
 was some connection between his carelessness and 
 his habit of rising at 5 A. M. to deliver papers, 
 but his chief trouble lay in his defective vision. 
 
VARIETIES 27 
 
 Twice in six months his eyes were examined and 
 glasses fitted to them at a cHnic. The improvement 
 was immediate and continuous. In the same class 
 with the same teacher, he changed entirely and ap- 
 plied himself so well that he became a good scholar 
 in all his studies, and in geography and history, his 
 former bugbears, he secured grades of eighty-five 
 and ninety-four per cent, respectively. He repre- 
 sents the class of children very numerous in school 
 whose backwardness is due to physical defects and 
 who respond immediately to proper medical treat- 
 ments. 
 
 A similar case is a girl nine years of age, in the 
 third grade, whose retardation was not marked 
 enough to be noted in school but marked enough to 
 attract the notice of her parents. It gave them some 
 uneasiness because the child had suffered congestion 
 of the brain when she was five and again when she 
 was eight, and because they feared that her increas- 
 ing backwardness was due to some mental derange- 
 ment. 
 
 An examination revealed no signs of mental ab- 
 normalities, but it did reveal poor eyesight, enlarged 
 tonsils, adenoids and a consequent sore throat. 
 When the adenoids were removed and her eyes fitted 
 with glasses, the child changed immediately for the 
 better. Her health improved greatly. The signs 
 of nervousness disappeared and with them her dis- 
 position changed from melancholy to cheerfulness, 
 from constant irritability to normal good humor, 
 
28 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 and her conduct from disobedience and rebellion 
 to willing and happy effort to please. Her mental 
 improvement was equally marked. Lessons that 
 formerly were labored over with weariness, discour- 
 agement and tears, now came easily. Her music les- 
 sons, formerly an equal trial to her and her mother, 
 became seasons of special enjoyment. So rapidly 
 did she advance in music that she soon surpassed her 
 mother in accomplishment. All of this change was 
 due to the treatment and not to training. Her case 
 illustrates what can be done by wise and watchful 
 parents who look for causes of conduct and intelli- 
 gently seek remedies at children's clinics before the 
 advance of diseases causes trouble at school. 
 
 Rapidly Recoverable Cases. — Jack, at eleven 
 years, promised to be a ne'er-do-well. He could not 
 learn in school. He was discouraged and his rela- 
 tives were discouraged, too. He did not know what 
 was the matter and nobody else seemed to know. 
 He had floundered along for five years in the public 
 school of his small town and was only in the second 
 grade. He could not read in a second reader; his 
 spelling was poor; his grammar was atrocious; his 
 writing a combination of poor spelling, worse gram- 
 mar and illegible penmanship. 
 
 Yet he was a good boy, obedient, affectionate 
 and thoughtful of others. He loved pets, and had a 
 dog, some rabbits and chickens, all of which he 
 cared for faithfully. He built them pens, and fussed 
 and worked with them every spare hour he had. 
 
VARIETIES 29 
 
 At eleven years of age he was brought to a clinic 
 by his mother. They lived in a country town or he 
 would bave been brought before. There it was 
 found he had enlarged tonsils, but his chief trouble 
 was poor eyesight. His tonsils were removed and 
 glasses were fitted to his eyes and he was entered in 
 a special summer class in the city in which his physi- 
 cal activities were given free opportunity. He was 
 very good in gymnastic drills and in swimming. 
 Carpentry also served to rouse his dormant facul- 
 ties and to stimulate his interest in study. With his 
 eyesight improved he found reading much easier 
 and took to simple history. In six weeks he went 
 back home, and in the fall entered the regular third 
 grade, where his progress fully satisfied everybody. 
 He went through the primary grades, and at sixteen, 
 on account of the absence of his father from home, 
 he took full charge of their small farm and ran it 
 successfully. The proper diagnosis, treatment, and 
 brief special training changed this boy from a tramp 
 in embryo to a wholesome and worthy member of 
 the community, capable in a pinch, of becoming the 
 support of the family. 
 
 Jack illustrates a second group among tempora- 
 rily retarded children. Unlike the first group, they 
 do not show immediate improvement on removal 
 of their physical defects. They start to school, fall 
 behind in their grades, are examined and found to 
 have a number of physical defects, or to be badly 
 situated in a poor neighborhood, or live in a poor 
 
30 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 home where they do not have enough to eat. When 
 they are treated medically or surgically, or removed 
 from their bad neighborhoods, or their homes, they 
 then require manual training or individualized in- 
 struction to arouse again their dormant and tem- 
 porarily stagnated faculties. Such children improve 
 and eventually return to their regular classes, grad- 
 uate from school and go out into the world ready to 
 make a living. 
 
 The Slowly Recoverable. — ^Julia was a dis- 
 couraging pupil. She was thirteen years old with 
 six years of schooling to her credit, during which 
 many and sundry teachers had wrought upon her 
 to see what they might make of her meager mind. 
 Four years she had submitted meekly to regular 
 grade instruction, learning a little at first and then 
 losing that little gradually until she went into a spe- 
 cial class. For two years individual instruction, 
 with all the accessories of equipment and manual 
 work, were brought to bear upon her with practi- 
 cally no results. Then she was taken to a clinic for 
 diagnosis, where a number of complications were 
 discovered. 
 
 The girl was very small for her age, a pale 
 anemic child, with bad teeth, poor eyesight, enlarged 
 adenoids and tonsils. She was dull and sleepy, sub- 
 ject to spells of stubbornness, heart-breaking to an 
 ambitious teacher, but otherwise of an excellent 
 moral character. Glasses were fitted to her eyes, 
 her teeth were treated, and her nervous and intes- 
 
VARIETIES 31 
 
 tinal troubles received the proper medication. Then 
 she went back to the special class. 
 
 Now the two chief values of all special classes are 
 found in the large amount of attention given to each 
 pupil in the small classes and in fitting the instruc- 
 tion to the peculiar needs of each pupil. Julia liked 
 to sew, to take physical exercise, to play games and 
 to sing. So she received regular daily training in 
 all these arts. Nothing special or peculiar was in- 
 troduced into the methods of teaching her these 
 common accomplishments. It was the fact that she 
 was learning the things she could learn that counted. 
 The effect of such exercises began soon to appear. 
 They showed first in her constantly and rapidly im- 
 proving physical condition. Health came to her 
 body, blood to her cheeks, brightness to her eyes, 
 and energy to her muscles. Along with health came 
 improvement in her disposition. Her stubbornness 
 just evaporated under the sunshine of daily well- 
 being. 
 
 Finally her power to perform mental work began 
 to grow. Concentration, always dependent upon 
 physical power in some form or other, increased 
 with the increase of health and strength. Julia be- 
 gan to learn, and the joy of developing common to 
 all children when they grow came to her. Four 
 months of strenuous training were required to stem 
 the tide of retrogression and to return her to the 
 regular third grade. That of course was far below 
 her normal grade and it will take several years of 
 
32 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 hard work yet to bring her up anywhere near to the 
 standard. It seems a profound pity that so many 
 years were wasted before a clinic examination was 
 made, but we must remember that it was the clinic 
 that started her right and assured her teachers of 
 ultimate victory. 
 
 Julia, unlike some of the boys and girls just de- 
 scribed, belongs to a class of slowly recoverable 
 temporarily retarded children. They are by all odds 
 the most difficult cases to diagnose and to train. In 
 their general appearance and mental powers they 
 seem to belong not to the temporarily retarded but 
 to the permanently retarded, for whom little can be 
 done. They often suffer from a multitude of de- 
 fects — poor vision, bad hearing, enlarged tonsils, 
 adenoids, decayed teeth and malnutrition; they tire 
 easily, are irritable or apathetic, without ability to 
 pay attention, idlers, slovenly, falling into mischief, 
 centers of disturbance and constant drains upon the 
 teacher's time and patience. All of their physical 
 defects may be remedied, they may be placed in the 
 best of special classes and yet for a long time their 
 mental awakening is beyond the hope of all but the 
 most faithful and experienced. Gradually they take 
 hold; some detail of manual labor appeals to them 
 and they do it with a new pleasure. From that, 
 step by step, the experienced teacher leads them out 
 into wider and more intricate pieces of manual work 
 until at last the day comes when the gulf between 
 the concrete task and the abstract symbol, between 
 
VARIETIES 33 
 
 training and teaching, is bridged and the road to the 
 higher learning Hes open once more. The progress 
 may still be slow, but the upward march is sure, and 
 the outcome, though possibly long delayed, is cer- 
 tain. No single group of children requires so much 
 patience, so much skill in diagnosis and training, 
 and so much abounding faith in the infallibility of 
 psychological analyses as does this group. If to 
 their mental backwardness are added moral delin- 
 quencies, then indeed is their lot a hard one. For 
 it is so easy for the uninformed parent or unpre- 
 pared teacher to explain the whole trouble by say- 
 ing, "He is just bad; that's what is the matter with 
 him," but utterly forgetting that in this case the 
 badness is not at all a cause, but merely a symptom, 
 or a concomitant, of the backwardness. 
 
 These children are often confused with the feeble- 
 minded, and hence in some cases great cures of the 
 feeble-minded are heralded by instructors who are 
 not skilful in making diagnoses. This is not to 
 be wondered at since the physical appearances and 
 mental attributes of these children very closely ap- 
 proximate those of the truly feeble-minded. The 
 resemblances are only superficial, while the differ- 
 ences are profound. It is in this realm that so much 
 waste of energy and so much confusion in theory 
 is to be found. Teachers will insist that middle- 
 grade imbeciles, for example, can be taught to read 
 and write, because they have received children diag- 
 nosed as middle-grade imbeciles into their classes 
 
34 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 and have succeeded in teaching them to read and 
 write. It is perfectly evident to those who under- 
 stand that if, by definition, a middle-grade imbecile 
 is one who can not be taught to read and write, then 
 children called middle-grade imbeciles and who still 
 learn to read and write are not what they are diag- 
 nosed to be. That mistakes of this kind should 
 frequently occur is not at all surprising when we 
 consider how few skilled mental diagnosticians there 
 are and how many mental diagnoses are made by 
 laymen and by others with very little special train- 
 ing. It is, therefore, highly necessary that the 
 teacher of special children should keep herself clear 
 from confusion of this sort. She should maintain 
 her poise of mind and retain her clear discrimina- 
 tion between temporarily retarded and the perma- 
 nently retarded and neither waste her time by spend- 
 ing useless energy on the latter nor exhibit undue 
 exhilaration over the reclamation of the former. 
 Especially must she be on her guard against assert- 
 ing that a feeble-minded child, who very naturally 
 makes exceedingly rapid progress after surgical and 
 medical treatment, with a little intensive training, is 
 not feeble-minded, but only temporarily backward. 
 Just recently in an institution I came across a girl 
 manifestly feeble-minded, who six or seven years 
 ago under the care of an expert, received the 
 proper medical and surgical treatment, and then was 
 placed with a special teacher. Under this tutelage 
 the girl progressed very rapidly. She seemed to 
 
VARIETIES 35 
 
 awaken to new life intellectually and emotionally. 
 Her physical condition, her disposition, her charac- 
 ter and her conduct all leaped forward in unison. 
 She soon entered a grade in a regular public school 
 where, though she was much retarded pedagogically, 
 she kept pace with her class and made good prog- 
 ress. Gradually, however, her first rapid strides 
 grew slower and shorter until finally she reached 
 her upper limit of intellectual growth and has re- 
 mained there stationary ever since. Several ob- 
 servers were deceived by her first remarkable ad- 
 vancement and prematurely concluded that she was 
 entirely normal. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 TYPICAL RETARDATION DUE TO PHYSICAL DEFECTS 
 
 A SPECIAL-CLASS teacher of long experience 
 was one day confronted with the worst case 
 she had ever seen. He was a boy of eleven years 
 whose parents had recently moved into the neigh- 
 borhood and had entered their son in the regular 
 grade, where the teacher had tried her best with 
 him, and had finally appealed to the principal to re- 
 lieve her of this hopeless case by placing him in the 
 special class for backward children. So the princi- 
 pal brought him to the special teacher and gave her 
 as much as he knew of the boy's family, personal 
 and pedagogical history. 
 
 The parents were ordinary hard-working people 
 of good stock ; his brothers and sisters were all nor- 
 mal and several were in school doing well. The 
 boy himself had never suffered with any specially 
 severe disease like diphtheria, nor any that left bad 
 mental consequences behind, nor did he suffer from 
 epileptic fits, St. Vitus' dance, nor nervousness, 
 though he had a few more than his share of 
 children's ordinary diseases like measles, mumps, 
 chicken-pox and the like, and continually suffered 
 
 36 
 
PHYSICAL DEFECTS 37 
 
 from colds, sore throat, toothache and occasionally 
 earache. 
 
 His school-life presented nothing very marked in 
 particular, though on the whole it was bad. He 
 started to school at six ; at first made good progress, 
 but contracted the measles and was out of school 
 for six weeks, and after that seemed to lose interest 
 and to fall behind until he was only in the third 
 grade, and was that far along more by grace than 
 by merit. He seemed to be generally and hopelessly 
 retarded. He was poor in everything. Apparently 
 he did not try; he was dull, stupid, inattentive, for- 
 getful, irritable, stubborn, irregular in his attend- 
 ance, annoying when he was in school, and latterly 
 suspected of truancy when he was out. In it all, he 
 did not seem to be particularly mentally defective; 
 some of his teachers asserted he was feeble-minded, 
 while others said he could learn if he would. Such 
 was his history when he came to the special teacher. 
 
 Diagnosis of the Case. — As I said, this teacher 
 had both training for and experience in her work. 
 Though this boy seemed a hopeless case, she pro- 
 ceeded in her usual systematic and efficient man- 
 ner. She wasted no time calling him names nor 
 labeling him. She did not stop to ask if he was 
 ^'really retarded." That he was pedagogically re- 
 tarded was a patent fact. Her business was ulti- 
 mately to restore him to the grades if that was pos- 
 sible. Her immediate task was to decide if that was 
 possible. To decide that she must find the causes of 
 
38 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 this boy's backwardness. Her experience assured 
 her the causes were either in the boy himself or in 
 his environment. 
 
 Environmental Causes. — In his environment 
 there was nothing unusually bad. His home was 
 not rich, but it was a good one. His brothers and 
 sisters were normal. His schooling had been the 
 usual one, and his brothers and sisters had suc- 
 ceeded with the same schools, lessons and teachers 
 he himself had had. The neighborhood in which he 
 lived and played was typical, neither very good nor 
 very bad. His companions were not noted for their 
 delinquencies, though he had in the last year fallen 
 in with a crowd of boys who formed the worst ele- 
 ment of the school and who numbered among 
 them some of the truants and incorrigibles. But, 
 on the whole, it seemed clear that the cause of this 
 boy's decline in school work was not due to environ- 
 ment, but to something in him. Was that something 
 a mental defect, as a number of his teachers said, 
 or a physical defect? 
 
 The Physical Examination. — For answer the 
 teacher turned to the boy himself. He had come 
 slouching in behind the principal and had stood fin- 
 gering his cap and casting furtive glances around 
 the room and over the other fifteen children of vari- 
 ous ages in the ungraded class, while the principal 
 gave the teacher a rapid account of her new charge's 
 life and present condition. When the principal left, 
 in answer to the teacher's word, Joe — ^we will call 
 
PHYSICAL DEFECTS 39 
 
 him, though that is not his name — shuffled up to 
 the desk and stood before her. No wonder others 
 thought him hopeless. Almost every Hne of his per- 
 sonal appearance and posture spoke loudly of physi- 
 cal and mental inefficiency. To the acute eyes of 
 the teacher his clothing manifested the struggle go- 
 ing on between a mother, neat and energetic, still 
 hoping to keep up a high standard of appearance, 
 and the slow but sure inroads of mental retrogres- 
 sion in the boy. His clothes were good, somewhat 
 worn, carelessly put on and slovenly carried on 
 a slouching frame. Great perpendicular wrinkles 
 creased his coat at the shoulders; his soft shirt col- 
 lar, though clean and white, was pulled out of shape, 
 with one wing over and the other under his coat 
 lapel; his four-in-hand necktie had slipped down 
 from his collar and the ends hung outside his vest ; 
 his stockings were not pulled up smoothly ; his shoe- 
 strings were only partly laced. The struggle be- 
 tween a mother's will and a backward boy's listless 
 indifference was patent everywhere in his clothes. 
 
 The whole effect was accentuated and heightened 
 by his posture. He stood with his arms hanging at 
 his sides, stoop-shouldered, flat-chested, his shoul- 
 der-blades outstanding, betraying in every attitude 
 he took the lassitude and weakness due to lack of 
 oxygen, to faults of digestion and assimilation, and 
 to the poisons of fatigue. The teacher's trained eye 
 went over him from head to foot, noting in detail 
 every characteristic, eliminating the unimportant 
 
40 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 and non-essential, marking down in her retentive 
 memory the vital essentials, and letting these tell 
 their story to her unbiased and disciplined judg- 
 ment. 
 
 Her survey began with his hair, naturally thick 
 and glossy, but now dead and unruly, showing evi- 
 dences of having been wetted and combed that morn- 
 ing, but later mussed by a careless adjustment of 
 the cap, which the embarrassed boy now swung 
 backward and forward in nervous little semicircles. 
 The shape of his head, the size and shape of his ears, 
 eyes, nose, mouth and jaws were all naturally nor- 
 mal, as the teacher could discern by her analysis, 
 though some features were marred by defects. The 
 sallow complexion, the drooping eyelids, the vacu- 
 ous expression of face, and the listlessness of every 
 movement betokened either imbecility or the total 
 result of many advanced physical defects. 
 
 Signs of Adenoids. — To decide whether Joe 
 was permanently or only temporarily retarded, Miss 
 F., the teacher, knew that his physical defects must 
 first be diagnosed and removed and a chance be 
 given for his native powers to appear and to be de- 
 veloped by proper training in a special class. To 
 begin the analysis of Joe's real condition by her own 
 observation. Miss F. made a few gentle and kindly 
 inquiries, placed him in a seat well up in front, and 
 gave him some simple busy-work which would take 
 his mind off of himself and yet not make so great a 
 demand upon his attention that his activity would 
 
PHYSICAL DEFECTS 41 
 
 obscure his real self-expression. In the meantime 
 Miss F. continued her careful and systematic exam- 
 ination, while Joe, blissfully ignorant of it, pro- 
 ceeded to adjust himself to his new surroundings. 
 Very quickly the teacher noted the most potent 
 adenoid signs. Experience taught her what trains 
 of evil effects to expect in addition to these patent 
 defects. 
 
 Because adenoids are so common, because they 
 are so intimately connected with retardation, be- 
 cause their mental effects so closely resemble feeble- 
 mindedness, and because their accompanying physi- 
 cal defects are so numerous, we will describe briefly 
 what Miss F. saw in them. So true is the last state- 
 ment that we can almost say that a study of ade- 
 noids and their symptoms will cover nearly all 
 the non-contagious, most common physical defects a 
 child-trainer will ordinarily be called on to discover. 
 
 Adenoids are really tonsils always normally pres- 
 ent and giving trouble only when they swell by over- 
 growth and hang down from the rear wall of the 
 passage between the throat and the nose, forming 
 lobes of pulpy, red, spongy masses like several rai- 
 sins on a stem, the whole about as large as the end 
 of an adult's finger. In that position they obstruct 
 breathing, compelling the sufferer to bring in his 
 supply of oxygen directly through the mouth instead 
 of by the radiator-like, dust-gathering passages of 
 the nostrils, where the air is warmed and cleansed. 
 [The first external signs of adenoids to be looked for 
 
J 
 
 42 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 by the teacher, though of course others may precede 
 this one, is the thickening of the bridge of the nose 
 without depression. The bony bridge simply widens 
 by swelling at each side and gradually joins the 
 cheek like a hill melting into a plain. The nostrils, 
 because of their disuse in breathing, do not develop, 
 remain narrow and small, lose their fine chiselings, 
 and take on an infantile, putty-like, unfinished ap- 
 pearance. If the whole nose is inspected sharply, it 
 appears as if the bridge and the nostrils did not 
 match, as if the bridge was several years older than 
 the nostrils. 
 
 Very quickly following this thickening of the 
 nose bridge comes the mouth breathing. It may be 
 harder to detect than one thinks. Children are 
 scolded so frequently for holding their mouths open 
 that some of them acquire the habit of snapping 
 their lips shut whenever they look at any one in 
 authority or a grown person looks their way. As a 
 result the mouth appears to be closed most of the 
 time and the weary-worn, labor-saving device, "It 
 is just a habit !" stops further parental endeavor and 
 throws the burden of the matter on the already 
 overburdened frame of the patient sufferer, a pa- 
 tient and a sufferer in more senses than one. The 
 sympathetic observer will secretly watch the child 
 when he — she, I was just going to say, because girls 
 more than boys suffer from all forms of suppres- 
 sion — when he is off guard. The best time is dur- 
 ing the child's sleep. Parents, however, are so loath 
 
PHYSICAL DEFECTS 43 
 
 to admit that anything is wrong with their own 
 children and usually feel so much of a repugnance, 
 not to say fear, of an operation that unfortunately 
 their witness fails where it is needed most. How- 
 ever, the matter can not be long in doubt with any- 
 thing like observation, and at any time the diagnosis 
 of a modern throat specialist will settle the matter. 
 He will use a small mirror and a light to look up 
 into the arch of the post-nasal cavity or explore it 
 with his finger. The first method the lay person is 
 almost always unable to use, and the second, for 
 reasons many and obvious, he is wholesomely ad- 
 vised not to try. 
 
 The open mouth of the adenoid case is not due at 
 first to a dropping of the lower jaw, but a shorten- 
 ing of the upper lip. The fashion plates of school 
 misses, or the stereotyped faces of feminine beau- 
 ties found everywhere to illustrate the traditional 
 fragile and clinging type of woman, offer the best 
 opportunties to study the ideal adenoid upper lip. 
 For some reason, possibly because of the ^'weaker 
 sex" theory, the world has forced to some extent 
 the adenoid face and almost wholly the adenoid up- 
 per lip upon the womanly woman, and the firm 
 normal upper lip upon her anti-type, the "strong" 
 woman. All such perversions of nature showered 
 upon us in daily arts of advertisements and illus- 
 trations tend to confuse our minds and obscure the 
 defects from which children suffer. Though the 
 upper lip is first affected, it is not long before the 
 
44 BACKWARD. CHILDREN 
 
 lower lip also suffers. It thickens, tends to roll out 
 and down, falling with the lower jaw. The lip 
 thus exposed to the air, and deteriorating with the 
 rest of the body, becomes chapped and cracks, often 
 being covered with seams which open and bleed 
 easily. Usually it takes a long time after the ade- 
 noids are removed for the lips to recover their nor- 
 mal shape and beauty. 
 
 Adenoids, enlarged tonsils and crooked teeth fol- 
 low one another almost with the fatality of cause 
 and effect. The connection is certain if the ade- 
 noids develop at or before the time of second teeth- 
 ing, at about seven years of age. This is due to the 
 peculiar effect adenoids have upon the shape of the 
 jaws. The upper jaw assumes a V-shaped appear- 
 ance, losing its curve and tending to a point in front. 
 Some writers believe it is a reversion to the animal 
 jaw it so closely resembles, others, that it is chiefly 
 due to the pressure of enlarged tonsils. Naturally 
 such a malformation crowds the teeth together and 
 out of line. The upper front incisors jamb together 
 and overlap ; then the canines, or eye teeth, come in 
 either inside or outside of their proper places and 
 form "tushes"; the other teeth adjust themselves 
 to their crowded quarters as best they can, and often 
 the jawbones are bent up or down so that either the 
 front teeth or the back will not come together at all. 
 
 Under such conditions chewing is agony at worst 
 and ill-paying labor at best. Bolting the food gives 
 immediate relief and future digestive retribution, 
 
PHYSICAL DEFECTS 45 
 
 neither, of which, with all the parental admonitions 
 and threats thrown in, will be efficacious until the 
 child's teeth are restored by a dentist to their proper 
 grinding positions. Unless some positive treatment 
 for straightening the teeth is given, the crooked 
 teeth and consequent deformed and ugly mouth will 
 accompany the sufferer through life. Crooked teeth 
 are not misfortunes of fate, but curable defects, and 
 ninety-five per cent, of them are due to adenoids. 
 
 Still the category of ills justly ascribed to ad- 
 enoids is not complete. They rob the body of its 
 most necessary nutrition, food and oxygen. How 
 the food is lost by insufficient chewing due to bad 
 teeth has been described above. Robbing of oxygen 
 seems at first sight a false charge. For is it not 
 easier to breathe through the mouth than through 
 the nose? Why then is not more instead of less air 
 taken in that way? First, because the organism 
 seeks to protect itself against the direct blast of in- 
 coming cold and dusty air striking directly upon the 
 irritated membrane of the adenoid throat. Sec- 
 ondly, because of the ease of intake and the reduc- 
 tion of the amount of air, the neck muscles and the 
 inter-rib muscles are not exercised ; the ribs sag, the 
 chest flattens, the shoulders droop forward, and the 
 shoulder-blades stand out with remarkable promi- 
 nence. This whole condition is furthered and height- 
 ened by the lassitude and weakness of the body due 
 to lack of oxygen, to faults of digestion and assimi- 
 lation, and to fatigue. The sallow complexion, the 
 
46 BACKWARD CHILDREN . 
 
 paleness about the lips, the dark furrows under the 
 eyes, and the drooping eyelids, with a weary expres- 
 sion of face and listlessness in every movement, ex- 
 cept when quick irritation overcomes the constant 
 disinclination to move, complete the picture of a 
 >vell advanced adenoid case. 
 
 Mental Signs of Adenoids, — The mental signs 
 of adenoids are almost as well marked as the physi- 
 cal ones just described. Irritability is the one first 
 noticed. It is almost impossible for the sufferer to 
 get up in the morning, dress, eat breakfast and get 
 started to school without a quarrel and a cry over 
 something. Ignorant parents attribute such out- 
 breaks to mere temper and frequently assist in the 
 destruction of the child's disposition and nervous 
 system by means of the ever-ready rod. There is 
 no mystical connection between adenoids and irrita- 
 bility. Let any one push a wad of cotton about the 
 size of the little finger end back through his nose so 
 it will lodge in the cavity and obstruct his breath- 
 ing. Of course, it will compel him to breathe 
 through his mouth. His mouth and throat will be- 
 come parched, his sleep will be uneasy and broken ; 
 all the neighboring membranes will become irritated, 
 and in the morning, just as worn-out nature com- 
 poses itself for some real sleep, he is called to an 
 arbitrary task and expected to arise immediately, 
 obediently, amiably and gladly, greeting all the 
 household with a happy ''Good morning!" Such 
 expectations are against nature. The same explana- 
 
PHYSICAL DEFECTS 47 
 
 tion applies to wandering and flighty attention, the 
 second marked symptom of adenoids. The constant 
 irritation grown so habitual to the child as to be 
 almost unnoticed by him under ordinary circum- 
 stances, comes up into clear consciousness as soon 
 as he tries to apply his mind to monotonous books. 
 Everybody has noticed the same phenomenon with 
 any slight irritant. Excitement drowns out a pain. 
 But who can study with a pair of tight new shoes 
 burning his feet? If adenoids are allowed to re- 
 main, other more general mental effects follow the 
 gradual decline of physical strength: a general 
 mental lassitude, inability to apply the mind, dull- 
 ness and such low mental power that adenoid cases 
 of advanced standing are often mistaken for imbe- 
 cility. It is in this very realm that the most strik- 
 ing cases o'f recovery from retardation are recorded. 
 Tests By Reading. — Miss F. finally had Joe 
 read for her. She gave him a book as easy as the 
 first reader and let him handle it in his own way. 
 To free him from embarrassment as much as possi- 
 ble she let him sit in his seat. He seized the book 
 with both hands, tightened up all the muscles of his 
 body, began in a high-pitched, falsetto key, with a 
 peculiar deadened tone in it which his teacher recog- 
 nized at once as the "adenoid voice." When he 
 came to a word that he did not quite know, Joe 
 screwed up his face, squinted his right eye and 
 swung his head around so that his left eye did all 
 the seeing. His pronunciation exhibited minor yet 
 
48 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 significant peculiarities. He constantly omitted the 
 "g" in words ending in **ing"; he slurred many 
 other sounds and often omitted entirely a final syl- 
 lable with perfect equanimity and entire irresponsi- 
 bility. Not once did the new teacher stop him, nor 
 advise him nor correct him. 
 
 Joe was elated ; so was the teacher. She was sure 
 now that he had adenoids, almost certain that his 
 tonsils w^ere enlarged, suspected that he was par- 
 tially deaf, and felt adequately convinced that he 
 was near-sighted and that his right eye was far more 
 affected than his left. The position of his book, 
 the twisting of his head, shutting one eye in difficult 
 places, the wrinkles above his eyes across his fore- 
 head, all these told her of eye strain and argued for 
 many other nervous stresses all over his body that 
 may have led to many, many of his unruly fits and 
 bad actions. His slurring of syllables without any 
 consciousness of it, together with the adenoids, ar- 
 gued for partial deafness, and these were seconded 
 by his peculiarly loud voice. None of these signs 
 alone would have meant much, but altogether their 
 cumulative evidence was almost irresistible. His 
 teacher was not surprised a moment later, when, 
 without even touching the boy, she faced him to a 
 window, asked him to open his mouth wide and 
 pronounce "a" short, as in "rat," while she looked 
 into his open mouth and saw the red masses on each 
 side of his throat. Now she was certain of the en- 
 larged tonsils, and also as sure of them as if she 
 
PHYSICAL DEFECTS 49 
 
 could see the enlarged adenoids hanging in the post- 
 nasal passage in such a way as to obstruct most ef- 
 fectually any breathing through the nasal passage 
 provided by nature to warm and strain the incoming 
 air. A few simple additional tests would make her 
 also morally certain of the eye and ear defects and 
 give her the assurance that she could refer this poor 
 boy to the medical inspector without any fear that 
 her tentative diagnosis would prove an exaggerated 
 and unsupported suspicion. 
 
 To give the eye tests she simply held up letters 
 printed in different sized types at certain distances 
 from the boy's eyes, distances that she had marked 
 off on the floor by making tests upon normal chil- 
 dren. She tried first one eye and then the other. 
 While her tests were not at all final or official they 
 were accurate enough to convince her that Joe 
 needed an oculist. The ear tests were equally sim- 
 ple. She stood Joe up against the wall with his 
 right ear to the wall, his finger in it and his eyes 
 shut, and then had him repeat words to her that 
 she whispered to him while she stood at specified 
 distances from him. These distances she knew by 
 former tests. Just to confirm her judgment and to 
 intefest this backward boy — who was receiving, by 
 the way, a great deal of real education from the 
 tests — she had him stand before her with his back 
 to her, close his eyes, and then listen for a watch 
 which she held concealed in one hand, while she 
 brought both her closed hands from a distance on 
 
so BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 each side of his head toward his ears. As soon as 
 he was sure he heard the watch he raised the hand 
 on the side that he heard it. As she suspected, he 
 was almost entirely deaf in one ear and his hearing 
 was much diminished in the other. It was a revela- 
 tion to Joe and a matter of keen interest to the other 
 children, though, of course, none of them knew all 
 the results or their entire significance. None of them 
 guessed, for instance, what the teacher knew was 
 true, that much of Joe's stubbornness, stupidity, tru- 
 ancy and pseudo-feeble-mindedness was already ex- 
 plained. Though he did look hopeless, though ad- 
 enoids choked his breathing passages, and tonsils 
 nearly filled his throat, though both had been instru- 
 mental in bringing on the earache and partial deaf- 
 ness, and had further warped his jaws out of shape; 
 though his teeth were decaying and tartarous; 
 though he was bereft of his vitality by this under- 
 nutrition and by lack of oxygen because of aden- 
 oids; though his eyes were poor, and altogether he 
 seemed a sorry object, still there was hope. Great 
 indeed was the faith that could see a future for this 
 boy, his mouth open, his teeth crooked and decay- 
 ing, his jaws malformed, his nose thickened at the 
 bridge and undeveloped at the nostrils, his eyes 
 heavy, his hearing impaired, colds and sore throats 
 his weekly lot, his body starving for air and food 
 and proper rest in sleep, his attention flighty, his 
 mind sluggish, his temper quick and easily irritated, 
 his disposition stubborn and rebellious, a child unfit 
 
PHYSICAL DEFECTS 51 
 
 in every respect for schooling or for work, for play 
 or companionship, a ready victim to many diseases 
 and susceptible to bronchitis, pneumonia, and tuber- 
 culosis, and yet all his troubles physical and mental, 
 with the exception of a few like his visual defects, 
 could be traced directly or indirectly to adenoids. 
 He, indeed, was an extreme case, but how many 
 other backward children are there that suffer little 
 and much from a few or many of the same physical 
 defects. 
 
 Joe's Treatment. — Miss F. knew that it was 
 useless to waste time giving Joe mental tests or try- 
 ing to proceed with his education while all the ave- 
 nues to his mind were blockaded effectually against 
 any admission of knowledge. She sent him to the 
 medical inspector of the school, who confirmed all 
 her tentative diagnoses, and referred the boy to spe- 
 cialists and clinics for treatment. Of course Joe's 
 parents were amazed at the condition of their boy. 
 They were plain people who had not found aden- 
 oids and enlarged tonsils in their spellers and read- 
 ers when they went to school and were inclined, 
 like most parents who are moved through fear and 
 prejudice, to charge all advice regarding surgical 
 operations to attempts at experimentation upon their 
 most precious son. But tact and coaxing by the 
 medical inspector, the special teacher and the school 
 nurse, finally won the day, and Joe's mother went 
 with him to the hospital for the throat operation. 
 It was a trying time for the poor woman and a posi- 
 
52 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 tive epoch in Joe's life. He went bravely enough, 
 with a mixture of weariness and fear and stoicism 
 that did not sit badly upon him. When at last he 
 was undressed and stretched upon the wheeled 
 couch and felt the cone for the ether slipped over 
 his mouth and nose, he almost rebelled, but made a 
 great effort — and knew nothing more for some min- 
 utes. The doctor opened his mouth, slipped a 
 curved knife back behind the' soft-palate and with 
 one sweep removed the adenoids forever. The ton- 
 sils followed next, both with a great show of blood, 
 and Joe came out of the operating room still asleep. 
 He revived in a few more minutes, and felt first of 
 all the new freedom of a clear breathing passage 
 and an unclogged throat. For a week or more his 
 throat was sore, of course, but that he endured with 
 great fortitude because of new-found pride in being 
 looked up to by other boys who had never been for- 
 tunate enough to have adenoids and tonsils and to 
 go into a real hospital for terrible operations! 
 Then there was the tenderness of his mother and his 
 brothers and sisters and the new grave solicitude 
 of his father, and above all the real addition to his 
 moral strength which had come from nobly going 
 through the ordeal and making that final, never-to- 
 be-forgotten decision to stand it all when the ether- 
 izing began. 
 
 The eye examinations were not at all bad. The 
 "drops" made it impossible for him to see things 
 near by, but they did not hurt. His new glasses 
 
PHYSICAL DEFECTS 53 
 
 were strange at first and he had one or two ac- 
 cidents with them in spite of the admonitions of 
 his mother and the family worry over the cost of 
 repairs. The ear trouble and the catarrh of the 
 nose and throat were the most stubborn and de- 
 manded the longest and most patient treatments. 
 But Joe and his mother, inspired by the confidence 
 of Miss F., kept up the work and became familiar 
 with clinics and specialists and inured to waiting in 
 anterooms where the afflicted of the world gather 
 daily. The dentists were Joe's worst enemies. At 
 their hands he suffered many and sundry tortures. 
 Somehow there was not the same glory in submit- 
 ting to the irritation of getting a tooth filled as there 
 was to going out into the dark unknown by ether, 
 and Joe's protestations were inversely proportion- 
 ate to the decrease in glory. But at last it was over ; 
 the hopeless teeth were drawn, the others were 
 filled, and a band, with little screws at the back, was 
 clamped tightly upon his upper teeth to bring them 
 slowly and as painlessly as possible back to their 
 normal shape. 
 
 It was March when Joe came to the special class, 
 and it was the latter part of May before his clinic 
 treatments were finished and he was released from 
 almost daily physical pain and permitted to continue 
 his treatments for ear and catarrh at home, with 
 occasional visits to the doctors. In the meantime 
 he had kept up a broken attendance at school, being 
 excused when necessary for his treatments. His 
 
54 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 lessons were irregular and his education but per- 
 functory during that time. Yet it was wonderful 
 to see how he was already learning. It seemed as 
 if many items of knowledge that had been so la- 
 boriously instilled into his mind and seemingly for- 
 ever submerged there came back again. He was 
 changed physically also. There was a new bright- 
 ness in his eye, a better color to his cheek, a firmer 
 position and finer carriage to his body, a better appe- 
 tite and more visible results from his food. His 
 mouth was still open and he was far from the boy 
 he should have been, for ills that gather through 
 years can not be dispelled in weeks. His new-found 
 strength of muscle and purpose was exercised 
 chiefly in the manual and physical work of the spe- 
 cial class, where he was not only acquiring skill, but 
 was also developing interest in both manual and 
 mental tasks by discovering hitherto unknown con- 
 nections between the things he learned in books and 
 the things he liked to do with his hands. Almost 
 before Joe knew it June had come and with it vaca- 
 tion, the great period of relief to him before, but 
 this year another momentous occasion in this year 
 of great experiences. 
 
 Joe's Constitutional Treatments. — Through 
 the never-failing kindness of Miss F., Joe's mother 
 was recommended to a society and Joe was sent to 
 the country for the summer in care of a fresh air 
 organization. How he spent that summer it would 
 take volumes to tell if everything he did and learned 
 
PHYSICAL DEFECTS 55 
 
 were put down. It was the first time in his life he 
 had ever been so long in the country. The farm 
 where he stayed was a real farm, with a barn, stable, 
 horses, cows, barnyard, fowls of all kinds, and two 
 puppies just at the playful age, with a pond near by 
 for the boys, who like himself were there for the 
 summer, to swim in; with plenty of good nourishing 
 country food to eat, without the constant temptation 
 to devour candies and ice-cream and to drink soda- 
 water. Indeed, the old burning in Joe's throat that, 
 combined with his under-nourished body, brought 
 on that awful and continual craving for freezing 
 mixtures, or cigarette narcotics, was gone, and in 
 its place came a regular, robust appetite that made 
 a slice of bread, golden-crowned with fresh country 
 butter, look like the most delicious treat that ever 
 made a boy's mouth water in expectation. Back of 
 all this happy vacation life was a system, but of 
 course Joe did not know it. He did not dream that 
 his treatment was constitutional and that the five 
 necessities of his daily life — food, air, sleep, water 
 and play — were all carefully regulated, albeit with 
 such masterly care that the regulative devices were 
 all out of sight. 
 
 In the fall when Joe came back to school he was 
 wonderfully changed. His schoolmates hardly 
 knew him, and even Miss P., who had hoped mar- 
 vels for him, was surprised. He was a healthy, 
 round-cheeked, brown-skinned young savage, as 
 happy and enthusiastic as a boy could be who was 
 
56 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 tasting that most exhilarating of all experiences, 
 the rapid return of a naturally good constitution to 
 health and strength after a long down-hill journey. 
 He was not yet perfect. The marks of his adenoids 
 were still upon him. His teeth, slowly returning to 
 normal position, were white and clean. Toothache 
 and earache both were things of the past. He had 
 not known a cold since spring airs came. His shoul- 
 ders were somewhat stooped, but his lips were 
 closed, and it was a positive delight to his teacher 
 to look at the strong mouth, with its curve return- 
 ing, taking the place of that former unsightly gap 
 in his face. His nose, too, was reshaping itself un- 
 der the exercise of breathing. He still wore his 
 glasses, and behind them his eyes glowed with new 
 interests and new meaning. His body showed the 
 greatest improvement. He had gained in weight 
 and in muscular vigor; his nervousness had almost 
 disappeared and in its place had come a poise that 
 spoke of self-control and energy ready and anxious 
 to take up and complete the tasks of a boy's life. 
 With it all his temper had changed. He was not 
 sullen, but willing; not stubborn, but docile; not stu- 
 pid, but eager to learn. 
 
 The remnants of his defects, especially his de- 
 creasing deafness and his eye defects, kept him for 
 a little time in the special class. There he rounded 
 out his deficiencies rapidly, learned quickly to spell 
 and to read and to do arithmetic sufficiently to re- 
 turn to his grade, entering the fourth grade at the 
 
PHYSICAL DEFECTS 57 
 
 end of the first half-year. His school progress from 
 that time on was very good. He not only kept up, 
 but made some advance, and though he finished the 
 eighth grade one year behind the usual age, he went 
 out into the world well equipped with a strong body 
 and a good mind, and since that time has done well 
 in a printing office, where his father secured him a 
 position. Without doubt he will rise to a self-sup- 
 porting and worthy man, and possibly he will be 
 heard from in the world. Miss F. still points to him 
 as one of her most hopeless appearing cases and one 
 of her most successful reclamations. Whenever 
 she gets discouraged with her special class she thinks 
 of Joe and takes heart again. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 MINDS IN STRAIGHT JACKETS 
 
 BACKWARD children do not present one type 
 of mind, but many types. They do not neces- 
 sarily think slowly, but sometimes think with spark- 
 ling rapidity. Their minds do not always develop 
 slowly, but sometimes leap from stage to stage with 
 wonderful strides. They are not always dull or 
 stupid, but break out in unexpected flashes of wit. 
 They are genuises in some things, fools in others. 
 They are good and bad, cheerful and morose, 
 excitable and apathetic, a medley of emotions, a tur- 
 moil of thoughts, an anarchy of actions. Their 
 variety of types among the temporarily retarded 
 escapes analysis, breaks through hard and fast class- 
 ifications, defies rules and regulations, overturns me- 
 chanical systems of instruction, falsifies predictions 
 of their development, humiliates prophets, and, best 
 of all, banishes hopelessness regarding the outcome 
 of any one of their lives. A few examples are given 
 in this chapter to illustrate the attitude to be taken 
 toward some of the commoner types. Because back- 
 wardness usually means slowness, the first is the 
 story of a slow boy, an impatient teacher and an in- 
 
 58 
 
MINDS IN STRAIGHT JACKETS 59 
 
 terlocked course of study which demanded the same 
 toll from every child who traveled that way. 
 
 The Slow Pupil. — Karl was a boy in a country 
 school. He was slow in everything. He was lag- 
 ging in his movements, dragging in his speech, delib- 
 erate in his thought processes, and interminable in 
 acquiring new ideas. Yet his work was good when 
 It was completed. Given a problem to work out, 
 and left to himself, he would usually get it, and 
 when he got it it was almost always correct. In 
 arithmetic, therefore, he did not suffer so much. In 
 oral work like reading, spelling, parsing and analyz- 
 ing sentences in class, in reciting of every kind, he 
 was wearisome. Examinations were written, so 
 though he hardly ever finished on time he was just 
 able to get through, because what he answered was 
 about correct. Unfortunately for Karl he had a 
 teacher w^ho was a high-strung woman, who be- 
 lieved that good scholarship meant speed, and that 
 heaven and earth might pass away, but every jot and 
 tittle of the text-book must be fulfilled in the allotted 
 time. Furthermore, he was unfortunate in having 
 this same teacher for practically his entire school 
 life. She did not spare him. She let him know, 
 and the whole school and the whole neighborhood 
 know, that Karl was a stupid, dull-witted fellow, 
 with no brains and no prospect of ever acquiring 
 any. The frequency with which she said it, the way 
 she said it, and the conviction that she produced in 
 the minds of other pupils about it would have ut- 
 
60 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 terly discouraged any other person differently con- 
 stituted. But Karl, slow as the proverbial tortoise, 
 also had the fine qualities of that humble animal. 
 He held on, plodded through the grades with imper- 
 turbable patience, just squeezing through examina- 
 tions, accompanied by the pity of his schoolmates, 
 the disappointment of his parents and the increas- 
 ing exasperation of his teacher, and finally left 
 school followed by a sigh of relief in lieu of the 
 usual congratulations. 
 
 He entered a machine shop in a neighboring city, 
 and started at the same time to learn mechanical 
 drawing at night. He was still slow, but it was in 
 a business where accuracy counted for more than 
 careless speed, where a mistake might cost thou- 
 sands of dollars, and where absolute reliability, 
 coupled with unconquerable tenacity, was sure to 
 overcome obstacles and make success. Karl had the 
 qualities. In both shop work and mechanical draw- 
 ing he forged surely ahead. His drawing plates 
 were models of neatness and exactness. His initial 
 impetus to self-confidence came in his winning the 
 medal in the night school class for the best drawing 
 of the season. He learned his trade, gradually grav- 
 itated to the tool room where the dies for stamping 
 metal were made, distinguished himself for his fine 
 workmanship there, applied his mind to improving 
 the methods of making dies and to shortening me- 
 chanical processes by means of them, and at thirty- 
 five was at the head of that branch of work in his 
 
MINDS IN STRAIGHT JACKETS 61 
 
 city, already an inventor of no mean fame, and giv- 
 ing promise of a greater future, the most creditable 
 pupil his impatient teacher ever turned out of her 
 little country school. 
 
 With the same quiet persistence he had kept up 
 other intellectual activities, had become a splendid 
 mathematician, a deep reader in the literature of 
 his profession and its allied branches, and alto- 
 gether one of the best versed, soundest cultured men 
 with whom you might wish to spend a day. He 
 had a mind strong, capable, varied in powers, but 
 always slow moving. For such a slow but thorough 
 mind, not quantity of practise counts, but practise 
 taken as leisurely as it desires. Where other chil- 
 dren might need to work ten problems to inculcate 
 exactness, Karl needed to work but one: Had his 
 teacher been able to diagnose his case and to fit 
 her teachings to him, Karl would have made in 
 actual acquisition of knowledge in a given time, 
 as much progress as the average pupil and that 
 knowledge would have remained with him forever. 
 
 The Concrete Mind. — The slow boy is not the 
 only one whom the course of study and the method 
 of teaching in the public school do not fit. Obser- 
 vations in many far-removed places indicate that 
 there is a type of mind which fails ignominiously 
 to grasp knowledge when presented in the abstract 
 or by means of symbols, but which readily seizes 
 upon the concrete and revels in things which the 
 eye sees and the hands handle. Such children are 
 
62 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 often considered to be predestined to manual labor, 
 tillers of the soil by right of birth, hewers of wood 
 and drawers of water, shut out of the upper realms 
 where the intellectuals who read, write and reckon, 
 dwell. Shut out, they often are, but not so much 
 by Providence as by a steel-riveted school-system 
 called ^'common" or universal. Here is such a case 
 from Miss Elizabeth FarreFs report from New 
 York City. Note the cry of such a mind for its 
 opportunity to secure an education. 
 
 This boy, fourteen years old, can not spell words 
 like "girl," does not know how much are three times 
 twelve ; and reads second readers only. Yet his gen- 
 eral information is fair; his attention and memory 
 are good ; and at night he reads his lessons over and 
 over for fear of his father and teachers who ''think 
 he is lazy and unwilling to learn." While fourteen 
 winters and summers have built up this boy's body 
 to its height and weight, his intellect is equal to 
 that of a seven-year-old child. 
 
 But when he is freed from purely intellectual 
 matters and turns to manual work the miracle is 
 wrought. All his physical training is good, at 
 school the teachers have him doing all sorts of 
 work. He is especially interested in electrical ap- 
 paratus and keeps all the electrical bells in repair 
 at home. One summer he wanted a bicycle and 
 wanted it as only a boy can want a thing. He 
 managed to unearth two old bicycles and proposed 
 to make one good one out of them. In spite of as- 
 
MINDS IN STRAIGHT JACKETS 63 
 
 surances from wiser heads that it could not be done, 
 he went right ahead, took apart, made over, re-ar- 
 ranged, planned and perspired until he had accom- 
 plished his purpose and rode his contraption about 
 the country roads as happy as a millionaire in a 
 touring car. 
 
 His disposition is good, but with home, school 
 and society against him, it is growing worse. 
 Under the criticism he receives he is gradually sink- 
 ing. He does not play naturally, he tends to spend 
 his time alone; his shyness, timidity, feeling of 
 inadequacy and doubt are slowly building around 
 him the prison walls of failure within which he 
 will be confined a morose and solitary soul. Such 
 would be the inevitable outcome under ordinary 
 circumstances; but it will not be the end here, be- 
 cause there is a special class and a teacher who 
 understands this cry of his: "I don't know why 
 I can't get on at school ; I can't spell nor write nor 
 do arithmetic. I can do any sort of hand- work; 
 I seem to understand that by nature, but I can't 
 carry anything in my mind. I mean I can't see a 
 thing in the shop window and go home and make 
 any part of the toy or machine by having just seen 
 it in the shop. I want to be an electrician, but 
 realize I must know more about books if I am to 
 do any good work in life. If I could get an edu- 
 cation through my hands it would be easy." 
 
 The Salvation of Sam. — Out in the mountains 
 of western Pennsylvania, a great hulking boy, 
 
64 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 large for his age of sixteen, was in his first year of 
 high school. He was strong and healthy, with a 
 frank open face, and eyes that looked the simplicity 
 of the mind back of them. There was nothing 
 unusual in his personal appearance. He would 
 have been taken by any casual onlooker for a typical 
 high-school boy with evident predilection for ath- 
 letics. The more thoughtful observer would have 
 wondered why he was sixteen and just entering 
 high school. The fact was that he was a retarded 
 boy, presenting a not very unusual type of mind 
 which could deal efficiently and sometimes even 
 originally with concrete things, but groped almost 
 hopelessly in semi-darkness among the abstractions 
 of any pure science or symbolic knowledge. 
 
 His schooling in the grades had been a long- 
 drawn struggle, always verging on failure. He 
 had fallen behind his schoolmates until he was two 
 years retarded. His teachers had lost heart and 
 hope and had promoted him from grade to grade 
 on his age, on half what he should have known, 
 and in answer to his mother's importunate prayers. 
 He could not handle arithmetical relations with 
 any facility, though he could count money readily, 
 could make change and could see far into prob- 
 lems of mensuration when illustrated with any kind 
 of models. He read but poorly, had no taste for 
 literature, spelled atrociously, learned his geography 
 from the maps and his hygiene from the charts, 
 remembered his history from what his mother read 
 
MINDS IN STRAIGHT JACKETS 65 
 
 him at home and from the pictures, and so blun- 
 dered along. In grammar he could not comprehend 
 the sense or necessity for saying 'T' in some places 
 and "me'' in others, and mixed "done'' and "did" 
 hopelessly. In fact, he was not much of a talker, 
 and when he did say anything, he used the simple^ 
 and incorrect language of his home and his school 
 companions. His handwriting was unformed and 
 boyish and, when he wrote an original composition, 
 he showed a remarkable dearth of ideas and sim- 
 plicity of inner life in thought and feeling. In 
 short, at sixteen years of age, in all book knowledge, 
 Sam was a boy of eleven or twelve years with little 
 hope of going far beyond that. 
 
 His character and conduct were all that could 
 be desired. He was good natured, with a slow 
 easy disposition, rather shy, and avoided company 
 instead of seeking it. In the schoolroom he seemed 
 to try in a dull slave-minded way to get his lessons, 
 and on the playground he looked on while others 
 played oftener than he himself played. After 
 school, and during vacation, he spent much time 
 out-of-doors. He waded the mountain streams, 
 tramped the woods, knew the beasts and birds, 
 which he studied with curiosity, but without system, 
 but never hunted or killed, though he came to know 
 intuitively their songs, cries, nesting times and hid- 
 ing-places. 
 
 At home he was the same good-natured fellow, 
 doing his few chores and taking his rebukes for 
 
66 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 his poor scholarship from his ambitious mother 
 and more phlegmatic father with a wondering pa- 
 tience and virtuous humility. His home was the 
 usual one belonging to a foreman in a small boiler 
 shop. His father had never learned much in school, 
 had left before he completed the grades and had 
 slowly risen to his present position by diligent work 
 and knowledge of his trade gained wholly by in- 
 tuition and rule-of-thumb practise. 
 
 Sam's mother was the head of the family. It 
 had long been her ambition to make something 
 more of her only child than his father ever prom- 
 ised to be. Like all good mothers she thought the 
 only road to glory lay through the well-ordered 
 demesne of public schools. So far she had been 
 little encouraged by Sam's progress, but her un- 
 faltering ambition had kept him in the grades and 
 had finally started him in high school, two years 
 behind the usual age, generally retarded, and espe- 
 cially lacking in power to comprehend book knowl- 
 edge. 
 
 There his reception was anything but cordial. 
 Living as he did in a small town, the high-school 
 teachers knew him by reputation, and were 
 acquainted, too, with the pertinacity of Sam's 
 mother, who was determined not to let him fail nor 
 to remove him from school until he had secured the 
 coveted high-school diploma. Since Sam was in 
 nowise prepared for the ordinary work of the sec- 
 ondary school, since Latin, or any other language 
 
MINDS IN STRAIGHT JACKETS 67 
 
 was wholly out of the question, since general re- 
 tardation made the subject of English, or litera- 
 ture, or pure mathematics, almost hopeless tasks, 
 they looked on the necessity of teaching him with 
 anything but enthusiasm. 
 
 Fortunately for Sam, he and manual training 
 entered the high school together. He had handled 
 tools more or less at home. Very likely he would 
 have done more of such work had his father's oc- 
 cupation been one that lent itself easily to home 
 practise, or one that necessitated a work-bench and 
 chest of tools in the cellar. But his work was con- 
 fined to the shop, and by his wife's command he 
 left his menial tasks behind him when he came 
 home. Hence Sam's real introduction to tools and 
 hand-work, carpenter's benches, lathes, anvils, 
 forges, and all the practicalities of the new educa- 
 tion came in the high school. It w^as a veritable 
 entrance upon a new life. For him, things seen, 
 things palpable and tangible which the hands handle 
 and the muscles strained over comprised the eternal 
 verities of existence and spoke inspiring words to 
 his innermost soul. School, heretofore a word of 
 stagnant meaning and a place of dead monotony, 
 became gradually a center of vivacious interest and 
 vital powers. 
 
 He took up the course in manual training. That 
 relieved him from the abstract studies like lan- 
 guages. He responded readily to the mechanical 
 work, loved the forge, the machine shop, and the 
 
68 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 work-bench. His interest did not cease with the 
 school hours, but he carried his zeal for his work 
 into his home, and, in spite of the half-hearted op- 
 position of his mother, and with the ready acqui- 
 escence of his father, he set about arranging a 
 workshop in the cellar, and gradually accumulated 
 a set of tools. Inspired partly by his father's trade, 
 and partly by his innate desire to make something 
 that moved, he spent his evenings for many months 
 building and assembling a small steam-engine. The 
 parts of it came from many places and by devious 
 routes to their ultimate destination. The machine 
 was fearfully and wonderfully made. It was un- 
 wieldy and ill proportioned, but when it was fin- 
 ished, the oil lamp lighted underneath the boiler 
 made from a cut-down kitchen range water tank, 
 the steam finally turned on, and with sundry wheez- 
 ings and sputter ings, the wabbly flywheel of the 
 engine started, Sam heaved one great sigh of relief, 
 and for almost the first time in his life, drank in 
 draft on draft from the full cup of success. He 
 had made something and it would go. He had 
 conceived an idea, imperfectly, vaguely, dimly at 
 first, but it had unfolded as he advanced with his 
 work, and piece by piece it had grown until what 
 at first seemed to him but an impossible dream of 
 the night, now stood there a concrete and animated 
 reality. How much that poor accomplishment 
 meant to that groping soul, how it gave him the 
 sense of power to grip his heretofore flitting ideas, 
 
MINDS IN STRAIGHT JACKETS 69 
 
 how, for the first time in his conscious Hfe, ideas 
 themselves became sources of great possible achieve- 
 ments, nobody will ever know. It must all be 
 guessed by what accompanied and followed that 
 steam-engine building. 
 
 In the meantime, his schooling had gone on. 
 His manual work improved in its quality. It was 
 not better than that of the best students, for Sam 
 was never a brilliant pupil in anything, but it was 
 as good as the best, and wonderfully good in com- 
 parison to his book studies. It made his teachers 
 more lenient with him in other things. It brought 
 the feeling of ability and acquainted him with the 
 inspiration of success, and that again served to 
 spur him on to harder work in other directions. 
 Then, too, it offered him living points of contact 
 with other studies, and in this respect, more than 
 any other study, mechanical drawing served him 
 best. It stood for him at the center of the intricate 
 web of knowledge, from which in one direction his 
 mind went out readily to his beloved mechanical 
 operations, and in the other, felt its way with in- 
 creasing certainty through the dawning twilight of 
 abstract knowledge. The kernel of the matter was 
 contained in the process of forming and elaborating 
 an idea, then rendering that idea visible on paper, 
 and then, by those paper directions, transforming 
 it into a palpable, tangible thing of beauty and joy 
 forever. It was just the process needed by a mind 
 like Sam's, and just that process which his primary 
 
70 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 school never offered, and which his mother, in her 
 uninformed zeal for "education," had opposed at 
 home. 
 
 New terms came with these studies and his vo- 
 cabulary grew apace. The necessity for exact 
 legends on drawings compelled him to spell ac- 
 curately. His handwriting was always fair and his 
 lettering was especially good. Free-hand drawing 
 came to him rapidly and easily. He began to search 
 mechanical journals for ideas and that helped his 
 reading, but it must be confessed that Sam never 
 did take to literature and the school methods never 
 helped him much there. He grew to see the use of 
 mathematics. Fundamentals like multiplication 
 tables became usable and time-saving devices and 
 accordingly of increased value and interest. Plane 
 and solid geometry acquired meanings beyond the 
 confusing patterns of purely imaginary lines and 
 surfaces. On the whole, he pursued his course 
 steadily, gaining in all his studies, and developing 
 in his mentality. No special methods were used to 
 teach him in his classes. Possibly the rapid increase 
 in mental power accompanying and following 
 pubescence, corrected a disparity between his previ- 
 ous physical and mental development, and gave him 
 the necessary power to seize upon his manual train- 
 ing and to see through the concrete to the abstract. 
 At any rate, he did grow. 
 
 His great awakening dated from the steam- 
 engine. That was a home affair. His great school 
 
MINDS IN STRAIGHT JACKETS 71 
 
 victory came when one day toward the end of his 
 three years' course, his teacher announced that a 
 chair was to be buih for an educational exhibit in 
 the state capitol. The crowning piece of work was 
 to be the back, the honor of carving which was to 
 go to the student offering the best original design. 
 Sam went into the competition with a fearful 
 fluttering heart. He worked nights, feeling his 
 way into the invisible and unknown for his design. 
 He faltered more than once, but the designing of 
 the old steam-engine came back to him as he toiled, 
 and the lessons he learned with it carried him 
 through this infinitely larger task. Probably no 
 other boy in that class took the matter so to heart; 
 certainly no other one toiled so hard. Possibly it 
 was as much the marks of infinite pains as orig- 
 inality of design that made the judges award Sam 
 the privilege of making the piece of honor. The 
 report came to him with much of the old thrill ex- 
 perienced when his crazy engine started, but ac- 
 companied with a humility and self-control not then 
 known. The carving was yet to be done, but it was 
 carried on with all the painstaking care of an artist 
 engaged upon an altar piece, and when it was fin- 
 ished, it was a credit to the school. Some months 
 later Sam stood in the capitol, saw with his own 
 eyes the very work of his hands, looking strange 
 and yet familiar as it stood on its platform, and 
 experienced the rare pleasure-pain of hearing a 
 work praised of which he knew the defects as only 
 
\^' 
 
 n BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 the man who wrought the work could possibly know 
 them. 
 
 He was graduated with his class. He did not 
 win any honors. He was not on the commence- 
 ment program, but he probably learned more in four 
 years than any other student in the class. His 
 mother was as happy as any woman there that night. 
 Then Sam went to work in the drafting room of 
 the shop in which his father worked. 
 
 He worked hard and was advanced rapidly. 
 To-day he is a designer of machinery in a large 
 manufactory, holding a responsible position and 
 sure of advancement. He is devoted to his work, 
 faithful, enthusiastic, untiring, inventive, still a 
 little uncertain of his grammar, not talkative nor 
 given much to society, but he is a strong man in his 
 profession and may some day reach the top. 
 
 When one stops and thinks what he might have 
 been had he been continuously forced to grapple 
 with the abstract problems of the ordinary high- 
 school course based upon literature, languages, pure 
 mathematics ^nd pure sciences, until he either failed 
 ignominiously or had rebelled against further 
 schooling and gone out into the world untrained in 
 anything, and fit only for the least skilled labor, 
 without a sense of success, and with the habit of 
 failure, then the real magnitude of his development 
 can be measured. 
 
 Backward Because Not Interested In Lessons. 
 — Few children in the world wholly lack interest. 
 
MINDS IN STRAIGHT JACKETS 73 
 
 They are always interested in a few things and 
 usually interested in many things. In fact, their 
 fault lies in the large number and the lightning-like 
 changes of their interests rather than in the fewness 
 of them. Hence, we frequently blame them because 
 their attention, unlike that of grown people, is not 
 subdued to a durable and lasting concentration on 
 one or two subjects, and modified by experience to 
 a mildness that does not interfere with good judg- 
 ment. Sometimes, however, a child does display 
 an attention similar to that of a specialist. In that 
 case the child gets no credit for the display, but 
 immediately becomes the object of most solicitous 
 attention and urgent treatment. Especially is this 
 true where the interest is wholly consumed on mat- 
 ters not pertaining to lessons, or to those activi- 
 ties common to other children, or to society. As 
 a result of the child's narrow interest, he will attend 
 to only a few activities and neglect others. Re- 
 tardation in the larger affairs of life and in school 
 is the inevitable result. This may be much or little 
 depending upon the degree of attention remaining 
 for those things we call lessons. In some cases the 
 lack of attention appears to be absolutely patholog- 
 ical. All such instances, however, must not be taken 
 to indicate hopeless mental retardation for life, as 
 I shall try to show in the following example. 
 
 Katie, let us call her, was a little girl who spent 
 the first nine years of her life without sisters or 
 brothers, or playmates, When other girls of her 
 
^J 
 
 74 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 age were in school in the third or fourth grades, 
 she was at home in a room, sitting all day alone 
 talking to herself in a very limited vocabulary, play- 
 ing with the ragged dolls of her own simple manu- 
 facture, eating rudely and crudely her meals by 
 herself, since her lack of manners forbade her 
 eating with grown people, speaking to others almost 
 never, and answering when spoken to only in mono- 
 syllables, signs, or meaningless grunts. She needed 
 constant attention; she could not be permitted to 
 go much out-of-doors; she could not play at all 
 with other children. In short, all who knew her 
 thought her to be an idiot, or an imbecile at best, 
 without much mind and without hope of ever arriv- 
 ing at any but the simplest lessons of life. Such 
 was Katie at nine years of age. 
 
 Then her parents heard of some children similar 
 to her who had been wonderfully helped by special 
 training and she was taken to a clinic. There the 
 psychologist examined her carefully and found 
 nothing in her family history or her own life to 
 substantiate genuine feeble-mindedness. Diphtheria 
 in her early childhood had caused some retardation 
 of her growth and activities, and this, combined 
 with her subsequent loneliness and neglect, had 
 prevented her mind from expanding as it should 
 have done. Her physical condition was fair; she 
 had no special defects of the senses; she ate, slept, 
 played in her own way. But she did not pay at- 
 tention to lessons, people, or things; she seemed to 
 
MINDS IN STRAIGHT JACKETS 75 
 
 have no interest; there appeared no way to arouse 
 her dormant faculties to any realization of the daily 
 events about her ; she lacked the curiosity, the desire 
 for novelty, and the enthusiasm of normal children. 
 While not positively bad or unruly in any way 
 except one, she was immune to the effects of all 
 the usual punishments and rewards to arouse her 
 to an interest in duties and studies usual to the aver- 
 age child. Her parents had tried in their way but 
 had failed. The father was a busy man, away from 
 home much of the time, and the mother was a frail 
 delicate woman who did not possess the health or 
 the energy to do what was necessary to train so 
 strange a child. Katie had been left largely in the 
 hands of nurses in her babyhood and largely to 
 herself in her childhood. Much of this neglect was 
 also due to her terrible temper. If any attempt was 
 made to force her to some task or to prevent her 
 from doing the few simple things she liked to do, 
 she first paid no attention, then grew sullen, then 
 broke out into a paroxysm of anger, ending by 
 crying, screaming, scratching, kicking and biting. 
 Nothing would stop the attack except letting her 
 alone, and that her mother and nurse had learned 
 to do. Under these conditions, lacking, as she did, 
 those springs within herself which force normal 
 children to explore the world in which they find 
 themselves, this child had lived a strange isolated 
 existence, shut up in the fancies of her own mind, 
 knowing little and caring less for the great world 
 
76 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 of interests that fills the lives of others. To the 
 innumerable marvels of this world she was insen- 
 sible. She was psychically blind, deaf, dumb, almost 
 without human emotions, desires, thoughts or vo- 
 litions. 
 
 On the advice of the specialist a teacher was 
 secured. This woman came to live in the home. 
 She began with a quiet study of her strange charge. 
 / She found that Katie, though almost absolutely 
 V destitute of interests, did have a few. While most 
 of the time during the day she sat, wide-eyed and 
 wondering, with mind apparently blank, or mut- 
 tered words to herself, at other times, she repeated 
 over and over again rhythmic syllables without 
 meaning and with little tune, but in a sing-song 
 manner. That was a clue to the teacher. When 
 Katie "tra-la-la-ed," the teacher did the same and 
 they both fell into unison. Katie seemed to enjoy 
 it. She kept up the exercise longer than when she 
 did it alone. Next, the teacher noted if she began 
 it first and kept it up for a little while, Katie would 
 also begin the rhythm. 
 
 The next stage came when the little girl showed 
 by unmistakable signs that she was actually enjoy- 
 ing the fun ; and the next when she made it known 
 by pulling the teacher's hand, grunting that she 
 wanted her teacher to "sing" with her. It was easy 
 to fix a sign to this desire and Katie learned the 
 "ting" and learned to iterate it, with sundry other 
 signs, until the teacher would start the tune. From 
 
MINDS IN STRAIGHT JACKETS ^7 
 
 those simple beginnings came the whole after-train- 
 ing of the little girl who seemed at first so hopeless. 
 
 A piano was added to the equipment and the 
 teacher drummed upon it the rhythmic scale they 
 had been singing. At first the music fell upon 
 dead ears. Gradually, however, the strange girl 
 whose only interest was in rhythm, began to note 
 the sound and to fall into harmony with it until, 
 as in her previous accompaniment of her teacher's 
 voice, she likewise learned to follow the piano. 
 That was a great event and the teacher's joy in it 
 was faintly shared by the groping mind beginning 
 to taste for the first time the pleasure of attainment. 
 From notes and snatches of melody, more or less 
 disconnected, they went on to little songs. Words 
 were added, albeit slowly and laboriously, until 
 Katie's monotonous life became comparatively rich 
 and variegated in its new activities. 
 
 Along with the singing and music Katie learned 
 to beat time; first with her hands and then with 
 her feet. Very soon, for she began to show a 
 genius for such things, she proceeded to dancing; 
 and with that came a whole flood of health-giving 
 and developing exercises. Then her teacher ven- 
 tured to take her to a theater where dancing occu- 
 pied a large part in the performance. In the life 
 of this little hermit that day was a pilgrimage to 
 a promised land. She came home burning with a 
 new ambition. She was wild to imitate what she 
 had seen. She practised her dancing with all her 
 
78 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 might and learned it rapidly. Theater-going be- 
 came a part of her education; its sights and sounds 
 were the stimulators of her endeavors and the re- 
 wards of her achievements; the stage was the goal 
 of her ambition. 
 
 One day she thought of the clothes those splendid 
 people on the stage wore. She wanted dresses like 
 them. Her wise teacher saw another opportunity 
 and proposed that they make the dresses themselves. 
 That introduced into the curriculum all the mys- 
 teries and discipline of sewing. How that pro- 
 ceeded, first painfully and laboriously, but finally 
 triumphantly, I must let the teacher who has taught 
 it imagine. When Katie, arrayed in one of her 
 own creations, preened herself before the mirror, 
 which had been brought into her room, and then 
 pirouetted across the room like the great ladies of 
 the stage world, she did it with all the abandon of 
 a normal child dressed in her mother's skirts. 
 
 From dancing and costuming, it was only a step 
 to acting, to repeating dialogues, at first elementary, 
 incoherent and sketchy; from dialogues to recita- 
 tions, committed to memory with rapidly increasing 
 power under the stimulation of great and enthusi- 
 astic interest. Under such tuition, Katie's mind 
 grew like a long-delayed plant taken from the cellar 
 and set in the sun. Her power of concentration 
 grew daily and her memory with it ; her vocabulary 
 multiplied itself; her increasing powers of acquisi- 
 tion naturally led her on to continually more am- 
 
MINDS IN STRAIGHT JACKETS 79 
 
 bitious tasks, and keen enjoyment of her new-found 
 varieties of self-expression spurred her to continu- 
 ous effort. The balance maintained between the 
 exercise contained in dancing and sewing and the 
 mental activity found in memorizing and reciting, 
 saved her from any untoward effects which she 
 might have suffered from a too rapid mental 
 growth. 
 
 Her teacher had wisely left her moral training 
 in the background. Her temper had been the chief 
 obstacle to any education that her mother might 
 have given her. Coercion of any kind, as I have 
 already said, had always thrown her into tantrums, 
 which ended in complete collapses for her mother 
 and nervous spasms for herself. Though the fre- 
 quency of such outbreaks had continually dimin- 
 ished with the multiplication of her interests, they 
 still remained, and on occasions, Katie showed with 
 due fierceness her old-time paroxysms. She soon 
 found, however, that her steady-nerved teacher did 
 not collapse and give up. She was told also that 
 whenever she gave way to such tempers she would 
 not be taken to the beloved theater, and found that 
 when such an edict went forth, it was irrevocable. 
 Though she screamed, stamped, danced and threw 
 herself on the floor and kicked, it was energy 
 wasted, and the little lady gradually learned the 
 great moral lesson of obedience. On the other 
 hand, she found that docility and diligent applica- 
 tion to lessons and tasks always met with their de- 
 
80 . BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 served rewards. Therefore she soon fell into doing 
 Avhat was told her and not doing what was for- 
 bidden her. 
 
 To this training was added the stimulation of 
 great examples. She worshiped the heroines and 
 heroes of the stage. When she was arrayed in her 
 home-made finery, her lively imagination and power 
 of mimicry transformed her in her own mind into 
 something very closely akin, if not identical, with 
 these demigods. Of course, she expected some day 
 to become one of them really and truly. "If that 
 is so," said her teacher, "then you must be like 
 them all the time. You must be patient, courteous, 
 kind, noble and queenly, just as those people are." 
 And Katie tried with all her might. 
 
 From love of music she came to playing music. 
 At first she played by ear. Then she undertook 
 regular music lessons and learned a new meaning 
 and extracted an unlimited pleasure from the pe- 
 culiar black-knobbed signs on the music sheets. It 
 was not very long before she mastered the simplest 
 music. Then her attention reached out to the other 
 symbols in black that ran between the notes and 
 from which her teacher taught her the words of 
 songs. Could she learn those, too? Certainly. 
 And so reading began and went on rapidly. Then 
 the reading of simple plays followed, and almost 
 before Katie knew it she was ushered into another 
 world of great characters in fiction. 
 
 AH this time, the other activities of her life were 
 
MINDS IN STRAIGHT JACKETS 81 
 
 cared for. Her exercises grew out of her dancing. 
 Once the pleasure of movement was tasted, it could 
 1 not be confined to one variety. The usual chil- 
 dren's exercises — jumping the rope, running, 
 swinging clubs and dumb-bells — came into play. 
 Health and strength increased aboundingly. Games 
 followed ; then playmates came in and took part and 
 along with them came all the world of self-control 
 and unselfishness and the awakening of friendship 
 and love. Sewing and the piano practise gave first 
 manual lessons. They were continued in dressing, 
 washing, eating and all the amenities of polite life, 
 all of them inspired by the ambition to become like 
 the personages of the stage or the novel. 
 
 From musical notes and letters in song and 
 drama, Katie passed to other studies, and mastered 
 them fairly well for one so long retarded. The 
 weary steps she took in a few years, the hours of 
 labor, the lapses she suffered in intellectual and 
 moral training, the patience required by her teacher, 
 I shall pass over. They were there and they were 
 discouraging enough. In all of them the firm and 
 skilful trainer supplied the will that poor Katie 
 lacked and without which her life would in all 
 probability have continued enclosed to the end in 
 the psychic prison in which it began. In about three 
 years the little girl who at nine was counted an 
 imbecile had developed so marvelously that she 
 could take her part in any company of twelve-year- 
 old children, and could comport herself with the 
 
82 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 manners of a proper child in any society. She was 
 an inveterate and earnest reader, possessed a com- 
 paratively rich and varied command of language 
 and an expressed ambition "to add at least one new 
 word to her vocabulary every day." 
 
 Katie's case is interesting from many points of 
 view. It is such an extreme one that teachers never 
 expect to see one like it in school, and parents feel 
 it to be utterly unthinkable to have one like it in 
 their home. Yet at bottom, Katie's difficulty might 
 be exemplified in milder form in numberless in- 
 stances. Notice, she was not mentally abnormal. 
 She was not dull, nor stupid, nor slow. She was 
 not a "born criminal," nor a moral imbecile, nor 
 a degenerate fallen from higher moral planes. She 
 had no bad family history, nor any diseases in her 
 own lifetime which left indelible marks. Katie was 
 merely the victim of extreme bad management. The 
 core of all her later troubles lay in her lack of 
 those varied interests which compel ordinary chil- 
 dren to educate themselves. All her evils developed 
 when unskilled adults, without a study of her con- 
 dition, undertook to force her into the usual molds 
 of training. She was made of stubborn metal, 
 tough, fine-grained, high-tempered, and the molds 
 broke. Then came a seer who perceived the germ 
 of her mental life, treated Katie as if she was a 
 living organism and a human being, fitted instruc- 
 tion to pupil, saved a soul from mental torture and 
 formed a noble woman out of a potential maniac. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 BAD AND BACKWARD 
 
 BACKWARDNESS and badness are sometimes 
 related as cause to effect. A boy is back- 
 ward because he is bad. This happens in school 
 where conduct counts so much for advancement 
 that sometimes amiable feeble-minded children are 
 promoted from grade to grade with praise for their 
 splendid behavior and for their evident sincere at- 
 tempts to study, while pupils really bright are held 
 back in their grades and counted mentally retarded 
 because they are unruly. No teacher, of course, 
 deliberately plans such anomalies of educational 
 practise. But for that very reason, because such 
 unintended results sometimes follow, we should 
 study the matter. The following case illustrates 
 some of the evils arising from treating bad bright 
 boys as if they were mentally retarded. 
 
 George was brought to the clinic by his mother 
 because his school said he was a backward boy. He 
 did not look it, nor did he in his appearance live 
 up to the stories told about him and the confessions 
 he later made. It was a curious confusion due to 
 opposite view-points, and a natural confusion of 
 
 83 
 
84 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 opinions that was presented by the teachers and 
 his mother. But first let us have a look at the boy. 
 
 He was about twelve years of age; well dressed, 
 clean, red-cheeked, slightly freckled through his 
 tanned skin. The tan argued that he was much out- 
 of-doors; for it is unusual, even in summer, for a 
 city boy to secure such a healthy coat of brown. 
 He was a manly-looking fellow, strong and well, 
 with broad shoulders, a quiet, somewhat suppressed 
 manner which spoke as much for self-control as it 
 did for discipline, as much for a hidden life as it 
 did training in manners. In his own history there 
 was not a sign of abnormality. Neither was there 
 an item in his family history that could be con- 
 strued as moral or mental deficiency. All this was 
 borne out also by his mother's general appearance 
 and by her evident character and ability. She was 
 a widow engaged in some easy and lucrative work 
 befitting her capacity, so that George suffered 
 neither the hardships nor the privations of an or- 
 phaned boy, except that his mother was forced to 
 be away from home during the day, and he lacked 
 the sympathetic understanding and the guidance of 
 a father when he needed them most. 
 
 The history of his schooling was altogether of 
 a different color. At six years of age George had 
 started to the regular public school in a large eastern 
 city. From the beginning he did well and for three 
 years gave absolutely no trouble, learning his lessons 
 like a worthy pupil, securing good grades and be- 
 
BAD AND BACKWARD 85 
 
 having like a little gentleman. Then for some un- 
 explained reason, in one of those educational re- 
 arrangements common to growing neighborhoods, 
 George found himself compelled to go to another 
 public school in quite another neighborhood. It 
 was not such a great distance from his home, but 
 it was in a neighborhood infinitely removed from 
 his in social conditions. From boys of his own 
 class he passed to boys of an altogether different 
 class: children from the slums, whites and blacks, 
 whose homes and no-account parents made them 
 what they were, objects of pity rather than objects 
 of censure, but little demons, nevertheless, potent 
 with influences and powers to make others like 
 themselves. 
 
 The new boy had his troubles from the first. 
 He was a stranger and therefore a suspicious char- 
 acter. After the first flush of antagonism because 
 of his strangeness had worn off his evident social 
 superiority, his good-breeding and his scholarship, 
 made him a natural enemy to the hoodlum element. 
 Like all strange boys in that school he had to fight 
 his way. That he could do with right good gusto. 
 George was no weakling; he was not a coward, nor 
 was he sickly, nor had he any squeamish ethical 
 ideas that unfitted him for the robustious world of 
 boys into which he had been thrown. His training 
 on the streets had not refined away any of his 
 natural Irish belligerency, nor imbued him with any 
 notions of passive resistance. Likewise he had a 
 
86 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 just estimate of his superior social position and 
 made no concealment of the fact that he considered 
 his removal from the other school unjust and his 
 association with these new companions a degrada- 
 tion. Naturally he had to fight for such ideals; 
 and fight he did with the necessary frequency and 
 the necessary vigor. As a result he both gained 
 and lost. He made himself a solid place in the boy- 
 world where he was respected and where he ruled 
 with a good-natured despotism. For it must be 
 said to his credit that he never picked a quarrel and 
 he never fought unless he thought he had to do so 
 for some principle, or for some end to be gained. 
 Of course, the tales of his fighting reached the 
 teachers. He was reprimanded and punished. He 
 went through all the formalities to which a boy is 
 subjected by a machine that attempts to force the 
 standards of civilized and cultured life upon a bar- 
 barian society. His teachers lectured him on the 
 ungentlemanliness of fighting with bad boys, ap- 
 pealed to his evident superior breeding, besought 
 him in his mother's name, scolded, kept him after 
 school, wrote notes to his mother, gave him marks 
 of demerit, cut down his grades, threatened to send 
 him to the school for incorrigibles, and finally, in 
 despair, themselves descended to his plane, and 
 seizing the rod of superior physical prowess pro- 
 ceeded with exactly the same tactics that George 
 found he had been compelled to pursue on the play- 
 
BAD AND BACKWARD 87 
 
 ground. Through it all, the teachers felt doubly 
 outraged because they believed that the boy was 
 bright and could settle down and study in peace 
 and quiet if he only would do it. However, his 
 study continued to suffer and his reputation for 
 pugnacity grew. It is an open question whether 
 George did not find more compensation from the 
 knowledge of supremacy in his own world than he 
 lost from the feeling of failure in the school-world. 
 He had entered the first stages of the real hoodlum. 
 His principal, at last worn out with attempts to 
 reform George, sent him to a school for the in- 
 corrigibles. There he was to stay until he worked 
 his way out by a system of credits whereby every 
 day's good conduct was rewarded with a ticket, 
 thirty of which released the young prisoner from 
 his ignominious incarceration. If his former school 
 was a school of pugnacity the second was infinitely 
 worse. Here the lowest boys of many neighbor- 
 hoods were corralled; pugnacity was concentrated; 
 truancy was incarnated and walked abroad in visible 
 heroes who would *'bag'' school in the face of cer- 
 tain death; burglars in embryo, pickpockets in the 
 tutelage, gamblers in reality, braggadocios in petty 
 criminality, heroes of juvenile courts and houses 
 of detention, stalked about like kings with their 
 followers, many of whom were feeble-minded and 
 all of whom were in that impressionable and sug- 
 gestible stage where daredevil misdemeanors lent 
 
88 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 to the perpetrator a glamour beside which the halo 
 of a saint flickered and went out like a candle in the 
 Valley of Death. 
 
 So at least it looked to George and the other 
 boys, according to his story to the clinic staff. For- 
 tunately George was too bright and too well-bred 
 to be caught with the tinsel of cheap viciousness 
 and the showy exhibition of vulgar vainglory. The 
 whole thing bored him. All he wanted was to be let 
 alone. That peace was impossible to be had ex- 
 cept by fighting for it. ^*Why didn't you work your 
 way out by merits?'' George was asked. "I did 
 try," he answered wearily, "but the other fellows 
 wouldn't leave me alone. Once I got twenty-nine 
 tickets and then I had to lick a fellow that got 
 fresh, and they took all my tickets away again." 
 
 It was hard for the clinic staff to believe that this 
 clean-cut chap, who ought by all odds to have been 
 a good scholar in a regular school, had been kept 
 in a place like that for causes like that for nearly 
 two years, but his mother corroborated the story 
 and later it was found to be true by the clinic social 
 worker. 
 
 The opinion of George's mother varied essen- 
 tially from the lurid reputation he had acquired at 
 school. She insisted that he was a good boy; that 
 he was gentlemanly in his conduct, obedient at 
 home, regular in his habits and diligent in his at- 
 tempts to get his lessons. When asked how he 
 spent his evenings, she affirmed that he usually spent 
 
BAD AND BACKWARD 89 
 
 them at home, but he went out sometimes, and once 
 a week with her permission, attended the moving- 
 picture show. All his troubles at school she blamed 
 on the principal, who, she averred, had taken a 
 violent dislike to her son, and had maliciously kept 
 him in a school for incorrigibles for a period be- 
 yond all justice or reason. It might be said in 
 passing that George did not entirely deserve this 
 angelic opinion of his mother and he admitted that 
 he frequently slipped out at night and got into the 
 moving-picture show by doing odd jobs for the 
 manager. I believe, too, he admitted to a recently 
 acquired taste for cigarettes. If he did not smoke 
 and swear he must have been born a saint. 
 
 Such was the situation. Undoubtedly George 
 was not retarded because of any mental deficiency. 
 His trouble was badness ; or, to be more correct and 
 specific, — fighting. From all appearances his fight- 
 ing was forced on him by circumstances. Like 
 primitive man, he knew no other mode of settling 
 his difficulties in the society where he had fallen 
 through no fault of his own. When this conclusion 
 was reached, friends laid the matter before the 
 superintendent of schools who cut some red tape 
 and speedily removed George to his old school 
 where he first started. There George settled down 
 again to study, left off fighting more than the usual 
 amount necessary to boys and conducive to order 
 in their world, and at last accounts was making up 
 lost ground. 
 
90 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 A Hopeless Case. — Admit it we must: some 
 children are born bad and they can not be cured 
 of their badness. This fact, unbelievable to some 
 people, and not discerned in individual cases by 
 others, has led and continues to lead to many com- 
 plications and much confusion regarding the moral 
 training of children. Theories are laid down by 
 traditions or by inventors, methods are elaborated 
 to fit them, and all comes to naught because the 
 child was not carefully studied and his true condi- 
 tion ascertained before any effort was made to cure 
 him. Some mental defect always accompanies true 
 moral imbecility. With the clinics for children well 
 organized, as they are to-day, guesswork is not nec- 
 essary. That it will be continued for some time to 
 come is a prophecy in line with all history. It 
 takes time for new knowledge to escape from the 
 confines of laboratories and to penetrate the prac- 
 tises of the crowd. The following illustration 
 shows many things; chief among them is the fact 
 that moral imbecility exists, that scientists can diag- 
 nose it, and that long and costly experimentation 
 brings the doubters to the same conclusion. 
 
 Rose was a girl about eleven years old when she 
 came to a clinic. She was a well- formed beautiful 
 child, with a face in which the hint of voluptuous- 
 ness was chastened into cherubic purity by the in- 
 nocence of childhood; with eyes that were full and 
 deep as the sky in June, and as untarnished as a 
 violet by the spring, with hair that fell in long 
 
BAD AND BACKWARD 91 
 
 chestnut curls, crisp and shimmering in its wealth 
 and health. Her teeth were large and white and 
 her charming smile unveiled them frankly with an 
 inviting trust and wholesome good-humor. Her 
 skin was clear and clean, a surprising fact consid- 
 ering that she came from a very poor family. She 
 suffered from adenoids, enlarged tonsils and a slight 
 defect of vision. She was brought to a clinic be- 
 cause she was expelled from school for general mis- 
 behavior. She spent her time while away from school 
 on the streets and in the alleys, playing and fighting, 
 stealing rides on wagons and fleeing the police. 
 Her home was poor in all its aspects, physical, 
 mental and moral. The less said about the family 
 the better. Sufficient will it be to remark that while 
 there were no marked mental or moral abnormalities 
 in her family, all of her immediate relatives were 
 worthless or nearly so. There were some positive 
 immoralities, but they were of the weak kind, ar- 
 guing for no character, not bad character. All of 
 her relatives, her mother, father, sisters and 
 brothers, might have been summarized in that most 
 significant southern phrase, "poor white trash." To 
 the clinicist, this was the most damaging testimony 
 in the whole case. 
 
 Rose exhibited a similar weakness in mental ca- 
 pacities. She was not distinctly feeble-minded, but 
 she was fearfully retarded for no reason except ir- 
 regular attendance at school and her inability to 
 learn when she was there. She was twelve years 
 
92 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 of age and in the second grade, and not up to that 
 grade in some studies. Poor heredity and bad en- 
 vironment had cooperated all through her life, and 
 before her life, to make her an exceedingly bad and 
 backward child, though fair and beautiful to look 
 upon. The impartial clinicist pronounced his verdict 
 according to the evidence, that it was useless to try 
 to keep her in society, and advised that she be sent 
 to some institution where she would be protected 
 from herself and prevented from doing the damage 
 to society that she w^ould not fail to do if she were 
 permitted to go at large. However, Rose had suc- 
 ceeded by her charms in touching the heart of a very 
 splendid young woman who gave herself without 
 stint to aiding unfortunate children anywhere and 
 everywhere. This good-hearted girl deemed the re- 
 sults of the examination too harsh and hard and 
 made up her mind to give Rose another chance. 
 
 She secured the child's admission to an institution 
 for children in the country where Rose for the 
 first time in her life entered a healthy and pleasant 
 home. As a result of the novelty, her conduct for 
 two weeks was reported as good in every way. Then 
 she went back to her own home again. Her conduct 
 soon reverted to its former evil state. Her play- 
 ground was the street, and her conduct so disorderly 
 that the police again interfered and threatened her 
 with arrest. Her friend secured her a boarding- 
 place in the country where her actions were soon 
 reported to be unbearable. Then she went to a chil- 
 
BAD AND BACKWARD 93 
 
 dren's hospital for an operation and treatment, 
 whence, as soon as her treatment was concluded, she 
 was removed by request because of her badness. 
 Her friend, still stanch in her efforts to save so beau- 
 tiful a child, took her into her own home. But it 
 was of no avail. Kindness went for naught; it was 
 answered by impertinence, disobedience, blasphemy 
 and vileness. Back she went to a caretaker in a 
 special home. For five weeks she stayed there and 
 then her friend took her for a vacation to the sea- 
 shore. There she was ill and fairly good for a 
 while, but not good enough to show any real de- 
 velopment in morality. Her benefactress was be- 
 coming discouraged and tried her next in a colony 
 for delinquent children. There she was disobedient, 
 quarrelsome, used improper and vile language and 
 exhibited a marked and vicious propensity for boys' 
 society. That was the last attempt to reform her. 
 The doors of a house of refuge in which there is 
 practically no hope closed upon her and she is there 
 now. Six institutions, five doctors and a host of 
 friends, none more loyal and patient to be found 
 than Rose's benefactress, had tried their utmost 
 for a year and a half and had not made the slight- 
 est progress in developing a moral nature in the girl. 
 Her immorality was due to heredity and environ- 
 ment. Her home was poor, her neighborhood bad, 
 the effect of her surroundings augmented by phys- 
 ical defects. Although attractive in personal appear- 
 ance and promising in character, she was devoid of 
 
94 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 moral sense, and impervious to elevating surround- 
 ings or elevating ideals. This brief sketch gives but 
 a faint idea of her depravity, her vileness, her de- 
 generate tastes, her familiarity with certain crimes, 
 her versatility in blasphemous language, all of it 
 springing out of a nature that sought vice with the 
 unchecked determination of an animal following its 
 instincts. Yet she was as beautiful as an angel, 
 as sweet as a little child. 
 
 A Pseudo-Moral Imbecile. — ^To show, how- 
 ever, that children may be saved who exhibit on the 
 surface all the characteristics and worse ones than 
 those just enumerated in Rose's life, let me give a 
 brief resume of another case leading to an alto- 
 gether different conclusion. In The Psychological 
 Clinic, Miss Catlin gives an interesting and detailed 
 account of her experiences with a girl who was en- 
 trusted to her care for about two years. The child's 
 mother died in childbirth and the baby was thrown 
 upon the care of nurses and others. At eight she 
 was a terror to all who knew her. Her health, un- 
 dermined by indulgences of many kinds, was preca- 
 rious, her temper frightful, her nature soured and 
 warped, her resentment at interference fierce and 
 lasting. Her face wore a wolfish aspect that made 
 her more animal than human in appearance. The 
 family, utterly despairing of doing anything with 
 her, sent her to a special trainer. 
 
 There for two years she was compelled to lead a 
 physically well-ordered, hygienic life, with the re- 
 
BAD AND BACKWARD 95 
 
 suit that her health improved greatly but her dispo- 
 sition remained about the same. Her teacher, when 
 handing the child over to Miss Catlin, reported that 
 she was still ungovernable, that she was absolutely 
 wanting in "decency, honesty, truth; was cruel, 
 sneaky, filthy," and concluded with the firm con- 
 viction that the child was insane and should be ex- 
 amined by an alienist. In spite of this Miss Catlin 
 received her into her care and trained her for two 
 years. 
 
 She began with her own diagnosis of the case. 
 She took account of stock and reckoned up the 
 moral assets and liabilities with which she was to 
 begin business. She found that all the evil told of 
 the child was true; in fact that half had not been 
 told. To all her other evils she added the art of tor- 
 menting people out of their wits. She knew how 
 because she possessed a bright mind sharpened to 
 a keenness almost uncanny by her ten years of con- , 
 stant warfare against her enemies whom she hated 
 with the hatred of a savage and whom she loved to 
 out-do by any sort of cunning and to hurt by any 
 exquisite torture. Her new teacher soon discov- 
 ered another fault which she immediately set down 
 as an asset. That was vanity growing out of an all- 
 pervading egotism. Her one real streark of gold was 
 sympathy which Sarai, let us call her, possessed to 
 a marked degree, but which seemingly had never 
 been discovered before and certainly had not been 
 developed. This quality of sympathy determined 
 
96 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 the teacher in her choice of the mode of training to 
 be followed with this problematical child. 
 
 Immediately she made herself a chum to her 
 charge, adopting even the same kind of dress. For 
 a month both ran wild on an isolated farm. During 
 that time Miss Catlin made herself absolutely in- 
 dispensable to her pupil so that even if she were 
 away for an hour the girl felt it keenly. For the 
 first two weeks the little demon tried by every dia- 
 bolical art, like dropping caterpillars down her 
 teacher's back, jumping at her from corners, and 
 dangling snakes within an inch from her nose, to 
 test the staying powers of her new friend's good hu- 
 mor. The first streak of dawn in the otherwise dark 
 training up to that time, came when the teasing grew 
 so unbearable that the teacher took to flight and 
 showed by unmistakable signs, not the anger the 
 little girl expected, but the awful hurt her friend 
 was suffering through her misconduct. She tim- 
 idly stole up to her teacher, took her hand and whis- 
 pered, "Sister, do you feel like you look?" In that 
 moment the teacher knew that her method was right 
 and would eventually succeed. 
 
 Every morning there was a thought for the day. 
 Then came the stage, most cleverly brought on, 
 when the child gave her word for stated tasks and 
 never broke her promise. Then the promising was 
 generalized and she was asked to promise always 
 to do anything she was told. By that time she had 
 learned that her new teacher would never ask her 
 
BAD AND BACKWARD 97 
 
 to do anything arbitrary. Later the two further 
 qualifications of "promptness" and "cheerfulness'' 
 were added and the lesson of obedience was com- 
 pletely learned. Cheerfulness was applied to more 
 than mere obedience. It was' to be carried into 
 everything, even to the loss of games which sorely 
 tried the little egotist's vanity. One day at tennis, 
 Miss C. dropped her racket and said, "See here, Fm 
 not going to play out of my class. I'm a sport! 
 What are you? Do you know what a sport is?" 
 
 "I'm not sure," the subdued playmate said. 
 
 "Well, it's one who plays fair, and is a good 
 loser! . . . Are you a sport?" 
 
 "I don't think I was born one," was the honest 
 reply, "but I might grow to be one, couldn't I?" 
 And you may be sure she received assurances con- 
 cerning the prepotency of human will over heredity. 
 
 The thoughts of the morning gradually grew 
 from ideals for a day to purposes for life. Her 
 teacher early and energetically inculcated the notion 
 that everybody without exception should have a 
 work in the world and do it with a right good will. 
 The kind old gentleman will never know what dis- 
 dain and indignation he aroused by calling the girl 
 who looks confidently forward to earning her own 
 living a "little lady." 
 
 Her schooling after about a month of freedom 
 began with one hour's study a day. The beginning 
 was as sore a trial as her moral training. Her 
 knowledge of books, and almost all else, was prac- 
 
98 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 tically nothing. Yet she had the supremest opin- 
 ion of her own intellectual attainments. She knew 
 everything and resented warmly any imputation to 
 the contrary. Some of her vagaries were ludicrous. 
 When she was given "there" to write and wrote it, 
 and immediately following that was given "then," 
 she quite economically wrote "hen" underneath it, 
 asserting, and quite rightly as far as that fragmen- 
 tary situation went, that one "t" could stand for 
 both. None but a bright child would have thought 
 of that. In such instances nothing but the threat 
 of her teacher to leave her would compel the neces- 
 sary routine. With these few exceptions her lessons 
 went on rapidly. She apparently needed no special 
 kind of instruction for her mind was normal, but 
 neglected. At the end of four months she went to 
 a private school where she continued without diffi- 
 culty for eight months. 
 
 At ten years she was a suspected moral imbecile 
 with maniacal tendencies, cruel, indecent, dishonest, 
 deceitful, tricky, filthy, incapable of living with nor- 
 mal people or mixing with ordinary children, a crea- 
 ture despised and apparently doomed to a life of 
 horror; at twelve she was a well-bred little lady, 
 "kindly, lovable, thoughtful, earnest, loyal," in 
 school learning rapidly, playing with other children, 
 sincerely ambitious to make her life useful and no- 
 ble in the fullest degree. The first state, contrary 
 to the opinion of her first teacher, was not due to 
 mental defect nor to ungovernable passion within 
 
BAD AND BACKWARD 99 
 
 the child herself but to misdirected energies. The 
 new state was brought about by the simple but la- 
 borious direction of the same fundamental energies 
 into new and useful channels. 
 
 Laziness. — One of the commonest charges 
 brought against backward children when the back- 
 wardness is so mild that it does not demand serious 
 investigation, is the charge of laziness. It is an 
 easy mode of explaining hard things. Besides, the 
 backward child exhibits so many symptoms of lazi- 
 ness. In fact, a lazy boy and a ''truly backward" 
 boy, if they are not suffering from precisely the 
 same fundamental pathological conditions, certainly 
 act as if they were. But it is the traditional method 
 with children to declare that they are born with de- 
 pravity in them and their worth of character comes 
 largely, if not wholly, from training. However, 
 science in its advances encroaches more and more 
 not only upon the realms of superstition but also 
 upon the empires of tradition. Many hoary-headed 
 opinions concerning children, when examined im- 
 partially, melt away like snow under the April sun. 
 One of these is the traditional notion that because 
 they do not like work or study, healthy, outdoor, 
 sun-loving, young barbarians are lazy. The fact 
 that the accusation rests chiefly against boys and 
 not girls suggests some ground for suspicion that it 
 is unjust. 
 
 Modern child-study has done much to explode the 
 theory of '*just pure laziness'' as a cause for a boy's 
 
100 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 so-called idleness. The youthful, good-for-nothing, 
 rat-catching Darwin, who later was amazed at» his 
 own industry displayed in reading whole masses of 
 biological literature; a boy called 'Tat," who al- 
 ternated fits of extremest laziness with spells of 
 hunting without which the orator of the Revolution 
 might never have proclaimed to the centuries ''Give 
 me liberty or give me death"; and a host ol others 
 have done much to dispel the prophecy that "lazy" 
 boys are sure to fail. The lifelong sufferings of 
 Horace Mann, due largely to his work-laden boy- 
 hood, is a protest against adult-defined diligence as 
 the proper virtue for children. Added to these 
 admonitions comes Doctor Hutchison with his half- 
 jocular toxin-theory of work and his warning 
 against infection by the deadly habit of industry, on 
 the one hand, and the hook-worm with its genuine 
 infection of laziness on the other. Out of this med- 
 ley of theories and babel of new voices, for every 
 child trainer must come a revision of doctrine con- 
 cerning the old simple formula of "He is lazy." 
 
 Possibly laziness in children really exists. If it 
 does and is the cause of some pupils' poor progress 
 in school, possibly the direct method of the father 
 who gave his two boys a sound beating because 
 their monthly grades were low, may be effective for 
 curing the low grades. The method has in its fa- 
 vor at least the simplicity of brutality. If, how- 
 ever, it should turn out that all children called lazy 
 are in reality suffering from perfectly definite but 
 
BAD AND. EA.CKWAkDt iOl 
 
 as yet only partially known pathological conditions, 
 punijphment would appear to be as barbarous as 
 beating a sick savage in order to expel the evil 
 spirit causing the disease; and if, as is now gen- 
 erally believed, a very large majority of cases of so- 
 called laziness have their distinct causes, it would 
 seem to be only rudimentary justice to study 
 each case carefully in order to discover the cause. 
 Finally* so-called laziness may turn out to be a 
 man's salvation. 
 
 A couple of boys lived on a farm where both were 
 compelled to work hard to force a living for the 
 family out of the unwilling soil. One boy took to 
 the work willingly. He did his chores, "plowed and 
 sowed, bought and sold'' as his forefathers had done 
 with never a vision beyond the mechanical order of 
 the day. The other hated the farm work, did as 
 little as he could, would walk miles to borrow a book 
 and then would crawl off in the haymow or some 
 other place and pore over it all day. He was slow, 
 inactive, dilatory in all manual occupations and re- 
 ceived early the opprobrious title of "lazy bones." 
 At the first opportunity he left the farm and went 
 into the city, secured an office position in a business 
 corporation and is to-day an influential officer in that 
 organization. His "diligent" brother remained on 
 the farm, "diligently" plied his trade with dimin- 
 ishing success, but continual labor, till the foreclo- 
 sure of a mortgage threatened to alienate the home- 
 stead from the family and it was saved only by the 
 
102 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 "lazy'' brother, who bought it in and now hires his 
 "diligent" brother to farm it for him. 
 
 Such an instance does not prove that laziness does 
 not exist, but it does go to show that laziness should 
 be more accurately defined and each suspected case 
 carefully diagnosed before summary action is taken. 
 A period comes in many a high-school boy's life 
 when rapid physical growth saps his energies ; when 
 disgust for old things begets tastes for new things ; 
 when restlessness drives and doubt guides, and the 
 whole life eddies, then stands still and stagnates. Such 
 a boy often falls behind in study, is charged with 
 gross laziness, and sometimes is driven by extreme 
 measures into acts ruinous to his whole life. For 
 the lazy boy, young or old, I would make a plea for 
 the most discriminating study and the most patient 
 treatment. I have heard a successful man in m.id- 
 dle life devoutly thank God for the profound lazi- 
 ness of his youth because it permitted the incubation 
 of purposes that changed the direction of his whole 
 career. 
 
 All of us know the evil effects of truancy on 
 school progress. Few of us know infallibly how to 
 cure it. Some of us believe that truants are bom 
 and truants are made. The former truants must 
 have their fling for a time at least ; must learn the 
 bitter truth little Hugh Idle learned who ran away 
 from Mr. Toil, his hated schoolmaster, fell in with 
 a most congenial traveler along the road, stopped 
 with him to admire one interesting activity after 
 
BAD AND BACKWARD 103 
 
 I another always to be frightened half out of his wits 
 by seeing one of Mr. Toil's everlasting brothers en- 
 ergetically bossing the job. Night came at last, 
 and poor Hugh turned to his fellow-traveler with 
 the tearful question, "Is there nothing but Toil in 
 the world ?*' to discover to his utter dismay that he 
 had been in the company of Toil all day long. That 
 is one of the fables in our school readers, one of the 
 lessons we do not learn while young, but -do learn 
 when we are older, by experience and only by ex- 
 perience, and then forget that lesson the moment 
 we ourselves begin to deal with the faults of chil- 
 dren. Verily, I do believe that born-truants must 
 have the truancy taken out of them by the long and 
 dusty road, by the hardships of ignorance, by the 
 labor inevitably involved in fleeing from toil. The 
 wise rich father sends his truant son on a long 
 voyage with one of his captains; or his son falls 
 overboard, as Kipling's hero did, and tastes the bit- 
 terness of ignorance upon a fishing-smack. Poor 
 men's sons can not always do that and sometimes 
 they end tragically because they can not, as the 
 sequel to the following story will show. 
 
 A Truant Made. — When I first saw Ikey he 
 was in a special summer school, and I did not won- 
 der that a teacher had taken the trouble to travel 
 half-way across the city to warn the lady in charge 
 against the little rogue. She described his ignor- 
 ance, his stupidity, his unruliness, his truancy, his 
 deceit fulness, his constant aggravation of his men- 
 
104 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 tal ills by most persistent moral turpitude. She, for 
 one, was convinced that he was a moral degenerate 
 and mentally unsound, and that further efforts on 
 his behalf would be worse than useless because they 
 would do no good to Ikey and he would do untold 
 harm to the other summer-school pupils. 
 
 And Ikey looked it. He was undersized in body 
 and limb ; with a queer, little, wizened face, scarred 
 by old burns that affected one eye and gave an 
 odd and impish quirk to his grin. His hair was cut 
 a la Pompadour, and stood up over his low fore- 
 head like the spines of a hedgehog. His clothes be- 
 tokened his lowly condition ; they were ragged and 
 dirty ; his shoes, old button-shoes, were run down at 
 the heel, full of holes and half the buttons were 
 gone. He was a typical slum child, a "wharf-rat," 
 with all the cunning of the species written in every 
 line of his face, every thread of his clothes, in the 
 ready poise and in every startled, scuttling move- 
 ment of his body. His beady eyes glistened and 
 danced, a flat denial to the charge of stupidity. The 
 tentative, twisted uncovering of his crooked teeth 
 offered either enmity or friendship, and accord- 
 ing to the exigencies of the occasion, might turn 
 into a snarl or a smile. One could not associate a 
 loud, hearty laugh with Ikey. A silent series of 
 chuckles is as much as one could expect under the 
 most mirthful circumstances. 
 
 Into his home and schooling we need not go. Both 
 can better be imagined than described. We can 
 
BAD AND BACKWARD 105 
 
 begin our admiration for Ikey by noting that neither 
 home nor school had broken his spring-steel spirit, 
 though between them they had put kinks in it. For- 
 tunately for the ^vaif of a city's wreckage, he had 
 fallen at last into the hands of Miss F., the same 
 teacher who dealt^with Joe described in Chapter I. 
 She had a habit of looking through the outside of 
 teachers and boys and things, and so after glancing 
 at the hat of the teacher who pursued Ikey across 
 the city, she courteously dismissed the prophet and 
 the prophecy of evil and turned to the boy. She 
 saw all I have described, and likely she saw more. 
 Anyhow, from Ikey's facial contortions emerged 
 a confessed smile and his schooling began. 
 
 And now when our story should reach its climax 
 of interest in the pedagogical struggle that ought 
 to follow, we really have little to say. The battle 
 was all won when this kind of a special class w^as or- 
 ganized and a teacher like Miss F. was born. The 
 very novelty held the truant for about a week. It 
 was all so strange. Class began with all the fifteen 
 pupils arranged about the teacher as they do in a 
 kindergarten, and then they all told what they 
 wanted to do during the day and how they would 
 do it. After that each went to the board and wrote 
 what he would do; then he read it and had it cor- 
 rected; then he went and did it. The "it'' consisted 
 of something different for each child and included 
 manual work of all kinds; reading, writing, arith- 
 metic, games, a lunch with ice-cream, a nap, a swim. 
 
106 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 a walk in the park, and a lingering farewell at four 
 o'clock. No wonder a boy like poor street-hardened 
 Ikey counted it all a paradise, never missed a day, 
 rain or shine, though he walked six miles a day, and 
 at the end of the summer came to the principal's of- 
 fice and begged to be permitted to come back to that 
 school next year. He studied, too, and did well for 
 him, considering his previous disadvantages. He 
 certainly was not an imbecile, neither a degenerate, 
 neither an incorrigible, but just a little cobble-stone, 
 kicked loose from the streets where travel had worn 
 him hard and smooth. At the end of six weeks the 
 great city opened its maw and swallowed him again, 
 and I have not seen him since. Often I have wanted 
 to hear how he turned out and have hoped against 
 hope that he did well. At least, it was demon- 
 strated that he was a truant made and not a truant 
 born. 
 
 A Truant Born. — Bert was a truant born. At 
 thirteen he bore about with him the air of a rover 
 and the ennui of a man of the world. I met him 
 in the same summer-school with Ikey. They were 
 altogether different. Bert was large, well-formed, 
 easy-mannered, hated to be in a class with "kids" 
 and boarded at a place where some of them "cried 
 at night to go home !" That to him was the nether- 
 most depth of imbecile puerility. He never wanted 
 to go home. In fact, for several years he had been 
 using every effort to get away from home to go west 
 and lead a wild untrammeled life on a ranch. He^ 
 
BAD AND BACKWARD 107 
 
 had started on his free-life career via truancy, but 
 it had ended so far rather humiliatingly. He had 
 been sent to a truant school, been in the juvenile 
 court, in the detention house, on probation, in a 
 protectory, and between times, frequently in the 
 hands of the police. Through it all his study nat- 
 urally suffered, and at thirteen he was having a new 
 trial in a summer class for backward children. 
 There he was making a good impression by his lazy 
 smile, his drawling tones, his ready ability and un- 
 failing politeness. The matron with whom he 
 boarded said he had a "good face" and was the 
 most "gentlemanly boy she ever saw." When he 
 obligingly offered to take a ten-dollar check to the 
 store and get it cashed for her she readily signed 
 it and telephoned the store to give him the money. 
 When Bert was next heard of he was in a sol- 
 diers' camp in another state. He had taken the ten 
 dollars, equipped himself with a brand new khaki 
 uniform, taken a train, passed through the largest 
 city in America, changed from train to boat, from 
 boat to trolley-car, thence to train again, with the 
 unerring scent of a pointer-dog winding a covey of 
 partridges, and arrived at the soldiers' camp only 
 to find his expected friend was not there. Nothing 
 abashed, he soon made friends, was boarded and 
 petted, and finally wrote a post-card to hfe father ad- 
 monishing him not to worry. Before the police 
 came he was on his way home, and arrived in his 
 native city with twenty-five cents, with which, like 
 
108 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 a true man of the world, he took one last fling at an 
 amusement park. Then he reported at the police 
 station that he was a lost boy and "wouldn't they 
 take him home?" Which they did in the patrol- 
 wagon, and nothing was lacking in Bert's arrival 
 save a band playing "See, the Conquering Hero 
 Comes." 
 
 Poor Bert! That was about his last escapade. 
 All the threats and punishments could not cure his 
 craving for the West. His parents thought they 
 could cure it, or, to be more accurate, they did not 
 think at all, and following in their poor blind way 
 the traditions of society, attempted by paternal au- 
 thority and organized social machinery to suppress 
 the vagrancy of their unguided boy. But in spite 
 of it all, Bert slipped through the meshes, took a 
 freight-train for his promised land, fell under the 
 wheels and his restless spirit free forever, winged 
 away on its last long journey. 
 
 In the face of such tragedy, pedagogy feels the 
 propriety of silent reflection. Yet for the sake of 
 other parents with other boys, I must add my firm 
 conviction that Bert might have been saved and 
 cured from his truancy. Purposefully, I have 
 brought together Ikey and Bert in order to show 
 from the first how the second might have been 
 helped, and to show from the second how serious it 
 is to attempt to suppress the vagrant impulses of 
 boys when they are manifested so persistently and 
 so strenuously. I believe that if Bert's parents had 
 
BAD AND BACKWARD 109 
 
 arranged for him to go west and by the toil and 
 sweat of actual cowboy life, to work out of his sys- 
 tem the romance and glamour surrounding his no- 
 tion of ranch life, he would have come to himself 
 and would have returned a chastened and wiser 
 youth. He had brains and ability, he was not irra- 
 tionally bad, he was not a general vagrant nor 
 merely an aimless truant, but he was a boy with a 
 fixed obsession, and the lure of that obsession led 
 him to his death. If we dare generalize from these 
 cases, and others like them, I would say that tru- 
 ancy is nearly always due to environment, and if 
 taken in time, can be cured by the proper modifica- 
 tion of the school conditions. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 RETARDATION DU£ TO ENVIRONMENT 
 
 THE causes of mental retardation are resident 
 either within the child himself or outside of 
 him. Since the retardation is so often discovered 
 in school where the first exact methods of classify- 
 ing children are applied, it frequently happens that 
 the causes for the retardation are looked for in the 
 school. Parents say the curriculum is too crowded 
 or too difficult, the lessons too long, the text-books 
 incomprehensible, the teacher unfit, the method of 
 teaching outworn or experimental. It is seldom 
 that the school-administrator has a chance to make 
 an adequate reply and so the charges stand. 
 
 The fact is that causes for retardation very often 
 lie in the child's home, or in his neighborhood, or 
 in the kinds of companions he keeps. Sometimes 
 the causes are physical; sometimes they are due to 
 the ideals he imbibes. 
 
 Because of their exceeding triviality, the causes 
 are frequently overlooked. So serious does peda- 
 gogical retardation appear to the average school- 
 administrator that he is misled into thinking that a 
 serious cause must surely lie at the bottom of so 
 
 110 
 
ENVIRONMENT 111 
 
 serious a condition. He therefore looks for deep- 
 seated defects in the pupil's physical or mental being, 
 or for sinister influences in his surroundings, when, 
 as a matter of fact, frequently the cause is so trivial 
 and superficial that he overlooks it. Causes that 
 are ludicrous except for the gravity of their effect, 
 and too ridiculous to be set down except for their 
 frequency, will readily occur to any seasoned 
 teacher. Partly to warn teachers, in cases of re- 
 tardation, to look first for the obvious, and partly 
 to warn parents about the effects of their careless 
 and thoughtless criticisms of school on their chil- 
 dren, I will set down a few cases that have come 
 under my notice. 
 
 A boy ten years old fell behind his classes so per- 
 sistently that the principal of his school, after look- 
 mg in vain for causes adequate to account for his 
 seeming utter indifference to study, and after ex- 
 hausting every pedagogical device to interest him in 
 things mundane, sent him to a clinic. There a care- 
 ful examination was made, and though the boy was 
 found to be but of ordinary mentality, he seemed 
 to possess enough mind to succeed moderately if 
 he would only apply himself. There were no rad- 
 ical physical defects in the way of this, either; no 
 cause appeared but his sublime indifference to study 
 or to any other preparation for life. The reason for 
 this attitude was discovered when he was asked 
 what he was going to be when he grew up and 
 blandly answered, '^Nothing; for the world is com- 
 
112 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 ing to an end in 1917, and there isn't any use of get- 
 ting ready to do anything." Then it transpired 
 that the boy belonged to a family who held a mil- 
 lennium doctrine that looked confidently for the 
 near destruction of this world. The boy heard it, be- 
 lieved it, applied it literally to his own case and re- 
 fused to make any preparation whatever for his 
 future here. He knew that the sect to which his 
 parents belonged was misunderstood and criticized, 
 and hence he kept his doctrines to himself until the 
 seriousness of his retardation led him to a clinic 
 where he blurted out his confession. Needless to 
 say, his parents had had no intention of permitting 
 their theological doctrines to make such an impres- 
 sion upon their son and took immediate steps to 
 correct it. 
 
 Another case is so utterly ridiculous that only its 
 cogency as an illustration of how almost unthinkably 
 trivial causes will affect children's attitude toward 
 studies, and its actual occurrence in a large city of 
 the Middle West justifies its restatement. A little 
 girl, apparently from a very poor and very ignorant 
 foreign family, did well in all her studies except 
 geography. Finally, in despair, the teacher sent for 
 Mary's mother, who duly appeared, an uncultured 
 ignorant woman, belligerent and not over-refined in 
 her manner or ideals of life./ She heard the teach- 
 er's complaint to the end and then almost dazed that 
 good spinster-lady by remarking with the utmost 
 complacency that geography was patently utterly f u- 
 
ENVIRONMENT 113 
 
 tile, since she herself without it had contrived to con- 
 summate a woman's supreme ambition in life by se- 
 curing a husband, while the teacher, with it, had 
 failed !/ No wonder that Mary despised geography ! 
 It is a compliment to the versatility of the American 
 school-teacher to add that this one quickly recov- 
 ered herself, led Mary's mother into further con- 
 versation, accepted an invitation to visit their home 
 and meet the prize husband, who turned out to be 
 very anxious for his daughter to become a school- 
 teacher because she would earn a large salary. With 
 that as her cue, the teacher led Mary and her father 
 to see the more certain and more immediate value 
 of geography as an asset to teaching, while she 
 pleased the mother by assuring her that it was not 
 an obstacle to the ultimate vocation of matrimony. 
 Other instances, some more serious and some 
 more ridiculous, illustrating the undesirable effects 
 of home ideals on pupil's progress in school will 
 readily come to mind. The American boy's hope- 
 lessness in grammar caused by his father's grandiose 
 assertion that a free-born American did not have 
 to be taught his native tongue; the failure of an- 
 other in drawing because his commercial parents 
 despised "artists"; the collapse of a girl under a 
 certain teacher because the girl's mother and the 
 teacher crossed swords in some social affair; all 
 these could be developed at length to teach the same 
 lesson of home influences upon the backwardness of 
 some pupils in certain or all of their studies. 
 
114 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 Home influences are not limited to inculcation of 
 ideas. Some of them are physical, definite in their 
 nature, and serious in their effects. The common- 
 est of these causes are sanitary and nutritional. 
 What and how a child eats; how many hours, and 
 under what conditions he sleeps, how much fresh 
 air he has at his command, any or all of these items 
 of his daily regime bear heavily on his mental de- 
 velopment and often make or mar his educational 
 course. Being physical, and therefore not always 
 appreciated as having direct mental bearings, being 
 distant from the schoolroom, and, therefore, not 
 easily observable, and being confined to the home, 
 and hence intensely difficult to amend, such causes 
 are the hardest of all to deal with effectively. It is 
 a great help for a teacher in any particular case to 
 know that home conditions are at the bottom of the 
 matter. It enables her to put the blame where it 
 belongs and not to put it where it does not belong. 
 The following case illustrates how blame may be 
 misplaced : 
 
 Sarah was a girl about nine who came to school 
 every morning and regularly put her head down on 
 her arms on her desk and for half an hour refused 
 to do anything whatsoever. Punishment succeeded 
 in developing only a spell of stubborn suUenness, 
 and coaxing was of no avail. If she was left en- 
 tirely undisturbed, Sarah seemed to fall into a half 
 stupor from which she aroused herself gradually 
 and with effort and assumed little by little the duties 
 
ENVIRONMENT 115 
 
 of the day. She was always more dull and stupid 
 than the normal children, but behaved well and 
 seemed to try to learn though she suffered from a 
 number of physical defects. 
 
 Finally, through the social service department of 
 a clinic, her home was investigated. It consisted of 
 two rooms in a tenement located in the crowded sec- 
 tion of a large eastern city. In those two rooms a 
 family of nine persons, father, mother and seven 
 children, ate, slept and lived. How they did it the 
 dwellers in the slums only know. They had no reg- 
 ular bedtime nor meal-times. They went to bed and 
 rose as fancy or the demands of their work dictated. 
 On the table was always a loaf of bread and per- 
 haps some bologna sausage, and on the stove a pot 
 of black coffee or tea. In winter windows were 
 kept closed to save fuel and the conditions of such 
 a sleeping place can only be imagined. From a night 
 in such quarters, Sarah rose, dressed, seized a hasty 
 bite of bread and meat, swallowed some coffee, if 
 there was any, and hurried off to school. There 
 outraged nature asserted itself and the worn-out 
 nervous system racked all night by city noises, dis- 
 turbances, poisoned air and over-crowded quarters, 
 seized the opportunity in this comparative repose 
 and fell into a kind of stupor. 
 
 What this single illustration teaches might be en- 
 forced by literally thousands of examples, for thou- 
 sands of backward children among the six million 
 pedagogically retarded ones, suffer from lack of 
 
116 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 food, improper food and poor housing. However, 
 the converse, that all poorly fed and poorly housed 
 children are backward, is not true; though in all 
 probability there is a close connection between the 
 two. That coffee-drinking has something to do with 
 low grades in conduct and studies is indicated by 
 Mr. C. K. Taylor's statements concerning four hun- 
 dred and sixty-four pupils. The general average 
 for conduct for those not drinking coffee was sev- 
 enty-five and six-tenths per cent., while for all of 
 those drinking it was seventy-three per cent. Those 
 who drank four cups a day averaged only sixty- 
 seven and eight-tenths per cent. In their grades a 
 similar result was found. For the month in which 
 the test was made, the non-coffee-drinkers averaged 
 seventy-three and fourth-tenths per cent., and the 
 drinkers seventy and eight-tenths per cent. Those 
 drinking four cups a day averaged only sixty-three 
 and eight-tenths per cent. Other conditions not 
 conducive to study may have entered into the total 
 situation, but with these figures before us, it hardly 
 seems possible to treat coffee-drinking by children 
 as a matter of indifference. Yet the habit is most 
 common. Doctor Chapin reported that out of two 
 hundred and sixty-two New York school children, 
 ninety-three per cent, had tea or coffee every day, 
 and forty per cent, twice a day. Investigations 
 made in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Bos- 
 ton, St. Paul, and other large cities go to show; 
 
ENVIRONMENT 117 
 
 that about ten per cent, of the school children are 
 seriously underfed. This comes from several con- 
 ditions. Some children do not have enough pro- 
 vided at home. Gathered from many sources sta- 
 tistics indicate that about fifty or sixty per cent, 
 of city school children do not have enough break- 
 fast, and possibly eight to ten per cent, have no 
 breakfast. Some of these go home for lunch, but 
 many either buy penny lunches or do without eating 
 at noon. In Philadelphia it is estimated that school 
 children spend one hundred and seventy thousand 
 dollars annually away from home for lunches. John 
 Spargo noted that in New York City the girls and 
 boys bought lunches chiefly composed of pickles, 
 ice-cream, candy, bananas, bread, bologna and 
 pickled fish. Some of the boys preferred to gam- 
 ble with their pennies to spending them for such 
 lunches, and it is a nice question to determine which 
 was worse on their morals. 
 
 How much such articles of diet affect children's 
 studies has never been ascertained. That they do 
 affect them materially for the worse goes without 
 saying. It seems impossible that brains taking one- 
 eighth of the blood in the human body could work 
 well when supplied with an arterial circulation which 
 must be affected by ferments and toxins generated 
 from disproportionate amounts of acids and sweets 
 like ice-cjeam and chocolates. Education working 
 on the masses is the only cure in sight for these 
 
118 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 conditions. The school-lunch movements not only 
 alleviate present conditions but educate for the fu- 
 ture. 
 
 A common cause of retardation is the influence of 
 companions. This potent determiner of a pupiFs 
 studiousness reveals itself most prominently in col- 
 lege life. When he leaves home for college there 
 to take his life in his own hands, probably to live 
 in a fraternity house where every item of his 
 daily conduct is intimately acted and reacted on by 
 other youths, the overpowering importance of com- 
 pany comes out. Many a college student has been 
 made or marred by his college companions. Many 
 a one has been saved by the simple expedient of 
 changing his lodging or boarding-house and so fall- 
 ing in with a totally new group of men. 
 
 This tendency to conform to the ideals of the 
 group, or to the "gang spirit," expressed so prom- 
 inently in college, is also present in boys of pri- 
 mary-school age. With them home influence usually 
 holds it in check. Sometimes, however, the home 
 fails and the boy suffers in his studies, not because 
 he is naturally bad morally or mentally, but because 
 of untoward or unfair conditions. Any one can 
 feel this truth in the following story : 
 
 Allan was a boy born across the water while his 
 father, for business reasons, was in America, where 
 one cause after another kept the father until his boy 
 was ten years old. Allan did not feel the loss of all 
 those ties that go to make fathers dear to their 
 
ENVIRONMENT 119 
 
 boys and boys dear to their fathers. He had never 
 known them, and besides, his mother and his grand- 
 parents made up much that his father could not give. 
 So he grew and played, and went to a private school, 
 and was petted and cared for by all his relatives 
 more than he would have been had his father been 
 at home. He was shielded from all dangers, spent 
 much time with grown people and received and re- 
 turned a boundless affection for those about him 
 and withal, was as happy as a healthy red-cheeked 
 boy could be. 
 
 Then, to him quite suddenly, his mother and he 
 left all the joys he had known so long, and came to 
 America to join the father. The change for Allan 
 can well be imagined. From a country town he 
 came to live in a large city, from fields and woods 
 and rivers, to an apartment house ; from a quiet pri- 
 vate school, to a hurly-burly American public school. 
 
 His father was strange to him and he was strange 
 to his father. His mother tried to make it up to him 
 and managed to do so until the care of Allan's sis- 
 ter took her time. Then came the sorest trial of 
 this little boy's life. 
 
 For nearly a year he had done fairly well in his 
 studies, as well as could be expected for a pupil 
 with such a totally new curriculum. Then he be- 
 gan gradually to fall behind his class. All his school- 
 work suffered about the same decline. At first the 
 teachers thought it might be temporary, but the 
 lagging continued. The immediate cause of it ap- 
 
120 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 peared in his indifference to his studies and his lack 
 of attention. His teachers noticed that and won- 
 dered at it because he had always before been so in- 
 terested and eager in his strange shy way. Along 
 with his inattentiveness and backwardness had come 
 a deep and more subtle change of general attitude. 
 He was not so shy nor uncertain. He had acquired 
 a certain self-confidence. He listened to admoni- 
 tions about study with an air of superiority as if he 
 had found something better. His parents noticed 
 the same kind of change and still others wdth it. He 
 did not spend his evenings at home, but lived them 
 on the streets in spite of warnings and finally pun- 
 ishments, neither of which did any good. His de- 
 terioration was rapid. In a few months he had 
 changed from one of the most docile to one of the 
 most unprofitable boys in school, irregular, tardy, 
 indifferent, bored; speedily falling into the class of 
 hopeless retardants. Yet nothing appeared on the 
 surface to account for this distressing change. 
 
 His condition became so bad and the causes so 
 baffling that he was taken to a clinic for special ex- 
 amination. Nothing was found in his physical or 
 mental condition that would explain his miscon- 
 duct or his pedagogical retardation. A social 
 worker was sent to his home where the above de- 
 scribed home conditions were found to exist. Then 
 she went to the school and watched Allan on the 
 playground. His companions were a revelation. 
 Instead of associating with neatly dressed boys of 
 
ENVIRONMENT 121 
 
 his own social standing, she found he was the 
 hanger-on of a group of ragamuffins most of whom 
 were older than he was, and most of whom were 
 also retarded in their schooling and therefore were 
 still in that school of primary grades. To these boys 
 Allan was a treasure. He brought them cakes, fruit, 
 candies and money he had been browbeaten into 
 taking from home. So pitiably simple-minded was 
 he that he gloried in his membership in the gang 
 and rejoiced in the comradeship of these fellows and 
 his apparent importance in their eyes. To the so- 
 cial worker the whole cruel situation came with the 
 force of a child- world tragedy. The lonesome lit- 
 tle foreigner had never played much with boys ; 
 they were strange to him and their games stranger 
 still. At school he was an outcast; at home neg- 
 lected. At the lowest ebb of his spirits when he was 
 ready to make friends with anybody, he fell in with 
 this gang of idlers, who welcomed him as a new 
 source of diversion and exploitation, and speedily 
 impregnated his simple mind with ideals all at vari- 
 ance with obedience, study and honesty. Who could 
 blame this homesick, lonely boy if he accepted the 
 superior wisdom of these older boys and fell a ready 
 victim to their advice and their practises ? He felt 
 in every particular like the country boy who plunges 
 for the first time into city life and grows an abnor- 
 mal sophistication which pities the simplicity of his 
 country home. 
 
 Once the cause of Allan's degenerative course was 
 
122 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 found out, it was not hard to reverse it. First, his 
 father was given a word or two of advice about 
 paternal duties and the superior efficacy of well- 
 regulated amusements and evenings at home over 
 the too ready resort to the rod. Next, the teach- 
 er's help was enlisted and pains were taken to see 
 that the stranger took lessons in American citizen- 
 ship by learning American games. The effect was 
 immediate and the final effect most satisfactory. 
 Allan regained his normal spirits, returned again to 
 the study of his school-books, and at last accounts 
 was as proud of his new baseball and bat as any 
 young American. 
 
 An instance of retardation and moral delinquency 
 of aggravated form is the following. A boy of 
 twelve years, from a most excellent family, of fine 
 physical appearance, and apparently of more than 
 usual intellectual ability, fell steadily behind in his 
 school-work until he was two years behind his class. 
 His father was dead, and on account of certain cir- 
 cumstances, his mother was compelled to give much 
 of her attention to her own father's business. As 
 a result, this boy, Rupert, was left more to his own 
 resources and with less supervision than he would 
 have had with a father and a mother who could 
 give him the usual care bestowed on growing boys. 
 He lived in a beautiful suburb of an eastern city, 
 where the fine physical appointments and the high 
 social positions of the largest part of its residents 
 gave an added sense of security to the parents of 
 
ENVIRONMENT 123 
 
 sons. But there, as everywhere, the upper classes 
 had their complement of lower classes, and among 
 the latter Rupert found his companions. 
 
 How his association with them began is not 
 clearly known. It seemed to date from the visit 
 of a cheap circus to the town. Rupert, like all 
 healthy youngsters, in the nomadic period of his 
 life, was wild about the show, its animals, its per- 
 formers and its fascinating free life. During the 
 three days it remained, he spent all the time he 
 could down among the tents, was delighted when 
 permitted to carry water for the horses, or to do any 
 other menial task he was asked to do; associated 
 with the circus hangers-on, and met and mingled 
 freely with a class of boys, black and white, whom 
 he had seen before but had instinctively avoided. 
 Their common liking for the circus, its life and its 
 spirit, was a strong bond between Rupert and his 
 new-found friends. He entered into their life with 
 the zest of boyish enthusiasm and the fascination 
 of a novel experience. 
 
 After the circus left, the boy continued his close 
 and daily contact with the same gang of boys. 
 Gradually he fell into their ways of doing, and 
 what was not so obvious, but even more serious, 
 into their ways of thinking. He became a part of 
 them, a leader in some respects; fawned upon by 
 them for his superior talents, better clothes and 
 ready supply of money. Inevitably the first pranks 
 degenerated into acts of hoodlumism, and then into 
 
124 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 petty thieving until the latter practise became quite 
 serious, and included the purloining of large sums 
 from home. Parallel with the moral delinquency 
 went intellectual deterioration and neglect of study 
 until Rupert fell far behind his class. The whole 
 process continued over a period of three years.. 
 Punishments were of no avail to compel him to 
 study nor to separate him from his gang. Finally, 
 so serious did his infatuation for his comrades be- 
 come and so detrimental to his mental life was the 
 effect that he was taken to a clinic for a mental 
 examination. 
 
 No physical marks of abnormality, no special 
 mental defects beyond general pedagogical retarda- 
 tion, and no moral deviations beyond those incident 
 to a bad environment appeared. To observe the boy 
 still further, he was placed for a month or more in a 
 special class where no abnormalities developed, and 
 where Rupert showed himself to be amenable to 
 discipline and capable of study. No special peda- 
 gogical devices were necessary to secure from him 
 fair work and considerable improvement. The ex- 
 periment in the new surroundings was considered 
 a sufficient demonstration of the cause of his re- 
 tardation and he was entered in a very good board- 
 ing-school. 
 
 There among new surroundings his improve- 
 ment continued, and at last report he was making 
 good progress, had readily adjusted himself to his 
 new environment and was part and parcel of the 
 
ENVIRONMENT 125 
 
 new group, entering into the games and ideals of 
 the students as if he never had been afflicted with 
 an almost ruinous and abnormal predilection for a 
 street-gang of low order. His face and his bearing 
 betoken a boy of more than usual nobility in char- 
 acter and breeding. His temporary aberration was 
 due to the power of ideals grafted on his mind by the 
 crowd of boys among whom he inadvertently fell. 
 
 The Conversion of a Gang. — ^These two cases 
 illustrate what can be done by removing boys from 
 the influence of the gang. Sometimes this is not 
 possible and the teacher is squarely faced with the 
 project of converting the gang for the sake of its 
 retarded members. I am not aware that the gang 
 has been very widely studied from this point of 
 view, nor that its value as a pedagogical asset has 
 been thoroughly explored. The following twCT in- 
 stances may indicate how the gang may be con- 
 verted and its members saved to the school, first, 
 by individual efforts, and second, by organized 
 efforts. 
 
 In a country town, a group of boys in the upper 
 grades had gradually crystallized into a gang of 
 young vandals, full of mischief, given over to night- 
 prowling and day-loafing, to indolence in school and 
 rebellion against study. Among them it was counted 
 smart to be ignorant and big to neglect openly all 
 school tasks. When any pupil through desire, 
 shame or fear, attempted to get his lessons, he 
 was greeted with sneers and jeers, called "the 
 
126 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 teacher's pet," and threatened with ostracism from 
 the group. As the town was small and the boys 
 of thirteen to fifteen or sixteen were not many, as the 
 swimming hole, baseball field, woods and streams 
 were common property, it meant much to the one 
 made an outcast by his diligence. The condition was 
 called to the teacher's attention by declining grades 
 and by increasing retardation of certain boys. All 
 the usual methods of stimulation were tried and 
 failed. The situation was becoming daily more 
 serious in the school, had attracted attention out- 
 side, and as usual led to a suggestion for a new 
 teacher. 
 
 At that point the principal took matters in hand. 
 He began by studying the situation indoors and 
 outdoors. He soon discovered the outlines of the 
 gang and noted that the line of demarcation be- 
 tween the gang and the good students was the 
 same. His first appearance on the playground was 
 made one day at recess when this particular group 
 of destructive imps was bombarding the maple 
 trees with stones from the graveled walks. There 
 was a pause in the throwing, a pretense of picking 
 up more stones to throw, a bravado attempt on the 
 part of the boys to look unconcerned. The prin- 
 cipal took in the situation, and in a half querulous 
 tone, remarked, "Why don't you boys set up that 
 old tin pail and see who can hit it at ten paces?" 
 Partly to cover an embarrassing situation the 
 
ENVIRONMENT 127 
 
 boys set up the pail and started in to throw per- 
 functorily. The principal kept the score, the in- 
 terest warmed up, and by the time recess ended, 
 the gang was hot in the midst of a contest of throw- 
 ing, the pail was nearly annihilated, and the prin- 
 cipal was one of the gang. 
 
 The principal followed up his initiation by spend- 
 ing recesses and noon-hours on the playground. He 
 introduced, organized and inspired games. H^ 
 showed that brains won "prisoners' base/' and he 
 developed generals and generalship as it was never 
 known in that pastime before. He permitted the 
 boys and girls to play together and so infused a 
 spirit of chivalry into the contests. He played ball, 
 coached the pitchers and showed himself to be an 
 all-round man. He won their respect and admira- 
 tion on the playground and, before they knew it, 
 they found themselves transferring the glow of the 
 games to the lessons of the schoolroom and there 
 desiring the same warm approbation from their 
 principal that he gave so generously to athletic 
 ability. 
 
 It was not long before Saturdays and Sundays 
 were utilized. The teacher organized hikes, as 
 they would be called now, taught his boys to camp 
 and cook, to see curious things in nature, to study 
 geography in open fields, and history in landmarks. 
 Gradually the original nucleus expanded until other 
 boys who formerly did not belong to the gang, were 
 
128 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 introduced; and being good scholars, and being 
 found also to be good fellows, they leavened the 
 whole lump with new ideals. 
 
 It was not all done in a day nor so smoothly as 
 I have hinted. There were periods of suspense and 
 crises. The great crisis came in a blacksmith shop. 
 It happened that the ringleader of the gang was a 
 big husky son of the town blacksmith, a man of 
 natural force and some influence, but little educa- 
 tion. He had rather gloried in his son's leadership 
 against study and listened readily to boys' criticisms 
 of the principal's new tactics, acquiescing in the 
 suspicions and growing sentiment that *'A teacher 
 ought to tend to his business and spend his time 
 in study instead of running all over the country 
 with a pack of boys." None of this was lost on 
 the principal who dropped around to the blacksmith 
 shop one day to cultivate the old man. It happened 
 that they were welding steel wagon tires, a heavy 
 laborious job requiring strength, alertness and skill. 
 The temporary helper who swung the sledge was 
 a half useless fellow who was too slow and usually 
 wrong. The smith was in a black sullen humor, 
 and the teacher paused at the door in silence, seeing 
 no propitious opening and not knowing what to do, 
 until the exasperating stupidity of the helper car- 
 ried him back to his father's blacksmith shop, and 
 his own days at wielding the sledge. Then before 
 he knew what he was doing, when the tire melting 
 hot came off the forge, he sprang forward, seized 
 
ENVIRONMENT 129 
 
 the great hammer and with a perfect rain of clean- 
 cut blows, the smith and he welded up the neatest 
 joint of the day. The victory over the gang was 
 won right there. What the old man said or did 
 to his boy is not recorded, but thereafter Pete, the 
 leader of the gang, became the teacher's stanchest 
 supporter, though through insufficient brains he 
 could never become a brilliant student. 
 
 Organizing the Gang-Spirit for Study. — Of 
 course, we know that every one can not swing a 
 sledge and that a blacksmith shop is not the place 
 for a lady principal, but common sense may glean 
 enough principles from the above procedure to en- 
 able a wise teacher to deal with an unruly crowd. 
 The next scene is laid in the city and gives general 
 account of an organized effort to control and direct 
 the gang spirit to study. 
 
 Mickey Hogan was short and stocky, older than 
 he looked, red-headed and freckled as his name de- 
 manded, and as Hibernian as Irish ancestors and 
 American birth could make him. He was lord of 
 the streets in his neighborhood, a terror to good- 
 doers among his schoolmates, a retarded pupil by 
 choice, not by necessity, and leader of a self -per- 
 petuating gang in the school where he went. The 
 gang had long been the despair of the teachers. 
 That part of the city was little enough conducive 
 to study as it was and retardation was so rife that 
 no artificial stimulation was needed to make it 
 thrive. But the gang did stimulate ideals altogether 
 
130 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 opposed to intellectual ideals and Mickey was their 
 prophet. 
 
 One day an event occurred in his school. He, 
 with some other boys of his age, was called into a 
 room and there met a strange man with scales, 
 measuring-rods, calipers and other curious instru- 
 ments. Mickey, true to his cult, viewed the pro- 
 ceedings with the superciliousness of a boy inured 
 to the new education, but with trembling in his 
 heart, and a rebellion near to the surface. The 
 man began to put the boys through some measure- 
 ments and to make comments. His manner was 
 pleasant and businesslike, and since no extra study 
 appeared to be involved in the process which seemed 
 to be concerned with muscles and breathing-power, 
 Mickey got interested in the measurements of biceps 
 and in the tin can for measuring lung-power, that 
 raised up like a gas tank when one blew through 
 the rubber tube. He was eager for his turn and 
 swelled his biceps and squared his shoulders and 
 drew himself up to his full stocky height. When 
 he came to the lung-power machine, he made up 
 his mind to blow it out at the top, but was surprised 
 to find how soon the rising reservoir stopped. Try 
 as he would, he could not muster another breath 
 and the indicator showed he blew less than a boy 
 with a clean face, whom Mickey despised. 
 
 "Try again," said the man good-naturedly, and 
 Mickey took a long breath and emptied his lungs 
 into the tube. It was no use. The indicator would 
 
ENVIRONMENT 131 
 
 stop at about one hundred and seventy-five cubic 
 inches. 
 
 Then the man slipped a tape-line around his chest 
 under his arms and measured Mickey's chest ex- 
 pansion. It was suspiciously small. "Too many 
 cigarettes, my boy," said the man in a perfectly 
 matter-of-fact voice, "you're cutting into your 
 wind. YouVe got a mighty fine build but you 
 won't last at the pace you are going." Mickey was 
 both delighted and frightened. He was proud to 
 be considered "tough,'' but he did not like to think 
 it interfered with his health and strength. He was 
 sensitive about his short stature and had always 
 taken comfort in his sturdiness. To have it demon- 
 strated by an apparatus that could not lie, and re- 
 marked on casually by a man who did not care, 
 placed the judgment beyond dispute. 
 
 Mickey listened very attentively to the rest of the 
 man's scheme. It was simple enough. At the end 
 of another six months all the boys were to be meas- 
 ured again. The boy who showed the greatest 
 all-round physical development would have his pic- 
 ture framed and hung up in the schoolhouse hall 
 for all the boys to see and admire. Frequent talks 
 would be given by experts telling the boys how to 
 grow strong. To gain strength meant regular hours, 
 plenty of sleep, plain food, without coffee, tea, much 
 candy, ice-cream or soda-water, and positively no 
 cigarettes or tobacco. It was rather a stiff program 
 for some of the boys and especially Mickey, but he 
 
132 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 took a big breath and resolved to try it. It was a 
 good thing that he did not then know all the details 
 of the struggle. For the next six months he fought 
 his battles grimly. His eye was single for the 
 physical prize, but his teachers soon noted an im- 
 provement in his studies. The reasons for that 
 were many. The chief ones were his improved 
 health, which in boyhood follows rapidly any better- 
 ment in hygiene, and the fact that he stayed at home 
 nights to keep out of temptation and having nothing 
 else to do, he studied. What was happening to 
 Mickey was happening in a more or less degree to 
 his followers. All of them were not so determined 
 as he, but they were still following their leader in 
 this new quest for physical might. As a result 
 their attitude changed from indifference to any- 
 thing good to intense interest in one good thing 
 and to subsidiary interests in many other things. 
 Their studies and conduct improved with the build- 
 ing of their bodies. The talks on hygiene were 
 constantly stimulating. Clubs were organized by 
 university students, and trips were taken to parks 
 and to the outlying country; exercises were given; 
 deep breathing was practised daily ; colored button- 
 badges were distributed as marks of honor, and the 
 old gang spirit was captured, tamed and harnessed 
 to works of good instead of evil. 
 
 The six months were up at last and Mr. Taylor, 
 the organizer of the movement, now an old friend 
 to the boys, reappeared with his scales, tapes and 
 
ENVIRONMENT 133 
 
 calipers, and amid many a nervous jest and jibe, 
 the boys went through their tests. Mickey won. 
 He ought to have won. Nobody had been more 
 faithful to the daily exercises than he. He had 
 commanded the admiration of his teachers, too, 
 for his sturdy adherence to study and his advance 
 in school work. Not only had his influence per- 
 meated his crowd with new zeal for intellectual 
 things, but he had interested his hard-working 
 father, a man seemingly infinitely removed from 
 school affairs, but who himself had had athletic 
 aspirations in his young days. When Mickey an^ 
 nounced that he had won and would have his pic- 
 ture taken, his father was so delighted that forth- 
 with he took his son to a store and bought him a pair 
 of tights with green plush trunks, and in that cos- 
 tume, Mickey, with his arms proudly folded, with 
 his knuckles under his biceps, was photographed 
 and his picture hangs in his school to-day. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE BACKWARD CHILD IN THE HOME 
 
 WHAT star was in the ascendant when Jer- 
 rold was born is a question. Surely he was 
 lucky to pass from the blankness of nothingness 
 into a mansion where every tenderness and luxury 
 waited for him. Unlucky he was in the journey, 
 for one leg and one arm were paralyzed. It was 
 bad enough in itself for him to enter life maimed, 
 but his ailment made matters worse. It was aston- 
 ishing how many hard things in life that helpless 
 arm and leg were able to ward off. Not a task 
 was Jerrold ever permitted to perform for himself. 
 From birth through babyhood nurses and eiderdown 
 were his alternatives. Servants tended him day 
 and night, washed him, fed him, dressed him and 
 kept him helpless all through a pampered childhood, 
 marked not by stages of achievement, but merely 
 by the passage of empty years. When he was seven 
 he was still a baby; when he was fourteen, he was 
 a child of seven. His body grew; he learned to 
 walk by dragging one foot; he could not use one 
 hand; everything that medical science knew had 
 been done for him, but he was a cripple. 
 
 At about fourteen, after money had done every- 
 
 134 
 
IN THE HOME 135 
 
 thing for him except the essential, he drifted into 
 a boarding-school. It is hard to believe that a boy 
 from such a home could be in such a state. At first 
 glance his personal appearance betokened pure im- 
 becility. His face wore the vacuous look of an im- 
 becile ; his lips hung ajar, and he drooled saliva like a 
 baby; his clothes were of excellent material but worn 
 slovenly; his left hand was held closed to his side, 
 as useless as the claw of a fiddler-crab; the toe of 
 his left foot dragged on the ground as he walked, 
 or hopped about in his ludicrous efforts to play. 
 To all appearances he was a slouching, helpless, 
 grinning simpleton. 
 
 He could not do anything. No royal imbecile 
 was ever more helpless. He had never washed his 
 face and hands, combed his hair, dressed himself, 
 tied a shoe-string or neck-tie, buttoned a but- 
 ton, nor taken a bath unassisted, in all his life. 
 Servants had done it all. They had followed him 
 about, taking his orders, enduring his high temper 
 and childish abuse, waiting on him hand and foot, 
 bringing to him what he required and picking up 
 what he threw down. He ate like a savage, grab- 
 bing his food in his hand and thrusting it into his 
 mouth till it was stuffed full, and then champing 
 it like a dog. An extreme case, you say. It was, 
 but a true one in all essentials. His extremity is 
 what makes it valuable, as the end will show. 
 
 At school, for the first time in his life, Jerrold 
 fell among boys. They began his training. Since 
 
136 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 his table manners were so bad, he was given a small 
 table in the corner of a room and a young man ate 
 with him. He was compelled, on pain of missing 
 dessert, to eat with a knife and fork, to chew his 
 food and otherwise to act rationally. Next, he 
 was taught to take a bath under a shower by com- 
 pulsion, during which the back of a hair-brush 
 wielded by students aided his circulation and sus- 
 tained his perseverance in the operation. His hands, 
 which were black with grime, were scrubbed with 
 a scrubbing-brush and a repetition of that vigorous 
 method promised unless he kept them reasonably 
 clean. His dressing was taken in hand and he was 
 compelled to put on his clothes and to button but- 
 tons. His shoe-strings were laced and tied for him 
 once and then he was shown how he could unhook 
 and hook them without untying or tying them. 
 His teeth and his hair were turned over to his care, 
 and he soon learned to take pride in keeping his hair 
 smooth and his teeth white. 
 
 In the meantime his outdoor life was not neg- 
 lected. He began at the school to play with boys 
 half his age; but he was shamed out of that and 
 introduced to sports more fitting to his years. His 
 fellow-students were patient and good-natured 
 here and he did his best. They undertook to 
 straighten his arm and fingers, invented a brace 
 for his arm, exercised and massaged his fingers 
 into strength and motion, pulled his arm straight 
 and put muscle on it. Jerrold responded nobly to 
 
IN THE HOME 137 
 
 all that. He wanted to be big and strong. He 
 worshiped the big center on the football team 
 and would obey him with canine docility. In a 
 couple of years he grew by eating, bathing and ex- 
 ercising into a robust boy. His features changed, 
 his mouth closed, his arm gained its powers, his 
 hand its cunning, and he walked, still with the 
 slightest limp, but with his foot flat on the heel 
 and toe. 
 
 His studies showed similar improvement. He 
 always had brains but in some respects they had 
 never been developed beyond their baby stage. 
 Travel and association, stories read and told him, 
 had filled his mind with much that was good. His 
 environment had shielded him from evil. His 
 tutors had given him the rudiments. With his 
 adolescent mental awakening had come the greatest 
 increase in his physical powers. The whole 
 exhilaration of the period, natural and artificial, 
 literally and visibly, made of him a new being. 
 Instead of an imbecile, he was a well-dressed, intelli- 
 gent, cultured young man; still bearing obscure 
 scars and lingering vestiges of his backwardness, 
 but on the whole so nearly normal that he visited 
 a college class composed of teachers and students 
 of abnormal children, entered the room, sat through 
 the lecture, came forward and was introduced to 
 the professor, all before the eyes of the thirty 
 students, none of whom noticed anything unusual 
 in his appearance or conduct. 
 
138 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 This case is valuable for illustrating many points. 
 Three of them I want to note especially. First, 
 Jerrold's home was, from the popular point of 
 view, all that could be desired. Not a material com- 
 fort was lacking. The boy had everything but 
 training. Second, lacking that, he was unfitted for 
 all higher education. He had not laid the founda- 
 tions for any kind of study. He had formed no 
 habits of daily routine, and acquired no habits of 
 study. Third, as a consequence, not only his 
 body, but his mind was undeveloped. This should 
 ,be especially remembered because it is not always 
 clearly understood that mental development begins 
 in the home and comes through such self-help activ- 
 ities as dressing, bathing and eating. 
 
 Diagnosis. — Backwardness in a child is often 
 noticed first in the home. With fond fatuity the 
 parents seek to hide the true seriousness of the 
 matter from themselves, or they comfort themselves 
 with the formula, "He will outgrow it." Both pol- 
 icies are wrong. As soon as mental retardation is 
 suspected, a diagnosis ought to be made by a spe- 
 cialist. This insistence admits of no exceptions. 
 No cost in time, trouble and money is too great to 
 obtain it. Any parent who delays for any reason 
 whatsoever is risking the mental life of the child. 
 None but a specialist in mental retardation of chil- 
 dren is fitted to make it. When a trustworthy 
 diagnosis is made by a specialist the treatment and 
 
IN THE HOME 139 
 
 training of the child can proceed with the assur- 
 ance that results will be achieved. 
 
 The Home Training. — The training should be- 
 gin in the cradle. Habits of sleeping, eating and 
 bathing can be developed by an inviolable and im- 
 placable order that will lay the foundation for 
 that obedience which is the first essential and al- 
 ways indispensable condition of all training. If 
 there is a time in a child's life when insistence on 
 a mechanical system and a blind obedience is proper 
 it is during infancy, when the child's acts are 
 chiefly if not wholly reflexive and instinctive, and 
 consciousness has not reached that acute state where 
 self-will and ideas of justice enter in. Indeed, I 
 am willing to go the length of summing up the aim 
 and method of training the child from birth to his 
 school-age in this: The formation of habits by 
 repetition of self-help activities. 
 
 Right habits, then, imbedded in the reflex nervous 
 system of the baby by an unfaltering and undeviat- 
 ing practise of right habits by parents, lay the foun- 
 dation for all future training. The next part, the 
 ground floor of the character-edifice, is self-help. 
 This again is a fundamental and lifelong lesson. 
 A child must learn to dress himself. I put that first 
 because it is to his interest to dress in order to get 
 out-of-doors. If he has been habituated in baby- 
 hood to prompt and expeditious dressing from other 
 hands, he will try to dress himself without delay. 
 
140 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 If he IS normal, he will succeed with very little 
 teaching; if he is backward, he will require definite 
 instruction with all patience and repeated trials. 
 Remember, too, that such training is also "mental 
 development"; it is ''education"; is necessary, fun- 
 damental and indispensable to all "higher" acquisi- 
 tion. This truth is revealed by a single glance at 
 the Montessori apparatus with its shoe-strings, but- 
 tons and button-holes. Following the dressing, eat- 
 ing can be taken up. A child must eat and it is 
 comparatively easy to bring natural rewards and 
 punishments to bear on him. If he will not eat 
 properly he can be deprived of certain sweetmeats, 
 desserts or luxuries. Because dressing and eating 
 carry with them the motives for their performance 
 I have placed them first in the category of lessons 
 to be learned. Washing the face and hands is not 
 necessary. Often it is a severe trial, especially with 
 boys. Therefore, it is hard to get a child to do it. 
 
 Method of Home Training. — I have a feeling 
 that the emphasis on methods of child-training is 
 overdone. It seems to me that in all this self-help, 
 the only method of learning to do is by doing. If 
 a child is to learn to lace his shoes, he must lace 
 his shoes. Let him do it himself and be not over 
 particular how he does it. If he is to put on his 
 trousers who cares which leg goes in first? If he 
 is to dress, whether his waist, or his stockings go 
 first? The whole process has a definite beginning 
 and an end. That is the educational beauty of it. 
 
IN THE HOME 141 
 
 The hard part is to get the unwilling child to begin, 
 to proceed and to finish. To do that, no new method 
 which will dispense with parental good-humor, pa- 
 tience and firmness, has been, or will likely ever 
 be invented. 
 
 The place where method comes in is in the 
 method of proceeding. Generally speaking, all 
 manual lessons should begin with large movements 
 first and gradually proceed to smaller and more de- 
 tailed ones. Dressing is a suitable exercise except 
 the buttons, shoe-strings, and hair-ribbons. Use 
 of knives and forks is hard for all little people. 
 Washing one's hands and face is not an act difficult 
 to perform and bathing is easy ; but face-washing is 
 difficult to teach because boys do not take to it 
 naturally. Because the ideal training can not be 
 found in self-help it must be supplemented with 
 other activities. 
 
 The supplementary activities should be play. For 
 the young child under six years of age chores are 
 impossible. He should engage in all forms of out- 
 door play that involve the large movements of run- 
 ning, jumping, rolling on the grass or ground, 
 climbing, hobby-horse riding, swinging, throwing, 
 playing in sand, and all other games of childhood. 
 The busy mother can not adequately direct the play 
 of her children and she need not worry about it. 
 One thing she must do: Let them play. If they 
 are well, they will play. Even a retarded child will 
 play if he has companions of his own capacity. If 
 
142 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 no children are available a puppy dog is the next 
 best substitute. Playing with grown people alone 
 generally has a bad effect on children. The gap 
 between their abilities is too great. Emulation dis- 
 appears and parasitism develops. In general, then, 
 see that the backward child plays with children, 
 toys or animals that compel him to do his part. 
 
 The Teacher in the Home. — Finally, we come 
 to the teacher in the home. That problem seems 
 easy to dismiss with that solution of all children's 
 problems, that bearer of all their burdens : Mother. 
 But is mother the teacher? Does not a child have 
 two parents and often grandmothers, and older 
 sisters, and sometimes aunts who are school- 
 teachers ? And do not all of these persons lend their 
 conscious and unconscious influence to the training 
 of the child? So important is it that one and only 
 one person should have charge of a child that many 
 of the best child specialists will not attempt to teach 
 any backward child in the home. We can not, 
 then, expect great results from a mother's training 
 if that is interfered with by any others in the home. 
 Still, the mother is the natural trainer and should 
 assume full charge of her child's pre-school educa- 
 tion. She may not be the best teacher in the world, 
 but it is better for all concerned if she becomes at 
 least the head-teacher. 
 
 A Case of Too Much Teacher. — Mercer was 
 born when his sister was sixteen years of age and 
 
IN THE HOME 14S 
 
 thought she knew the same amount about training 
 children that the average young lady of that age 
 thinks she knows plus the amount a girl studying 
 to be a teacher thinks she knows. Therefore, she 
 early took her brother's education in hand. She 
 did not succeed in giving him much book-learning 
 before he was six because his father and mother, 
 both middle-aged, thought he need not be bothered 
 about such matters until he went to school. When 
 he started to school, therefore, the reign of sister 
 Clara, now aged twenty-two, really began. It was 
 a stormy reign. Father and mother kept their hands 
 off the lessons and Mercer found liberty to fight his 
 battles alone. Usually the evening lesson which 
 began so happily in the lamplight of the family 
 circle ended in a domestic storm, wilh Mercer re- 
 bellious, father skeptical, mother resigned and 
 Clara indignant. She said Mercer was stupid and 
 backed her assertion with the testimony of his 
 teachers who said he had learned practically nothing 
 out of books the six months he was in school. 
 
 After the evening lesson, Mercer and his father 
 adjourned to the cellar where they had a workshop 
 full of lovely things. At six years Mercer could 
 assemble parts of electric apparatus, arranging 
 cells, wires, coils and bells so they would ring; 
 could attach an incandescent lamp; could start the 
 gas engine and operate it; and could handle tools 
 very well for his age and slight build. His father. 
 
144 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 who was a machinist, thought he was the smartest 
 boy on earth. 
 
 Mercer never played much with other children. 
 He had Hved with grown people all his life. That 
 is why the neighbors said he was beyond his years. 
 His mother and sister never let him go outdoors 
 out of their sight. Sometimes, while they sat on 
 the porch, they let him take his little wagon out 
 on the sidewalk and play with other boys. But 
 if a quarrel arose and one of the youngsters slapped 
 him, instead of fighting like a boy, Mercer ran 
 bawling to the sheltering arms of his mother or 
 sister. If he played alone and his automobile wagon 
 upset the same lachrymal demonstration followed. 
 No wonder, then, that the boys called him a baby. 
 
 The teachers said he was backward; the neigh- 
 bors said he was beyond his years; the boys said 
 he was a baby ; Binet tests said he was a year above 
 his age; the father said he was smart; the sister 
 said he was stupid; the mother folded her hands, 
 shook her head resignedly and said nothing. The 
 probable truth of the matter was that Mercer was 
 naturally bright, considerably spoiled, retarded in 
 some matters, advanced in others, taught by his 
 father one way, by his sister another, in school 
 another, and on the whole, directed by nobody. He 
 followed his own interests and in the conflict of 
 teachers managed to have his own way. He needed 
 one and only one good teacher and that should have 
 been his mother. 
 
IN THE HOME 145 
 
 Treatments. — Treatments for backwardness 
 are general or constitutional, and particular or spe- 
 cific. In the first class the treatments aiTect the 
 whole body and in the second they are applied to 
 particular organs for specific diseases. The latter 
 treatments may be subdivided into surgical and med- 
 ical. A constitutional treatment aims to build up the 
 whole system by outdoor life, by plenty of fresh air, 
 good food, sleep and play. What these will do in 
 some cases of backwardness caused by neglect or 
 ill treatment almost reaches the marvelous. It will 
 be practically impossible in much of this discussion 
 to keep treatment and training separate; nor is it 
 necessary or desirable to separate them. They 
 merge naturally into cause and effect without ef- 
 fort on the part of the parent. Take this case as an 
 example. 
 
 Cyrene was six years old when she was carried 
 to a clinic in the arms of a nurse. She could 
 neither walk nor talk, but crept about the floor and 
 babbled like an infant. She had been picked up in 
 the slums by a charity worker. Her home was a 
 room in a tenement. Her mother had to work 
 daily. Cyrene stayed at home much of the time by 
 herself and was often under the influence of drugs. 
 Neglect, dirt, starvation, accidents, soporific drugs, 
 disease inherited and acquired, had all done their 
 part to stunt the mind of this child almost com- 
 pletely and her body very materially. 
 
 She was taken out of her home and placed in a 
 
146 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 sanatorium at the seashore for six weeks. There 
 she was given for the first time in her Hfe the care 
 and the nourishment fit for a human being. The 
 treatment she received was not exceptional and 
 pecuHar treatment, but just such treatment as any- 
 modern institution would give. She was bathed 
 daily, dressed in clean clothes, slept long hours in 
 a bed white and sweet as soap and water, sunshine 
 and sea-air could make it; played all day on a 
 veranda or out in the sea sand; and ate plenty of 
 good, plain, wholesome, well-cooked food. In short 
 she lived the entirely healthful life of a young 
 animal. 
 
 In six weeks, what a change! I do not know 
 how many pounds she gained in weight, nor how 
 many inches she grew in height. Neither of those 
 additions was the wonderful part. The change in 
 her mental development without one single con- 
 scious effort at special training by her nurses, was 
 the marvel. She learned to walk and to talk, not 
 indeed as well as a normal six-year-old, but won- 
 derfully well for one so recently an infant. She 
 seemed to have grown three years in a few weeks 
 and since that time has continued to improve though 
 not so rapidly. 
 
 Cyrene's advance throws into bold relief what 
 IS called constitutional treatment. It shows both 
 by their presence and their absence what large and 
 important factors in mental growth are the com- 
 mon daily necessities of life. For her condition, 
 
JN THE HOME 147 
 
 while remarkable because it is unusual, is not there- 
 fore an exception to the effect of hygienic living 
 on children in general. Her experience only iso- 
 lates and therefore presents vividly and clearly the 
 factors of physical and mental growth usually hid- 
 den like the pressure of the atmosphere, by their 
 well-nigh universal presence. 
 
 Diets for Children. — Backward children do 
 not usually require a diet different from that of 
 other children. However, as many of them suffer 
 from insufficient and improper eating, it seems well 
 to make a few notes on this little understood sub- 
 ject. For convenience, we will treat home-feeding 
 and school- feeding together. Preparing food and 
 eating can be made as highly educational for the 
 mind as beneficial for the body. Buying, cooking, 
 setting the table, eating, washing dishes, cleaning 
 the teeth, — ^how many and how varied are the les- 
 sons grouped about this most ancient, necessary and 
 civilizing process of food-getting! Arithmetic, 
 chemistry, physics, physiology, anatomy, hygiene, 
 ethics, sociology, geography, economics, all these 
 so abstract subjects are directly connected with 
 plain cooking and refined eating; while reading, 
 writing, spelling, grammar, poetry and art may be 
 introduced without much effort. Worship has been 
 connected with all its processes from times imme- 
 morial. To get food is the chief struggle of nearly 
 ninety per cent, of all Americans and to secure the 
 dearest food the ideal of nearly all. Out of such 
 
148 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 an animal struggle and such a sensuous ideal come 
 so much of the greed, the passions and the crimes 
 of our civilization. Food, healthy and healthful, 
 fair-priced and sufficient, well-cooked and well-di- 
 gested is the solution of many problems within the 
 schoolroom, the home and the great world outside. 
 Foo.ds, all foods, yield energy. They strengthen 
 muscles and they heat the body. They furnish the 
 fire and steam to the human machine, and do some- 
 thing else no man-made machine ever dreams of 
 doing, namely, they repair the machine itself. 
 Though all yield energy, some foods are especially 
 repairing or tissue-building agents. These are 
 called proteins and make up chiefly the white of 
 eggs, the curds of milk, lean meat, parts of wheat, 
 etc. Another group compose the well-known fat 
 family, found in fat-meat, butter, olive oil, nuts, 
 corn, wheat, etc. Fat, as everybody knows, is 
 stored in the body for warmth and energy. It does 
 not build tissues like bones and muscles. Another 
 energy-giving food are the carbohydrates, like 
 sugar, starch, etc. They are changed into fats in 
 the body. These three, proteins, fats and carbo- 
 hydrates are the great foods of the body by which 
 it lives, moves and has its being. From the food 
 purchased in the market it selects by its own mys- 
 terious processes chiefly these three ingredients and 
 rejects most of the rest. So when the housewife 
 buys a lobster with its shell, its water, its mineral 
 matter, and its protein, fat and carbohydrates, in 
 
IN THE HOME 149 
 
 the last three ingredients the body uses only about 
 one-sixteenth of the whole lobster and about fifteen- 
 sixteenths is thrown away in shell and water. Lob- 
 sters are not only dear in first cost, but terribly dear 
 in last cost. When a man pays a dollar and a half 
 a pound for one alive he really pays one dollar and 
 a half an ounce, or twenty-four dollars a pound for 
 the lobster he really gets. Again we see that all 
 food is not food; and to find how much food a 
 child ought to have we must figure on actual, or 
 available food. 
 
 To find out how much a girl or boy ought to 
 eat daily we make comparisons with a man doing 
 moderate muscular work which is similar in effect 
 to the play of an ordinary child. The standard of 
 measurement for tissue building is the weight of 
 protein consumed daily, and for energy-giving food 
 the amount of heat the food will develop measured 
 by the calory. The calory is the amount of heat re- 
 quired to raise the temperature of one kilogram of 
 water one degree centigrade; or one pound of water 
 four degrees Fahrenheit nearly; or, if the heat 
 should be turned into mechanical power, one calory 
 would raise one ton nearly one and fifty-four hun- 
 dredths feet. 
 
 As a rough average diet for a child we can take 
 the amounts suitable for a child of ten years and 
 vary the diet by increasing the amounts for other 
 children up to fourteen years, but not beyond, and 
 diminishing them for children down to seven years, 
 
150 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 thus covering those of school age. The average 
 daily ration for a ten-year-old weighing twenty- 
 eight kilograms (about sixty pounds) lies, in round 
 numbers, between three hundred to three hundred 
 fifty grams* of actual or available food after waste 
 is deducted, made up as follows: proteids, sixty 
 grams; carbohydrates, two hundred fifty grams; 
 and fats, forty-five grams; giving altogether about 
 sixteen hundred calories of fuel or heat value. A 
 little later we will show how the calories are cal- 
 culated from the weight. 
 
 For more accurate measurements we may con- 
 struct a simple table as follows using as a standard 
 the daily rations needed by a man doing moderate 
 muscular work who requires about twenty- four hun- 
 dredths pounds of protein and about three thousand 
 fifty calories of heat besides. 
 
 Calories (Car- 
 Protein bohydrates 
 Person Percent. (Lbs.) and fats) 
 Man at moderate muscular 
 
 work 100 0.24 3050 
 
 Boy 15 to 16 years 90 0.22 2745 
 
 Boy 13 to 14 years > o^ ^.g ^440 
 
 Girl 15 to 16 years J ^" "'^ "^^^ 
 
 arVl^aril years! ^0 0.15 2155 
 
 ^^lolllllZl] 60 0.14 1830 
 
 Child 6 to 9 years 50 0.12 1525 
 
 Child 2 to 5 years 40 0.96 1220 
 
 Child under 2 years 30 0.72 915 
 
 ♦One gram, metric system, equals 15.432 grains avoirdupois 
 weight. One kilogram equals 2.2 pounds nearly. 
 
IN THE HOME 151 
 
 After the question as to how much a child should 
 eat daily comes the question of what he shall eat. 
 First let us show the method of answering* that for 
 individuals; then for a typical class. A child of 
 known age should be weighed and measured, two 
 operations easily performed by anybody, and his 
 blood tested by a physician. Then his diet should 
 be arranged to suit his needs. If he is thin, carbo- 
 hydrates and fats should dominate in his rations. 
 If he is fat and flabby, proteins should dominate. 
 The typical dietary given above for a ten-year-old 
 body may be used for an average and deviations 
 from it arranged. For calculating the calories 
 from the weights the following table may be used. 
 
 TABLE II 
 
 Substance Calories per gram Calories per pound 
 
 Protein 4 1820 
 
 Carbohydrates 4 1820 
 
 Fats 9 4040 
 
 For classes the procedure is the same for each 
 individual. Then instead of fitting a ration to each 
 child an average dietary is made up for the whole 
 class. To illustrate we will use an actual special 
 class in a summer school. One meal a day was 
 given and, since it was the noonday meal it was 
 calculated to furnish one-half the required daily 
 food. As the weather was warm the menus were 
 fitted to that condition, and ice-cream appears daily, 
 
152 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 both for its cooling effects and its allurement to 
 pupils inclined to play truant especially from a 
 school held during regular vacation time. Ten 
 menus were arranged and used through twenty- 
 seven days for nineteen children as given below. 
 
 Materials for each child Proteid Fat Carbohydrate 
 
 for each meal (grrams) (grams) (grams) Calories 
 
 1. Bread and milk, double 
 
 portion, ice-cream .... 31.16 37.00 117.04 769.00 
 
 2. Bread, roast beef, milk, 
 
 ice-cream 32.4 45.38 73.12 774.00 
 
 3. Jam sandwich, rice, 
 
 milk, ice-cream 26.38 36.95 149.29 885.00 
 
 4. Hamburg steak, rice, 
 bread and butter, milk, 
 
 ice-cream 35.16 46.13 118.74 951.00 
 
 5. Macaroni and cheese, 
 bread and butter, milk, 
 
 ice-cream 30.51 65.05 117.31 1019.00 
 
 6. Shredded wheat with 
 sugar and milk, bread 
 and butter, prunes and 
 
 ice-cream 20.85 37.32 147.26 904.00 
 
 7. Lettuce sandwich, with 
 dressing, bread and 
 butter, milk and ice- 
 cream 23.17 37.60 105.47 745.00 
 
 8. Scrambled eggs and ba- 
 con, bread and butter, 
 
 milk and ice-cream.... 31.79 72.72 74.08 866.26 
 
 9. Creamed beef, bread 
 and butter, milk and 
 
 ice-cream 33.64 50.67 78.48 798.00 
 
 10. Creamed beef, baked 
 potato, bread and but- 
 ter, milk and ice-cream 36,33 50.76 100.51 897.00 
 Total average per portion: proteid, 28; fat, 45; carbohy- 
 drate, 115; calories, 881. 
 
 It will be noted that the fat is very high, that the 
 average per portion is equal to the total standard 
 daily portion. The fat is mostly derived from 
 
IN THE HOME 153 
 
 milk and butter, which is the most wholesome form 
 for children. The children whose home diet was 
 most lacking in fat were watched carefully and it 
 was seen that they got more butter than the others. 
 Several learned to eat butter for the first time. 
 Again, the values given above took no account of 
 waste. They are based on the assumption that all 
 of the food served was eaten every day which, of 
 course, was not strictly true, a fair amount being 
 lost in changing from platter to plate. 
 
 Surgical Treatment for Particular Diseases. — 
 Surgical operations are so clearly procedures of 
 medical men, so technical in character and so remote 
 from the accomplishments of ordinary people that 
 it seems almost a waste of time to consider them 
 here. Yet everybody recognizes instantly what a 
 close connection the parent has with the inception 
 of surgical operations on children. The surgeon 
 can not take the initiative. Patients must be 
 brought to him. Here again, as in medical cases, 
 an early operation may save untold trouble. Ad- 
 enoids, enlarged tonsils, earache and toothache 
 have such a direct bearing on a child's behavior 
 that the parent often discovers these defects first. 
 If parents understood the same matters much of 
 their prejudice would also disappear. It seems ap- 
 propriate, therefore, to touch very briefly and pop- 
 ularly on a few of the commoner anatomical ills 
 of backward children where operations may help 
 the permanently backward and very frequently cure 
 
154 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 the temporarily backward. As adenoids are com- 
 mon we will begin with them. 
 
 Though adenoids are absorbed during ad- 
 olescence, by that time all the mischief has been done 
 and the marks remain for life or must be removed 
 by long and tedious treatment. Therefore re- 
 moval of adenoids is counseled by nearly all ex- 
 perts. This becomes imperative when the following 
 symptoms appear : 
 
 1. Open mouth, especially during sleep, teeth 
 coming crooked, disturbed sleep, irritable humor, 
 lack of attention, nasal voice, flat-chest and constant 
 lassitude. 
 
 2. Continual colds, nasal discharge, tendency to 
 sore throats, tonsilitis and bronchitis. 
 
 3. Earache and partial deafness or hard-hearing. 
 
 4. Nervous symptoms like bed-wetting, stam- 
 mering, St. Vitus' dance, headaches, night-terrors, 
 etc. 
 
 The Teeth. — Dental defects are many and va- 
 rious. Tartar is the commonest, decaying teeth the 
 next, and crooked teeth the next. From one or 
 all of these troubles, according to an estimate based 
 on an investigation of New York City schools, 
 half the pupils in America, or nine million little 
 souls, suffer the agony of horses under the whip 
 pulling with raw shoulders against a collar hard as 
 iron. Happily for both children and horses, hu- 
 manitarians have already cared for the horses and 
 are diligently considering the children. Many of 
 
IN THE HOME 155 
 
 the later dental evils come from the neglect of the 
 apparently harmless though disfiguring tartar. The 
 true nature of this insidious growth is seen when it 
 is known that tartar is a bacterial growth, a weed- 
 patch in a child's mouth which generally sends with 
 every swallow of food millions of its off-scourings 
 into the child's stomach. In that congenial soil they 
 thrive, multiply rapidly and devour the food in- 
 tended for the tissues of the child's body. Un- 
 willingly he has become the host of an innumerable 
 company of insolent guests who devour his dainties, 
 leaving him only the scraps at the second table. 
 Tartar, any tartar, is therefore serious and espe- 
 cially the kind that sometimes clings closely around 
 the gums of even the most fastidious tooth-wash- 
 ers, and gradually drives back the gums until the 
 teeth loosen in their sockets. Tartar, too, is a fore- 
 runner of decay, another germ disease worse in its 
 malnutritional effect than simple tartar, and infi- 
 nitely more painful and deterring to any application 
 of the mind. Happily that olden-time, well-known 
 institution, the puffed cheek, the sobbing child, 
 his handkerchief pressed to his aching jaw, the 
 consoling mother and the sympathizing group of 
 playmates, has almost disappeared from child-life 
 like the lost art of patching, or else lingers only in 
 out-of-the-way country places. Or, at least, it ought 
 to be; for no longer in a land of dentists is tooth- 
 ache a visitation of Providence to be subdued with 
 hartshorn or laudanum. Yet It is said that only a 
 
156 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 few years ago, in a school largely attended by for- 
 eign children, some were discovered with many 
 teeth missing, a few with only three teeth left, and 
 one or two with no teeth left^ 
 
 All decayed teeth should be filled, if possible; or 
 drawn, if the dentist advises it. Likewise impacted 
 teeth due to the second teeth's coming in and press- 
 ing upon the roots of the first set, should receive 
 immediate attention as they lead to the most aggra- 
 vated forms of mischief and sometimes to moral 
 delinquency. Crooked teeth, and indeed the whole 
 jaw, can be straightened. Such work should be 
 done as early as possible after the permanent teeth 
 are cut; for the younger the child the more easily 
 and quickly the jaws change their shape. This form 
 of surgery is bloodless and though irritating and pos- 
 sibly painful, it is infinitely less so than years of the 
 inconvenience, poor mastication, bad articulation and 
 ugliness occasioned by a mouth full of ill-shaped, in- 
 human-looking teeth only partially hidden by an 
 equally repulsive mouth. Because of such easily 
 corrected deformities what unexplainable acts and 
 habits of behavior must be attributed to the irrita- 
 tion and embarrassment suffered by adolescent boys 
 and girls only an omniscient judgment day will re- 
 veal. Certainly, besides probable mental and moral 
 qualities, a good, strong, clean, white, accurately 
 adjusted set of teeth adds much to the physical 
 health, appearance and tone of any person. In this 
 
IN THE HOME 157 
 
 day of dentists and tooth-brushes every child should 
 have good teeth. 
 
 Other bad companions come trooping in with ad- 
 enoids. Of course, enlarged tonsils are common ac- 
 companiments. They are located on each side of the 
 throat, and can be seen from the inside when the 
 mouth is open. Located more remotely from en- 
 larged tonsils and adenoids, yet frequently accom- 
 panying them, is earache, forming with toothache, 
 the twin-terrors of childish days and nights. The 
 pathological relation between adenoids and earache 
 is visibly seen in the eustachian tube, a small canal 
 running from the throat, through which the germs, 
 already having found a prolific soil in the fevered 
 over-blooded throat, are forced to another spot ideal 
 for colonizing in the middle-ear. Spraying the throat 
 with salt-water or weak germicides and consequent 
 coughing or violently blowing the nose assists the 
 germs in the passage to their safe seclusion in the 
 middle chamber of the ear, where no antiseptic can 
 reach them until they have perforated the drum- 
 head, or tympanum, and a running ear relieves the 
 intense pain of the preceding prosperous growth of 
 the germs known to sufiferers as earache. If the 
 earache is recurrent and is permitted to proceed un- 
 restricted or is aided by home-made applications, the 
 hearing may be entirely and permanently destroyed. 
 So serious is it that earache should always have the 
 prompt attention of a specialist. 
 
158 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 Arising alike in the home and schoolroom is the 
 problem of home-treatment and professional treat- 
 ment of physical ailments. At home it expresses 
 itself in, ''Shall we send for the doctor?"* and in 
 school, "Shall we send him to the medical in- 
 spector?" The answer obviously depends on the 
 nature of the ailment; and the discovery of that 
 on the parent's ability to distinguish simple and 
 unimportant affections from serious ones. How 
 much of this skill can be and should be imparted to 
 laymen may be a question ; but assuredly those who 
 are charged with the welfare of little people ought 
 at least to know the characteristic symptoms of 
 common contagious diseases. 
 
 Colds, for example, are either simple ailments or 
 the forerunners of serious diseases. If a cold is 
 accompanied with continually weeping eyes, a per- 
 sistent avoidance of light, it likely presages measles; 
 if accompanied with extremely high fever, hard dry 
 cough and soreness all over the body, it means 
 grippe; if a sudden discharge in thick bloody shreds 
 appears from the nose, dread diphtheria is indicated. 
 If the cold is accompanied by a paroxysmal cough 
 rising to a whoop, the signal is almost certain for 
 whooping-cough. Colds and coughs also accompany 
 adenoids. In general any persistent cold, or habitual 
 colds and coughs are danger-signals and should call 
 for investigation and treatment. 
 
 ♦ For a simple treatment of this whole subject see When to 
 Send for the Doctor, Lippert & Holmes, Lippincott Company, 
 Philadelphia, Pa. 
 
IN THE HOME 159 
 
 Sore throats are common and may mean much 
 or little. A highly inflamed throat with patches 
 is not necessarily dangerous. If vomiting comes 
 on with high fever, scarlet fever is signalized. 
 Swollen glands in the neck behind the jaw and a 
 gray white ''film'' inside the throat mean diphtheria. 
 If the tonsils are swollen and studded over with nu- 
 merous yellow spots tonsilitis is coming on. If the 
 tonsils are very red and large, so large it is diffi- 
 cult to open the mouth, quinsy must be suspected. 
 
 Headaches are always serious because they inter- 
 fere with a child's study and because they are symp- 
 toms of other perhaps dangerous conditions in the 
 child's body or his environment. Any teacher can 
 discover these causes by observation, questioning, 
 and experimenting with foods, ventilation, light, 
 play and naps in school. 
 
 Investigations in one school system showed that 
 children with skin diseases were more often back- 
 ward than those with poor eyesight. Hence, the 
 discovery and treatment of skin affections impinges 
 closely on scholastic duties. One hundred years 
 ago all skin diseases were supposed to come from 
 **bad blood." Now we know that many are due 
 to germs securing entrance through the pores of 
 the skin. If skin eruptions come in the form of 
 small red pimples tending to run together, growing 
 moist and itching intensely, eczema is the disease. 
 If the irritation is confined to the head, suspect 
 head lice. If it comes between the fingers or toes, 
 
160 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 and if a brown-black, zigzag line from an eighth to 
 a half inch long appears, send the child away im- 
 mediately before it communicates the itch to others. 
 Ringworm, another contagious skin trouble, is early 
 known by the circular direction of the eruption. 
 Scaling of the skin may mean simple dandruff, if 
 from the hair, or eczema, or the result of measles, 
 or of scarlet fever. The last is especially dangerous. 
 Chicken-pox usually comes on without much warn- 
 ing. The small, rose-colored pimples turn to blis- 
 ters in four hours' time, so the disease, a very con- 
 tagious one, develops often under the teacher's 
 eyes. Pinkeye is hardly a skin disease, but reddens 
 and swells the eyelids and colors the eyeball a 
 pinkish red. It runs through a school like wildfire, 
 and like all the other contagious diseases, should be 
 detected as early as possible and the sufferers sent 
 immediately to the school doctor. These most com- 
 mon diseases will serve to illustrate the need and 
 kind of knowledge teachers and parents should have 
 to protect their children from contagion and useless 
 suffering. 
 
 Beyond these suggestive treatments it does not 
 seem necessary to go. The treatment of earache 
 and adjustment of eye-glasses are so common and 
 the procedure so well known that they do not require 
 special consideration. From this discussion it is 
 hoped that the teacher and parent will derive the 
 general principle that commands all persons con- 
 cerned with children never to attribute their back- 
 
IN THE HOME 161 
 
 wardness or badness to wilfulness, but always in 
 the most persistent, aggravated and aggravating 
 cases, to believe in and to search unremittingly for 
 some physical defect in the child or outside of 
 him. If that, when found, is removable, the child 
 can be cured. If not, he can not be cured. In 
 either case it is not his fault. And here, for the 
 sake of millions of misunderstood children I must 
 yield to the temptation and set down this universal 
 negative: No child is ever a bad or a backward 
 child through his own fault. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS OF BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 IN all the previous chapters of this book we have 
 proceeded inductively in the study of backward 
 children. We have brought forward concrete cases 
 to illustrate types and to show how these children 
 were diagnosed and treated. The cases are taken 
 from the common experience of the schoolroom 
 and the home and were chosen because of their 
 striking features which would command attention, 
 and which would set forth underlying principles 
 and in such relief that they could be grasped and 
 applied to other similar but milder cases of the same 
 types. Statistical studies, tables, means and aver- 
 ages, on which all true and exhaustive scientific 
 studies of such matters must ultimately rest, might 
 have been given. For parents and teachers, how- 
 ever, the ultimate is not a statistical table, but the 
 real individual; not an average, but a human being 
 to be saved; not a method applying on the whole, 
 but a definite process to be used once, and only 
 once, to be rejected if it fails, and discarded when 
 it succeeds. Of necessity, such a treatment of the 
 subject did not permit the erection of a close and 
 
 162 
 
JHE CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS' 163 
 
 carefully articulated system of etiology, diagnosis, 
 classification, treatment and training. It is there in 
 germ, but is merely suggested and appears through 
 the illustrations. We will now turn to a more 
 detailed description of the clinical diagnosis. 
 
 The Process as a Whole. — ^The process of 
 diagnosing backward children begins with casual, 
 crude and rough approximations made by un- 
 skilled observers, and moves on toward sys- 
 tematic, precise, scientific measurements made by 
 experts. No one should be confused by the fact 
 that several organizations and many subordinate 
 processes are described. At bottom, from the casual 
 opinion of neighbors to the seasoned judgment of 
 an expert, all of them rest on the problem of the 
 child's social fitness or unfitness. Can he ever 
 support himself by his own efforts in society at 
 large? is the fundamental question. It is involved 
 in the definition of feeble-mindedness, and for the 
 teacher and for others responsible for the unfor- 
 tunate, it is the question paramount. If by any 
 means he can be made self-supporting, though he 
 may never read or write, then he has the same 
 right to schooling as any other child who is fitted 
 in public school for citizenship. If he never can 
 become self-supporting in society at large, then all 
 his years of public school learning are futile, a 
 waste and worse than a waste, robbing him of his 
 opportunities to develop his manual and industrial 
 faculties for life in an institution and stealing time 
 
164' BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 from normal children who will become self-sup- 
 porting. Social fitness is the one requisite; and in 
 judging this qualification the observations and 
 opinions of common people and especially the tacit 
 attitude of the child's peers on the playground, 
 have more weight than would at first appear to one 
 who thinks this matter wholly an academic and 
 technical one. 
 
 This can also be seen from the definition of feeble- 
 mindedness. The Royal College of Physicians 
 of London define it as ''a state of mental de- 
 I feet from birth, or from an early age, due to in- 
 complete cerebral development, in consequence of 
 which the person affected is unable to perform his 
 duties as a member of society in the position of life 
 to which he is born." It will be noted that there 
 is a mental defect and that it is incurable, and that 
 it is marked enough to prevent the sufferer from 
 making his living in ordinary society. These two 
 items mark the essentials of amentia, or feeble-mind- 
 edness. 
 
 Let us now take a bird's-eye view of our whole 
 problem. Here he is before us — a backward boy. 
 That much we know by the judgment of parents, 
 neighbors, friends and school grading. Let us say 
 he is ten years old and in the second grade. What is 
 our task? First, we must diagnose our case. Sec- 
 ond, we must apply the proper treatment. That is, 
 to put the matter in pedagogical terms, we must 
 find out what kind of backward boy we have and 
 
THE CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS 165 
 
 then we must develop him to his fullest capacity. 
 More specifically we must first and fundamentally 
 determine whether he is temporarily backward and 
 will under right training catch up with his fellows 
 in the race of life, or whether he is permanently 
 backward and can grow only so far in his mental ca- 
 pacity and then will stop. 
 
 What We Measure in Classifying Backward 
 Children. — Those two words ^'mental capacity'' 
 need a little more consideration. They bring up the 
 problem of just what we are trying to determine. 
 Is it the child's present intellectual attainments, his 
 knowledge of reading, writing and arithmetic? Not 
 primarily. Sometimes he is too young to do any of 
 these and yet is backward. Anyhow the school ex- 
 aminations would settle that. Is it his present men- 
 tal capacity — his ability to learn reading, writing 
 and arithmetic? Binet says it is, but immediately 
 recognizes the fact that such a quality is changeable 
 from year to year and hence can not in itself give a 
 final basis for calling any child permanently re- 
 tarded. Neither can it furnish a basis for a pro- 
 longed course of training. No, the quality we are 
 seeking to measure in this ten-year-old boy is neither 
 present intellectual attainments in themselves and 
 by themselves ; nor present mental capacities in them- 
 selves and by themselves. It is something far more 
 difficult and subtle, requiring not only skill and fine 
 judgment in the examiner, but also the gift of 
 prophecy based on long and wide experience. We 
 
166 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 are seeking something analogous to the latent forces 
 residing in an acorn. We are trying to analyze the 
 acorn, to determine its powers, real and potential, 
 and to predict, if it is placed in a suitable soil in a 
 salubrious climate, what kind of oak it will be when 
 full-grown. That is what we are trying to deter- 
 mine in our ten-year-old backward boy; not alone 
 how backward he is, not alone his reading, writ- 
 ing and mathematics, not alone his present physical 
 and mental powers but his present potentialities. 
 Not "What is he now?" but "What will he be at 
 puberty when all his mental faculties have reached 
 their maturity?" is the primal and unwavering ques- 
 tion we must keep before our minds. All we do and 
 all we ask must unfalteringly be directed toward 
 that one moment. Nor should any favorable or 
 unfavorable item swerve our judgment unduly from 
 its goal. The degree of backwardness, for example, 
 must not betray us into a hasty judgment. Here on 
 the table is a baby, unable to walk or talk, cooing ex- 
 citably over some blocks, so young psychically that 
 she is not free from the baby grasping-reflex and 
 will close her hand involuntarily over my fingers 
 placed in her palms. Though she screams to seize 
 the blocks before her eyes she can not overcome the 
 instinct to close her fingers and so holds on tightly 
 and keeps on screaming. She is psychically less 
 than a year old ; yet she is past her sixth birthday. 
 Is she permanently retarded? Specialists hesitated 
 to say so and hesitated a year after she was under 
 
 / 
 
THE CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS 167 
 
 their close observation. In six weeks she learned 
 to walk and to talk and her progress has remained 
 rapid. What will she be at thirteen or fourteen? 
 Such a case is exceptional and I cite it to bring out 
 the point. On the other hand, here is a low-grade 
 idiot ten years old. The prognosis or prophecy is 
 easy. Still another boy is fifteen, past puberty, and 
 his attainments under the best conditions are those 
 of a middle-grade imbecile. Again the diagnosis 
 is easy. No prediction is involved. He is now what 
 he always will be. His potentialities have all become 
 actualized. He is a middle-grade imbecile. 
 
 The Oral Examination. — The services of a 
 technically trained expert are not required to make 
 the preliminary survey or oral examination of the 
 case. It consists of a series of observations, and a 
 series of questions and answers. The questions 
 should seek to uncover the causes of backwardness 
 first, by covering the child's pedagogical history; 
 secondly, his life history, giving an account of his 
 present social capacities like play and work; of his 
 individual capacities like self-help; of his moral 
 character; of his diseases, past and present; and 
 of his infancy and of his birth-conditions. This 
 leads naturally to the third item, his family history 
 dwelling on the mental and nervous diseases of 
 his parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, brothers, 
 sisters and cousins. The last item is always im- 
 portant and sometimes decisive in its testimony as 
 to the temporariness or permanency of the back- 
 
168 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 wardness under discussion. How much feeble-mind- 
 edness is caused by birth conditions and by circum- 
 stances in life, is a question of grave doubt. All 
 writers admit that the proportion is small. 
 
 Heredity. — When we turn to heredity proper 
 much of the doubtfulness affecting the other two 
 stages of causes vanishes. The supreme fact that 
 permanent backwardness is chiefly due^ to mental 
 defects of parents seems to be established beyond 
 doubt and continual researches tend to raise the per- 
 centages of cases caused by them. The per- 
 centages vary from about sixty-six and two-thirds 
 per cent, to one hundred per cent. That is, some 
 authors suggest that two-thirds at least of all 
 the feeble-mindedness in the world could be elim- 
 inated in a few generations by proper public 
 sentiment and sufficient legislation adequately en- 
 forced to prevent the propagation of the mentally 
 unfit. Some few insist that nearly all of it would 
 disappear. Out of thirty-five medical men ex- 
 amined in England by the Royal Commission of 
 1904, twenty-five asserted their belief that feeble- 
 mindedness was almost, if not wholly a hereditary 
 disease. The other ten who placed environment be- 
 fore heredity as a casual factor had had very much 
 less opportunity to study the facts. Modern bio- 
 logical theories tend more and more to confirm the 
 opinion of the twenty-five experts. A few scientists 
 insist that feeble-minded people are a distinct variety 
 of the human species, and if they were left to them- 
 
THE CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS 169 
 
 selves to propagate their kind, would develop a 
 separate race of imbeciles. All of this evidence 
 tends strongly to the belief that amentia is wholly 
 hereditary and that no diseases, wounds or accidents 
 happening to the individual in his lifetime, at birth, 
 or later, can make an imbecile out of a child with 
 a normal brain. This, however, is a disputed point 
 which may be ultimately insolvable. For, grant- 
 ing that certain diseases like cerebral meningitis 
 will inevitably leave a mark upon the mind of the 
 afflicted child as ineradicable as the scar tissue on 
 the cortex, still it can be plausibly argued that this 
 germ disease would never have arisen had not the 
 brain been natively weak and, therefore, susceptible 
 to the attacks of the disease. Much support is given 
 to this theory by the fact that the sequelae, or evil 
 results, of scarlet fever and other illnesses, may 
 leave the special nervous end-organs like eyes and 
 ears permanently affected and yet not be able to 
 mar the strong central brain. Examples of such 
 cases will readily occur to all. Laura Bridgman, 
 and later Helen Keller, are brilliant ones. Malnutri- 
 tion and marasmus may be urged as causes of feeble- 
 mindedness arising after birth. Here again the 
 same kind of counter-argument can be used and sup- 
 ported to some extent with some degree of force by 
 the general assertion that the healthy brain always 
 demands its toll of sustenance even at the expense 
 of all other organs in the human body; that when 
 men die of starvation all their organs except the 
 
170 BACKWARD. CHILDREN 
 
 brain perish from want. The brain, like the mon- 
 arch of a kingdom, demands its tax from all the 
 rest. It starves last. 
 
 The Physical Examination. — ^After the inquiry 
 into the personal and family history comes the phys- 
 ical examination. While it must be made in part at 
 least by a regular physician, it need not be a medical 
 diagnosis. It is safest merely to note symptoms 
 or suspicions of symptoms to be fully studied later 
 by a specialist. The examination consists, first, of 
 a full description of the personal appearance of the 
 child ; secondly, his principal measurements ; thirdly, 
 his chest-expansion, grip of his hands, and his power 
 to resist fatigue; fourthly, the acuteness of his spe- 
 cial senses, especially sight and hearing. This 
 makes up the first part of the examination which 
 any clinicist can give. The second part is the med- 
 ical examination, and should be performed by a 
 regularly licensed physician. It includes tests of the 
 heart, lungs, throat and nose, stomach, intestines, 
 liver, kidneys, genito-urinary organs, and a search 
 for any constitutional or nervous diseases. The 
 'purpose of this whole examination is twofold; it is 
 made to discover two classes of physical defects. 
 The first are removable and hence are associated 
 with and are signs of temporary retardation. The 
 second are inborn, are not removable and are signs 
 of permanent retardation. 
 
 Can the teacher learn by the physical marks alone 
 to distinguish temporary backwardness from per- 
 
THE CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS 171 
 
 manent backwardness? In some low grades of im- 
 becility and in all grades of idiocy, yes. In the 
 grades of moronity, or light feeble-mindedness, no. 
 The marks on the bodies of these high-grade classes 
 are no more numerous nor prominent than with nor- 
 mal persons. Recently a daily paper presented the 
 picture of an apparent imbecile. There was the 
 open mouth, front teeth very wide apart indicating 
 the absence of other teeth, the thick low-growing 
 hair hiding the upper part of the ears, attached ear- 
 lobes, drooping eyelids, and the vacuous look of the 
 vacant mind. Further reading discovered the fact 
 that it was really a photograph of a young society 
 woman belonging to one of the best families. This 
 caution is thrown against the too ready and too easy 
 judgment of a child by his external appearance. Bad 
 manners, dirty face and hands, unkempt hair, com- 
 mon ugliness are none of them at all significant of 
 imbecility, nor of the opposite virtues of mentality. 
 In cases of true feeble-mindedness the uglier the 
 child is, the more hope is there of educating him; the 
 comelier he is, the less the hope of making much 
 progress in his training. 
 
 The Physical Marks of the Typical Imbecile. — 
 The typical feeble-minded person carries about in 
 his body marks that, to the practical eye, immedi- 
 ately catalogue him with unerring certainty. These 
 marks vary in number and prominence from grade 
 to grade of mentality. The idiot presents them with 
 pitiable obviousness ; the imbecile in a lesser degree ; 
 
172 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 and the moron only obscurely. Probably no one in- 
 dividual ever possesses all the physical defects of 
 feeble-mindedness. To describe them, therefore, we 
 must imagine a typical case of middle-grade imbec- 
 ility and making that the standard, expect in gen- 
 eral that those below him will possess many of the 
 defects in a more marked degree, and those above 
 him in a less marked degree. Further, we must 
 warn the student that probably not one of the de- 
 fects to be named are peculiar to mental defectives, 
 but that each one of them might be duplicated some- 
 where in the world in some normally-minded per- 
 son. One swallow does not make a summer but it 
 requires multitudes of the season's signs to mark 
 the change from spring. So one physical defect does 
 not make a person feeble-minded ; but a whole mass 
 of irremovable physical defects found in a backward 
 child marks feeble-mindedness with almost fatal cer- 
 tainty. Hence, the caution must go out against, 
 first, judging by physical marks without backzvard- 
 ness; secondly, against judging by one or a few 
 marks and not by a systematic examination of the 
 whole body; and thirdly, in the lesser stages of 
 retardation, against basing the final decision for 
 permanent backwardness on physical marks even 
 with a history of backwardness included. With 
 these limitations, the ordinary teacher or parent can 
 do at least two things ; first, can be instantly directed 
 to the study and further examination of a backward 
 child and so save it from false treatment and detri- 
 
THE CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS 173 
 
 mental training, and secondly, confirm to a large 
 degree a suspicion of feeble-mindedness by merely 
 looking closely at a child. 
 
 General Appearance. — Even to the most casual 
 and most unskilled observer there is something de- 
 cidedly abnormal in the general appearance of a typ- 
 ical imbecile. If the observer were asked to point 
 out just what it is that marks out this poor soul 
 from normal people, he would probably be at a loss 
 to do it without systematic practise in the art. That 
 comes from the little-noted fact that people look at 
 each other only very generally and describe indi- 
 viduals only in comparative terms. *Tall," "short," 
 "heavy," "light," "dark hair/' "large head," really 
 mean nothing as descriptions of persons. I have 
 frequently placed a child before a class of teachers, 
 have asked them to look at the child for fifteen min- 
 utes and then tell me what the child was like. The 
 variety of answers received was bewildering. Fat 
 and thin, light and dark, tall and short, large for his 
 age, small for his age, and many other equally con- 
 tradictory judgments can be derived from persons 
 who observe daily all sorts of children. Such ex- 
 periences suggest that observing children accurately 
 is an art to be diligently acquired, that wherever pos- 
 sible measurements be made, and that terms as ac- 
 curate as possible be used, amplified with phrases; 
 for example, not "tall," but "tall for a child of 
 nine," if a measurement is not given, with the im- 
 plication that the average height of a nine-year-old 
 
174 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 is the one given in some standard chart Hke Has- 
 tings'. 
 
 With these cautions we are ready to take another 
 look at our typical imbecile to discern what it is in 
 his personal appearance that impresses us. To do 
 that we will proceed with a systematic survey, meas- 
 uring first his height and weight, then looking at 
 his skin, then his posture, then his gait. After that 
 we will proceed to details of hair, skull, eyes, ears, 
 nose, mouth, teeth, tongue, hands and feet. By that 
 time we ought to know something of his character- 
 istic marks. 
 
 His Complexion. — In the first place, probably 
 the most striking quality about his general appear- 
 ance is his peculiar opaque, ashy complexion, due 
 to his poor circulation and his harsh, thick-looking 
 skin which is easily broken, giving ready rise to in- 
 fection and furnishing a congenial soil for parasites, 
 and giving off, in some cases, a peculiar odor, which 
 is so pronounced that an expert can diagnose imbec- 
 ility by simply entering the room where such a child 
 has been for a little time. Excellent diet, free exer- 
 cise and frequent baths will to a large extent over- 
 come all these defects. 
 
 Along with the skin the posture makes its impres- 
 sion on the eye. The head is usually inclined for- 
 ward and to one side, the shoulders droop forward, 
 the hands swing listlessly at the sides, the knees are 
 bent and the whole attitude reminds one of the ape. 
 Walking does not improve matters. The feet drag 
 
THE CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS 175 
 
 listlessly, the toes scrape on the floor, the arms 
 swing pendulum-Hke, and the whole movement pro- 
 ceeds aimlessly and without certain decision as to 
 point of destination or the path of reaching it. The 
 imbecile is clumsy in all movements, slow in run- 
 ning, falls frequently, and shows in every act the one 
 great characteristic of flabbiness in all his thinking 
 and doing. 
 
 Various Bodily Organs. — The various organs 
 furnish their detail of defects to fill in the picture. 
 Beginning at the top, we find skulls are too large or 
 too small ; too short and too long ; the first be- 
 cause of water usually in the cavities of the brain; 
 the second, not because of any pressure on the brain, 
 but because the brain will not grow; the third often 
 from malnutrition in babyhood, giving the box- 
 shaped skull; and the fourth from malformation of 
 brain. The technical names for the four types are 
 microcephalic, hydrocephalic, brachycephalic and 
 dolichocephalic. Though popularly these shapes of 
 skull are thought to be highly important as betrayers 
 of mental defects, they are in fact quite indecisive 
 and in themselves form no criteria of brain defects 
 at all. If the brains are there and in working order 
 it matters little how they are shaped. Napoleon, it 
 is asserted by some, was slightly hydrocephalic. A 
 professor in one of our colleges is markedly dolicho- 
 cephalic and IS very able. Great musicians are said 
 to be usually brachycephalic. Only when other ab- 
 normalities of character and conduct appear are 
 
176 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 these departures from the usual significant. In this 
 connection it might be remarked that the hair is 
 either very sparse or very thick, fine and silky or 
 coarse and wiry, and that the color is not significant. 
 The Special Sense Organs. — ^The various or- 
 gans of special sense come next. The eyes may be 
 small and set near together, or far apart, often de- 
 fective and sometimes one is one color and the other 
 another color. The ears are thought to be very sig- 
 nificant. The lobes are frequently attached or grown 
 to the cheek; the shell is badly formed with little 
 hard knots of cartilage at the top called Darwinian 
 tubercles, because they are thought to come from 
 ape-ancestry; the whole ear may be excessively 
 large or excessively small, may stand out from the 
 head, and may be misplaced, too far back or too high 
 up on the side of the head, though the shape of the 
 skull will often give this effect if it is low or flat at 
 the back. The nose is usually flat at the bridge and 
 wide in the nostrils, though again the opposite may 
 be true and the nose present a keen appearance with 
 thin nostrils. I have never seen a feeble-minded 
 child with a Roman nose, even among Jews, though 
 of course there may be some. The mouth is large 
 and coarse with thick lips, or strikingly small with 
 knife-blade lips. The marked symptom is slavering 
 with sores at the corners of the mouth and cracks at 
 other parts of the lips. The teeth are crooked, peg- 
 shaped, decayed, some absent from babyhood, and 
 sometimes too many present, even to the extent of 
 
THE CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS 177 
 
 forming a double row on each jaw. The tongue is 
 thick or thin and pointed, and cut with deep fissures. 
 The hands are the pecuHar organs of human in- 
 teUigence and as such furnish the surest indicator of 
 the deficient mentaHty of the imbecile. His hands 
 are typically weak, flaccid, useless, listless, lying 
 about as if they did not belong to him; if well kept, 
 with smooth tender skin, and ladylike fingers, 
 feeble of prehension and likely not to oppose them- 
 selves to the thumb in any decided fashion at any 
 time, and not at all for years after birth. The cor- 
 responding fingers on the two hands may be of dif- 
 ferent shape, are sometimes deformed, webbed and 
 lacking; the ends are clubbed and the nails brittle. 
 More significant than their appearance is the imbec- 
 ile's attitude toward his hands. Normal people 
 find them useful; to him they seem to be insignifi- 
 cant appendages as useless as those of a medieval 
 court-lady and as devoid of purpose as the tail of an 
 elephant. And all of this has come about because 
 they have not been energized into countless activities 
 by a normal and active brain behind them to tasks 
 that have curved the fingers and thumbs like a sail- 
 or's ready to grasp a rope. Even after mere imita- 
 tive training has taught the muscles certain manual 
 habits, there still remains a lack of that decisive pre- 
 hension so naturally the property of normal minds. 
 Descending to feet we have little to add except to 
 note that flat feet are common, that a broken-down 
 instep seems to indicate a broken-down mind, and 
 
178 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 to repeat that the flabbiness of the hand and all other 
 muscles extends itself to the cold, bloodless pedal ex- 
 tremities, making them peculiarly liable to frost- 
 bite. 
 
 Mental Tests. — ^The third examination is the 
 mental test proper. Not that eye-examinations and 
 head-measurements are not mental tests, but here we 
 come to tests that have always been associated with 
 the mind as measures of intelligence. They may be 
 divided into three kinds; first, pedagogical tests; 
 second, non-pedagogical tests; third, tests for spe- 
 cific defects in particular mental processes; and, un- 
 less such tests have been included in the physical 
 examination, tests of the special senses. The peda- 
 gogical tests are just the ordinary schoolroom ex- 
 amination questions — reading, writing, grammar 
 and arithmetic. The fact is that the pedagogical 
 tests are just as good as many others specially elab- 
 orated for measuring general backwardness. If 
 for example, a ten-year-old boy has been exposed 
 continuously to four years of schooling and can do 
 only second grade work and no special cause ac- 
 counts for his deficiency, he can be safely counted 
 on to be two years retarded in his general mental 
 growth. Neither, in all probability, will any special 
 talent in some particular direction vitiate this judg- 
 ment nor disappoint the expectation that he will 
 show the same degree of retardation by other sys- 
 tems of tests. In short, school grading, applied to 
 
THE CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS 179 
 
 a large number of children under the same condi- 
 tions, measures their mental capacities and predicts 
 their future adjustments to society with fair ac- 
 curacy. 
 
 Other tests have been formulated to measure the 
 mental capacities of children independent of their 
 school learning. How far they succeed is a question. 
 The system best known in this country was formu- 
 lated by two Frenchmen, Monsieur Binet and Mon- 
 sieur Simon. The final form of the tests consists of 
 five questions and tasks for each normal child from 
 three years old up to fifteen, or mental maturity. An 
 elaborate system of grading defines the child's men- 
 tal stature. If he is two years or more behind his fel- 
 lows of the same age, it is assumed that he will 
 never make up the lost ground, and so is mentally 
 defective. These tests are simple, compact, easy 
 to apply and measure mentality in terms of nor- 
 mal children's ages. For these and other acci- 
 dental reasons Binet's tests have spread far and 
 wide. One stricture on their application can be 
 made with a fair degree of safety. They should 
 not alone decide the feeble-mindedness of any 
 child. Binet himself did not intend them for 
 such a purpose and specifically warns against such 
 a contingency. Taken in connection with physical 
 conditions, environmental influences and heredity, 
 they are probably quite as accurate as pedagogical 
 tests and are more convenient to apply. 
 
180 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 Signs of Permanent Backwardness. — Though 
 we now come to what might be supposed to be signs 
 of mental deficiency most easy to discover, namely^ 
 the mental signs of permanent backwardness, as a 
 matter of fact, we have reached the most obscure 
 and most difficult portion of diagnosis. For this 
 kind of mental deficiency does not show itself in 
 some peculiar and limited mental defect perfectly 
 obvious to the examiner. As the definition indicates, 
 feeble-mindedness is such a pervasive, such an all- 
 inclusive disease that it can not be diagnosed from 
 one class of symptoms or signs. Here again we 
 meet the same quality which is manifested especially 
 in the higher grades of mental deficiency. I have 
 now in mind a girl fourteen years old, well-formed 
 in every respect, beautiful of face, sweet and mild- 
 tempered, expressing in her repose and poise a mind 
 and character above her years, with no mental defect 
 whatever showing in her exterior appearance, or 
 in her manual work. Yet this girl, who in all man- 
 ual work shows no want of any ordinary mental 
 powers, soon displays by her talk, by almost in- 
 finitesimal traits of manner and silliness of smile, 
 that '^something is wrong." What is it? It is an 
 evanescent something, a general tone, a continuous 
 permeation of everything she does with a ''lack.'' 
 ''She has a lack" is the paradoxical truth about the 
 matter, though what that lack is, is hard to put 
 down on paper because it does not appear in any 
 of her physical attributes but lies hidden somewhere 
 
THE CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS 181 
 
 in her mind and character and colors her whole act- 
 ive life. 
 
 General Signs of Permanent Backwardness. 
 —Probably the best way to come at the pe- 
 culiarities of the feeble mentality is to point out the 
 first and greatest defect. It is slowness. But here 
 again we are in danger of sayrfig"at"6hce too little 
 and too much ; too much because many normal peo- 
 ple are slow in their thinking processes yet have the 
 capability not only of maintaining themselves in so- 
 ciety but of advancing very materially through years 
 of persistent toil. The mental defective lacks the 
 persistency. He is slow and flighty. We are in 
 danger of saying too little because the slowness is 
 not always in the mental processes themselves but in 
 their development. The mental defective will some- 
 times reply quickly enough; indeed he will exhibit 
 a certain smartness and wit in his answers or ob- 
 servations, especially if the questions fall within his 
 limited capacities and if he is of the excitable 
 and susceptible type. In fact, it is easy to de- 
 ceive a whole room full of careful observers by 
 putting questions to a feeble-minded child in their 
 presence, each question lying within the powers of 
 the child and worded in such a way that he gets a 
 hint of the answer, though all the questions may be 
 new to him in the form in which they are asked. 
 The slowness lies not always in the working of men- 
 tal processes like perceiving, remembering, imagin- 
 ing and reasoning when these powers are present 
 
182 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 and items of knowledge are not being learned, but 
 in the development of these processes in the life of 
 the child. Therefore, the mental growth of a per- 
 manently retarded person has been likened to that of 
 the normal child except that the growth does not 
 proceed so rapidly and does not proceed so far. 
 Hence, we find that Binet defines mental retarda- 
 tion of this kind in terms of normal minds of 
 younger age. To put it the other way round, every 
 normal child is born deaf, dumb, blind and an idiot 
 except that it has in it potentialities which will de- 
 velop under proper environment to what nobody on 
 earth can predict. Set up all the babies of the world 
 in a row and who can tell which will be the leaders 
 of the world forty or fifty years hence? On the 
 other hand, the mental defective is born deaf, 
 dumb, blind and an idiot, and either remains an idiot, 
 or slowly grows into an imbecile, or else a moron, 
 reaching those upper limits in twelve or fifteen years 
 and halting there for all the rest of his life. Within 
 certain fairly well-defined limits his future can be 
 prophesied and this prophecy we have called the 
 diagnosis. His progress over this limited way is 
 fairly well divided into stages by his years and 
 these likewise have been marked out and described 
 more or less accurately, though work of this kind is 
 still going on and details of his picture are being 
 filled in each year. The signs of his mentality are 
 given in the following composite table made up 
 from a number of authors : 
 
THE CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS 183 
 
 A Bird's-Eye View of Grades of Feeble-Minded Chil- 
 dren Correlated With the Ages of Normal 
 Children 
 I. Morons. 
 
 1. High-Grade Moron. — Educable in elemen- 
 
 tary school work ; can write simple letters ; 
 can be trained in manual and intellectual 
 arts ; can not plan for the future. Equals 
 normal child of twelve years, or eleven 
 years. 
 
 2. Middle-Grade Moron. — Can be trained in 
 
 the manual arts ; is two years or more re- 
 tarded in school work of the simplest 
 kind. Equals normal child of ten years, 
 or nine years. 
 
 3. Low-Grade Moron. — Can be trained in in- 
 
 dustrial and simplest manual occupations ; 
 can do errands and light work ; can not 
 learn to read or write except the simplest 
 words. Equals normal child of eight 
 years. 
 II. Imbeciles. 
 
 1. High-Grade Imbeciles. — Can do tasks of 
 
 short duration; wash, scrub, sweep, etc., 
 but nothing higher. Equals normal child 
 of seven years. 
 
 2. Middle-Grade Imbecile. — Improvable in self- 
 
 help and help to others, that is, can be 
 taught to wash himself, eat, etc. ; can do 
 only the simplest tasks ; can guard himself 
 against common dangers. Equals normal 
 child of six years, or five years. 
 
 3. Low-Grade Imbecile. — Plays a little, but can 
 
 do nothing else without supervision. 
 Equals normal child of four years, or 
 three years. 
 III. Idiots. 
 
 L High-Grade Idiot. — Eats with discrimina- 
 tion, rejecting what is not food; can not 
 
184 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 protect himself against common dangers. 
 Equals normal child of two years. 
 
 2. Middle-Grade Idiot. — Able to feed himself, 
 
 but will eat almost anything. Equals nor- 
 mal child of one year. 
 
 3. Low-Grade Idiot. — Not able to walk, talk or 
 
 move; will swallow whatever is put into 
 
 his mouth. 
 Some Particular Marks of Backwardness. — To 
 the description of these general capacities we may 
 add a few words concerning definite processes of 
 the mind. For it often happens, especially with a 
 certain class of imbeciles called idiot es savants, or 
 learned idiots, that they possess wonderful powers 
 in certain directions. So the ordinary defective may 
 possess ordinary capacities in several directions but 
 be entirely or largely wanting in other directions. 
 
 Usually his perception is present but dull, drop- 
 ping down to greater and greater dulness as we fall 
 to lower grades of mental incapacity. Training is 
 necessary to get the defective to see and hear sights 
 and sounds which the ordinary child perceives in- 
 stantly and reflexly. His memory is almost always 
 pronounced "good'' by his relatives and friends. 
 They mean by that that he remembers small items of 
 experience which, on account of their unimportance, 
 are speedily swallowed up in the larger issues of life 
 as it is lived by normal people. Another talent as 
 frequently noted by friends, is the feeble-minded 
 . child's aptitude for music. As rhythm permeates all 
 ^ life, so also does it flow through all grades of mental 
 deficiency, reaching in the morons sometimes to 
 
THE CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS 185 
 
 splendid abilities in classical music, and in a few 
 cases, to a positive genius in rendition. Music is a 
 most valuable means of training mental defectives 
 and the band of a feeble-minded institution is al- 
 ways one of its happiest features. Yet the players 
 can not compose, for their constructive imagination 
 is lame, halting, and usually busied when it acts at 
 all with fantastic and childish schemes, or with 
 vain-glorious dreams of self-aggrandizement, 
 though sometimes those talented in manual work 
 will plan material things, and moral imbeciles will 
 scheme diligently how to do some mischief. If such 
 activities can be called reasoning, mental defectives 
 have reason, but it amounts to no more than mere 
 cunning and to practical wisdom capable of seeing 
 the means to material ends but failing in the higher 
 realms of abstract thinking, and never able to look 
 forward through the years and conserve present 
 good for future needs of self or others. On the 
 whole, through all stages of mentality from idiots 
 up, these capacities vary as they vary in growing 
 normal children, and we can always best measure 
 the power and responsibilities of these little folk, 
 no matter how old they grow, by assigning them to 
 their proper psychological ages and then asking, 
 "What would a normal boy or girl do at the corre- 
 sponding age?" For instance, if it is a middle-grade 
 imbecile boy we are considering, we must ask, "What 
 would a seven-year-old normal boy do, or be ?" 
 Besides defects in the intellectual processes of 
 
V 
 
 186 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 these children, defects in feelings, instincts and emo- 
 tions often appear especially in the lower grades. 
 The idiot lacks from the beginning the simplest life- 
 preserving instincts; he must be taught to eat, and 
 the lowest grade will eat anything put into his 
 mouth. The higher grades often lack the social in- 
 stincts. All of them are nearly always egotistic, 
 living in a little world bounded by those interests that 
 closely attach themselves to self and its immediate 
 satisfactions. Vanity, egotism, love of notice and of 
 notoriety are their petty vices, often leading them 
 into ludicrous acts, and occasionally into acts of 
 unpremeditated but desperate violence. One low- 
 grade imbecile always follows visitors through his 
 department of the institution where he is kept, sol- 
 emnly imitating the official guide in all his acts and 
 gestures. Another tried to bribe an officer at an ex- 
 hibit to mark his piece of work with a card crediting 
 him with mentality a grade higher than he really 
 was. He did not dream of asking to be made nor- 
 mal. Another set fire to some buildings merely for 
 excitement and the possible chance to play the hero. 
 All of these instances are revelations of the instinc- 
 tive stages in which these queer people live, as well 
 as instances of failures of that volitional power 
 which would keep similar impulses in normal people 
 safely hidden from the light of day. 
 
 Indeed, the final mark of feeble-mindedness lies 
 more in the will than anywhere else. In the last 
 analysis it is a matter of character. Almost every 
 
THE CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS 187 
 
 mental aberration, and every foolish feeling of the 
 feeble-minded might be duplicated in the myriad of 
 feelings and foolish thoughts of normal people who 
 nevertheless have the power to suppress them 
 always to some degree, and usually to a degree 
 consonant with their living and moving in ordinary 
 society. Everybody is in some degree and on some 
 occasions feeble-minded. Fatigue reduces the best 
 minds to that state; a terrible event, stage fright, 
 sudden awakening, extreme embarrassment, reduce 
 some people to a state of mind very similar to the 
 almost constant inner experience of the feeble- 
 minded person whose field of attention is limited al- 
 ways and whose mind stops dead under any, for him, 
 undue pressure. But the normal person is not too 
 feeble-minded; he passes muster in the large social 
 life of the community and barring accidents that no- 
 body can avoid, succeeds in being fairly safe, pros- 
 perous and happy. 
 
 Therefore in mind at least, there is a close kin 
 between the so-called normal and the mentally de- 
 fective. It is a kin that readily removes all repug- 
 nance from the minds of those who live with these 
 unfortunates. For very soon teachers of the de- 
 fectives see in them all the virtues and all the foi- 
 bles in germ, at least, which pass with such a brave 
 show in the real world, and they find themselves not 
 transported to an entirely new existence, but simply 
 removed to stage-land wherein the tragedies of the 
 larger world appear in the burlesques of Punch and 
 
188 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 Judy, real to the players as Punch is to children, 
 where the sorrows of life are poignant with the 
 anguish of the moment and as ephemeral as the tears 
 that wash away their sting forever. One knows not 
 whether to laugh or weep when he sees a strong 
 man, forty years old, stand up against a door and 
 bawl like a baby because he could not go down to 
 his beloved laundry work on account of a quaran- 
 tine for measles, and to hear the attendant say, 
 "Why, Billy Moore, aren't you ashamed to stand up 
 there before everybody and cry like that?" But he 
 was not ashamed and bellowed out his woe with 
 the abandon of a healthy three-year-old who had 
 dropped his candy in the dust. 
 
 Summary. — ^These, in brief, are the physical 
 and mental signs of permanent backwardness. The 
 method of discovering and measuring them has been 
 outlined in this very brief account, but it is detailed 
 enough to enable the teacher or the parent to distin- 
 guish temporary backwardness from permanent 
 backwardness. The importance of this ability ap- 
 pears when it is remembered that by the most con- 
 servative estimates, about six hundred thousand or 
 seven hundred thousand feeble-minded children are 
 to be found among the eighteen million in the public 
 schools; and of these about ninety thousand are in- 
 stitutional cases, some of them very low indeed in 
 mentality. To distinguish these six hundred thou- 
 sand from the rest of the six million who are re- 
 tarded only temporarily is of the highest importance. 
 
JHE CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS 189 
 
 Otherwise confusion results in injury and waste and 
 begets in the teacher a skepticism and hopelessness 
 regarding methods of teaching backward children, 
 methods which should never be applied to the feeble- 
 minded who can not be taught some lessons by any 
 method known to man. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE TEACHER^S DIAGNOSIS 
 
 IT IS said that when a new student came for 
 training under the great Agassiz he was given 
 a fish by the master and told to sit down and "look 
 at zee fish !" In a couple of hours he might be asked 
 for a report, would render it and ask what next. 
 "Look at zee fish!" was the invariable answer re- 
 peated often for days and even weeks before this 
 master-observer who said "Learn from nature, not 
 books !" was ready to let the tyro begin more ambi- 
 tious work. If an ordinary fish was worthy of all 
 that observation how much more should the same pa- 
 tient observation be due from the teacher to the 
 special pupil ! He is the most wonderful creation in 
 all the world, the epitome of all the limitless past 
 and possessing besides something new that defies all 
 traditional methods and principles of teaching. 
 What that peculiarity is which will henceforth take 
 its place in the creative evolution of the future 
 world, can be found only by the closest, most sys- 
 tematic and thorough observation by the teacher. 
 
 Yet how hard it is to see a child ! He is such a 
 wild shy creature, untamed, undomesticated and 
 
 190 
 
THE TEACHER'S DIAGNOSIS 191 
 
 unused to the ways of society. One must steal upon 
 him unawares and watch him in his native habitat 
 to see him as he really is. Among adults he is in 
 captivity. Only in unrestricted play does he reveal 
 his true nature. Under the teacher's eye he is likely 
 to try to be something different from what he is. 
 That is the first difficulty. Then there is the social 
 inheritance of the child showing itself obviously in 
 his clothes, his manners and the care of his body. 
 Through these veils we find ourselves peering back 
 into his home and into his parentage, and being af- 
 fected in our estimate of his mentality by these 
 draperies that cling so closely to him. 
 
 One day a teacher brought two of her pupils to 
 a clinic. They were both girls about ten years 
 of age. Both were backward and in the ungraded 
 class. The teacher was clear in her conviction that 
 Claire was far superior in her mentality to Meg. 
 
 Claire was a sweet child. Her presence breathed 
 sainthood. Her fellow pupils had nicknamed her 
 "St. Anne." Her hair was smooth and glossy and 
 the ribbon that held it back from her brow was 
 stiff and new; her gray checkered coat was new; 
 her dark blue dress was of good material and with- 
 out a spot or blemish or extra wrinkle; her shoes 
 were polished ; around her wrists and neck she wore 
 bits of white lace, and a locket hung on her bosom 
 from its gold chain. Her skin was clear and white 
 and her large, violet, sadly-solemn eyes looked out 
 from her oval face, with the heavenly look of a 
 
192 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 medieval Madonna. Sanctity warmed with ami- 
 ability, and passivity tempered with docility radi- 
 ated from the personality of this quiet little girl 
 and immediately enlisted the sympathy of every one 
 who came into her presence. 
 
 Meg was the extreme opposite of the saintly 
 Claire. She was a brunette, a vigorous intense 
 one; eyes deep-set and gleaming out from under 
 her shock of cropped straight hair that came down 
 on her low forehead to her straight heavy eye- 
 brows. Her clothes were poor, ill-fitting, old, dirty. 
 Her dress was black, bare of cuffs or collar; her 
 shoes were worn and scarred ; her appearance was 
 unrelieved by ornament ; her personality expressive 
 of energy shot forth in nervous jets of temper 
 verging on rebellion. To look at her gave one the 
 feeling of approaching a spiny creature, of walking 
 on broken jagged glass. 
 
 When the cold hard tests of science were ap- 
 plied to measure the mentality of these two girls it 
 was found that Meg was decidedly the better. Her 
 future was the more promising. She had in her 
 undeveloped potentialities, germs of capabilities 
 that could be trained into serviceable activities. Her 
 energies needed harnessing and directing. Claire 
 had no hidden resources. She was good because 
 she was not bad; not because she overcame evil 
 with good. She had nothing in her. Her appear- 
 ance was due to well-to-do parents, especially to a 
 painstaking mother. Meg had no mother. She 
 
THE TEACHER'S DIAGNOSIS 193 
 
 lived with an aunt. She had to dress herself and 
 also two of her small cousins and to do some house- 
 work to pay for her living. When she had time she 
 played in the streets. Contrasts between these two 
 girls were due to accidents and incidents ; accidents 
 of social inheritance and environment; and inherited 
 qualities like complexion, features and tempera- 
 ments which were mere incidents to learning. 
 
 Obviously the teacher in charge of these two 
 girls did not see these girls as pupils. She did not 
 look through the exteriors and see behind the veil 
 of clothes and manners, through her own conven- 
 tions and preperceptions into the minimum essen- 
 tials of her teaching. Those essentials for the 
 teacher were, first, the powers or processes of the 
 mind, inborn or developed, which were already 
 there; and secondly, the potentialities that might 
 yet be developed. These and only these were im- 
 portant to her. The clothes, manners, homes, and 
 other accessories, were merely so many signs of 
 the presence or absence of the essentials. The dis- 
 covery and measurement of these potentialities is 
 a mental diagnosis, described in the last chapter. 
 The study of mental process is now the task 
 of the teacher and she may well begin it by finding 
 out something of the mental content in the minds 
 she is expected to teach. 
 
 Mental Content. — ^The first thing a teacher 1 
 should discover about a backward child is how much ^ 
 he knows. Some backward children are marvels 
 
194 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 of brilliancy in some respects and utterly incapable 
 in others. Their mental defect is not general but 
 special and peculiar, showing itself in total igno- 
 rance of only certain branches, and it must be 
 studied thoroughly by the teacher before she can 
 proceed. Mathematical and musical prodigies are 
 frequently utterly unlearned in other sciences. A 
 young man recently died in an asylum, who in some 
 respects was a prodigy of learning and a genius in 
 intellect. He could recite whole pages from Shake- 
 speare, Milton or other classic writers after he had 
 once heard them recited on the stage or elsewhere. 
 Yet he was utterly deficient in other branches of 
 learning, and it was even doubtful if he could read. 
 One of the finest wood-model makers in the world 
 is in an institution for feeble-minded in England. 
 He received a prize for a perfect and complete 
 model of the Great Eastern, every mast, spar, rope, 
 block and bit of furniture of which is faithfully 
 reproduced, all requiring the use of about a million 
 one hundred and twenty-five thousand pegs which 
 he himself fashioned on a machine of his own in- 
 vention. These are a few striking examples of what 
 are encountered in less exaggerated forms every 
 term in any special class. The same extreme irregu- 
 larities and mental defects may not occur, but large 
 and sometimes surprising deficiencies are discovered 
 by a systematic examination. 
 
 How perfectly ridiculous it would be to teach 
 memory-gems to the genius in classics and manual 
 
THE TEACHER'S DIAGNOSIS 195 
 
 training to the model-maker! And how equally 
 futile it would be to reverse the order of subjects 
 and start the classical genius in manual training with 
 the Great Eastern and the model-maker with Mil- 
 ton's Paradise Lost! 
 
 The content of a pupil's mind must be measured, 
 first, to avoid the obvious waste of learning what 
 is old; and secondly, for the less obvious necessity 
 involved in learning anything new. All learning 
 is leavening. The leaven transmits the fresh dough 
 into a substance similar to itself. In learning we 
 call the process "assimilation of knowledge," and 
 the leaven the '^apperceptive mass." The new 
 knowledge must be assimilable. An ordinary child 
 can no more get an idea from the word "chimera" 
 than leaven can leaven a stone. "Chimera" must 
 first be translated into "lion's head" and "goat's 
 body" before he will understand, and then only if 
 he knows what a lion's head and a goat's body are 
 like. 
 
 The first and most obvious method of finding 
 what is in a child's mind is to ask him. It requires 
 natural tact and much skill, but it would seem to 
 be an essential part and art of teaching to do it. 
 The ordinary daily review of yesterday's lesson is 
 one method. School examinations should give a 
 systematic, accurate and fairly complete account 
 of the pupil's knowledge of school subjects but they 
 fail to give any estimate of what a child knows 
 about common things, and they do not prove that 
 
196 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 he has a clear idea because he uses the proper 
 words in a correct answer. 
 
 The Child's Interests. — The teacher may ap- 
 proach the pupil with this thought in her mind, 
 "How shall I interest him in the lesson?" or, with 
 the antipodal query, **In what is this pupil inter- 
 ested?'' The former attitude is that of the mother 
 who brought her nine-year-old boy to a specialist 
 who found him apparently a ruddy, healthy, nor- 
 mal-minded boy in every way. The specialist finally 
 inquired why she had brought him, and was amazed 
 to hear that the mother held the gravest fears for 
 her son's future because she had discovered, though 
 it nearly broke her heart to say it, that he was a 
 degenerate! The specialist, dumfounded for the 
 moment, asked the agitated woman her reasons for 
 such a terrible suspicion. Then she related how 
 she herself was trying to educate her boy by an 
 ideal method which would inculcate in him an early 
 love for the true, the good and the beautiful. Part 
 of his education consisted of daily visits to a 
 museum near his home, where there was a magnifi- 
 cent collection of the choicest paintings from the 
 best masters. Here she endeavored to instil estheti- 
 cism into her boy by having him sit quietly in the 
 art-rooms, a different one each day, and absorb art. 
 But, and here the poor woman almost broke down 
 in her anguish, the boy seemed utterly indifferent 
 to the beauty round about him and completely im- 
 mune to that method of esthetic infection. Instead 
 
THE TEACHER'S DIAGNOSIS 197 
 
 of silently devouring the masterpieces, he would 
 grow restless, beg her to go, would pull at her 
 skirts, and by every artifice he knew would try to 
 inveigle her to the cases where the swords, daggers, 
 spears, guns and other weapons were kept, where 
 he would stand for hours feasting his eyes on 
 these instruments of blood and destruction. It took 
 all the skill of the expert to convince that good 
 woman that her boy was entirely normal and that 
 he was merely passing through a periodic instinc- 
 tive sta;^e of his life. 
 
 To that woman it was a revelation to find that 
 children were naturally interested in certain objects 
 and certain subjects at certain ages, and that she 
 was attempting the impossible when she was trying 
 to inject into him certain feelings which were not 
 yet there. Of course, this mother knew, as every 
 one else does, that there are great permanent in- 
 stincts in human beings that run through their 
 whole lives. The aversion to pain and desire for 
 pleasure are two such fundamental feelings. With- 
 out them it would be impossible to build any edu- 
 cation or to enforce any discipline. Imitation is 
 another wide-spreading instinct. Its roots lie in 
 gregariousness which makes people flock together. 
 The first instinct ornaments and embellishes with 
 morality, patriotism, religion, custom and art what 
 the second founds. Many more of the same kind 
 might be mentioned but they are not important for 
 the teacher, who, in her analysis of a single child, 
 
 
198 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 can take their existence for granted. The fact that 
 some, indeed many, instincts are universal and per- 
 manent must not obscure the fact that many are 
 also transitory. 
 
 By transitory we mean that certain consuming 
 interests of a child's life will rise to a climax, claim 
 all of his attention and fire all of his plans, and 
 then die down and disappear quite naturally and 
 without any external aid or suppression from any 
 one. To diagnose such a case and to know when 
 the infection with a certain set of instincts has 
 taken place, to follow them in their period incuba- 
 tion, and to seize their power when they reach their 
 climax and bind this flood-tide of power to some 
 subject which will be then learned so as never again 
 to be forgotten, demands the genius and skill of a 
 great teacher. If the lesson is thrust on the child 
 too early it may not take, and what is worse, it may 
 render him immune to any later infection by the 
 same subject; if the lesson is delayed it will fall list- 
 lessly on a mind whose interest in it is as sear 
 and dead as the autumn leaf. Most anxiously then 
 should the dominant instinct of any child be sought 
 in the teacher's diagnosis. 
 
 The instinctive life of children changes from 
 individual to individual. They do not all have the 
 same instincts, and they do not all have them in 
 the same intensity. Nothing is more common than 
 that if we only stop to think of it. It makes the 
 
THE TEACHER^S DIAGNOSIS 199 
 
 fundamental differences in people, in their charac- 
 ters and in their professions, in all the little inci- 
 dents and traits that go to differentiate one indi- 
 vidual from another. Inborn differences take one 
 boy from the farm and make him a rover of the 
 seas, another a student, another a mechanic, while 
 other differences make him the keeper of the old 
 homestead and the tiller of the soil. One boy has 
 the fighting instinct in him and will work hard in 
 a contest ; another lacks it and will do his best when 
 alone. These primary interests manifesting them- 
 selves in the impulses of childhood, the tastes of 
 individuals, the foibles and crotchets of children, 
 must be all considered when the special teacher is 
 undertaking the training of a child who has failed 
 in the regular grades where uniformity has been 
 the rule. Perhaps in any one of these impulses she 
 may find the key to unlock the child's mind and thus 
 make him a scholar. 
 
 Some scientists believe that the change of in- 
 stinctive life follows a law. Instincts seem to come 
 and go in periods. These periods are thought to 
 follow and repeat the social history of the race in 
 its climb from savagery to civilization. Therefore 
 it need surprise no one to find that a boy is a little 
 savage or a barbarian in his tastes and interests. 
 Whether this theory is true or not need not con- 
 cern the teacher, except as it again suggests study 
 to find in what particular period any particular 
 
200 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 child is at the time she receives him, and as it em- 
 phasizes the fact that not all instincts are permanent 
 and fixed. 
 
 To summarize, instincts are permanent or tran- 
 sient, universal and particular. They vary from 
 individual to individual, and they vary from time 
 to time in the same individual. These variations 
 seem to follow a periodic law that leads the child 
 to reiterate the history of the race. 
 
 A General Instinct. — Play is an instinct so 
 widely diiffused that healthy children are lost in it 
 from the time their eyes open in the morning until 
 their heavy lids fall like shadows of the evening. 
 All children play, play when they are let loose from 
 factories and when their bloodless muscles seem in- 
 capable of any more exertions. Sad it is to see 
 them; as sad as to see the momentary brightening 
 of a sick child when its dear familiar toys are 
 brought to its bedside, perhaps for the last time. 
 Play is a stimulant when all the doctor's lore fails 
 and his medicines lose their potency. For children 
 are like Juvenal's ancient Romans who cared for 
 nothing except bread and games; and sometimes 
 they are so ardent for it that they imitate Voltaire's 
 French who "omitted the panem'' — bread — because 
 of the heart-of -hearts' truth that play is the realest 
 world the child will ever find in his earthly seeking. 
 Wise indeed is the teacher who dares to follow 
 Locke's advice and to make everything that chil- 
 dren have to do sport and play. For the special 
 
THE TEACHER^S DIAGNOSIS 201 
 
 class, without doubt, all tasks must be games and 
 all lessons stories; one the play of muscles, the other 
 the play of minds. To be sure that this will not 
 be misunderstood by those who have never entered, 
 or having entered have forgotten, this portion of 
 heaven, let me say that play is not amusement, not 
 even pleasure alone, but the outpouring of all one's 
 strength to accomplish what one desires with all his 
 might. Once in a while a teacher's attention is ar- 
 rested by a harmony in her schoolroom, when the 
 spirit of work prevails in it and all the air is 
 freighted with spontaneous activity, when every 
 head is bent over book or paper, and the hum of 
 labor is as the humming of bees in the blooming 
 willow-trees in spring. Three sum^mers ago I 
 stepped for a minute into a manual-training class 
 where eighteen pupils were all busy, each one mak- 
 ing a different article, while the teacher was sitting 
 silently by the window. All were at play. She 
 had achieved the play-spirit in a class-exercise and 
 it was a perfect schoolroom. 
 
 Some Particular Instincts. — Not only do 
 great chains of similar likes and dislikes run through 
 mankind, some to bind individuals together, and 
 some to form common links between young and old, 
 all of which exhibit themselves in the presence of 
 a variety of objects, but there are also particular 
 interests that are aroused only on the presenta- 
 tion of their own peculiar stimulations. Here is 
 a profuseness of innate interests among which we 
 
202 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 can find inspirers of interest for every variety of 
 study conceivable. Yet how frequently do we hear 
 a teacher say she *'has exhausted every effort to 
 arouse some torpid pupil !" Surely, she must mean 
 that she has exhausted her own stock of knowledge 
 on particular instincts, or else her own ingenuity 
 for bringing lessons within striking distance of 
 these highly charged motives to endeavor. For the 
 instincts themselves are innumerable and each one 
 of them can be aroused by an indefinite number of 
 objects. To illustrate merely what they are, let us 
 take hunger. It is present in all children above 
 idiots. The sight of food will always arouse a 
 hungry child and the sight of sweets nearly always 
 any child. Fire is another interesting object, one 
 which through many, many generations of sylvan 
 tribes has bound itself up with the nervous systems 
 of our race so that its leaping flames and glowing 
 embers have in them a weirdness sure to strike an 
 answering note in children. They all like to play 
 with fire. Water, — ^where must mothers always 
 look for their runaway boys if a river or lake is 
 near? Mud or clay has its own particular charm. 
 Trees call forth an answering challenge to boys 
 when their apish instincts are ripe. Stones to throw; 
 are nearer to nature than their cousins, balls. Food, 
 water, earth, trees, sticks, stones, all these com- 
 monest objects of life are the ones that dwell near- 
 est the depths of children's souls and answer to the 
 call of hidden and mysterious forces in them. These 
 
JHE JEACHER^S DIAGNOSIS 203 
 
 then should become the paraphernalia of the school- 
 room, the quiver of the teacher who is armed for 
 every emergency. Out of them can be and ought 
 to be fabricated literally numberless toys and in- 
 struments for developing and modifying the primi- 
 tive traits which must be softened down and 
 smoothed to fit the modern civilized world. 
 
 Temperaments. — Closely allied to instincts are 
 emotions or feelings. Nothing about a child is 
 more changeable than his humors. Smiles and tears 
 chase one another across his face like storm and 
 sunshine across April skies. Yet it is true that each 
 possesses a general disposition toward one humor 
 or another and that we will call his temperament. 
 
 About temperament in the ordinary schoolroom, 
 we know but little and reckon with less. The 
 reason is obvious. The system fits the average child 
 and no room is left for consideration of special 
 tempers or temperaments. But the special class is 
 "speciaF' for ''special" children, and here tempera- 
 ment becomes of mighty importance. Where the 
 ordinary teacher notes it incidentally, or hears of it 
 from the anxious mother visiting the school for the 
 sole purpose of impressing the fact of X's peculiar 
 ''temperament" on the weary schoolmistress who 
 considers her duty well done when she suppresses 
 the same peculiarity, the special-class teacher studies 
 it with care and skill and into each pupil's tempera- 
 ment she will fit herself and her methods of en- 
 couragement or suppression. Possibly as good 3. 
 
204 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 description of the various temperaments as can be 
 found is the well-worn one of sanguine, melancholy, 
 choleric and phlegmatic, with the combinations that 
 may arise from tinctures of these being mixed in 
 the same child. The first is the hoj)eful child 
 always bobbing up with great promises of the fu- 
 ture, hard to be made to see the need of present 
 persistent application and needing almost constant 
 suppression. His melancholy brother is just the 
 opposite. He must be guarded from criticism as a 
 tender plant from a hail-storm. He grows in the 
 sunshine of praise. The choleric boy is the hard 
 one to manage for his temper flares up in a moment. 
 "Coolness ! coolness ! coolness !'' is the constant ex- 
 hortation to him. The phlegmatic boy is hard to 
 move by praise or blame, hard to excite, hard to 
 impress and readily acquires a reputation for im- 
 penetrable laziness. Usually he is good-natured 
 about it all and often has a knack of sticking to a 
 task that demonstrates afresh the fable of the mas- 
 ter-phlegmatic tortoise and the hare. These tem- 
 peramental differences are really the ones empha- 
 sized by parents when they aver that "none of their 
 children are alike.'' They make a brave attempt 
 under the guise of justice, to treat each child alike 
 no matter if he is entirely different from the rest. 
 Their zealous though mistaken attempts are some- 
 times softened with charity and much love, but 
 seldom with enough of either. They should temper 
 them even more with the thought that the tempera- 
 
THE TEACHER'S DIAGNOSIS 205 
 
 ment of the child comes direct from his parents, a 
 thing inherited with his nose and eyes and color of 
 his hair. The special teacher of the backward child 
 must recognize the differences and must adjust her- 
 self to them with all the exhilarating freedom of 
 individual teaching. 
 
 The significance of temperament for the teacher 
 is seen in the fact that people think as they feel. 
 **White" suggests orange-blossoms or tombstones, 
 according to the feeling of the hearer. "It snows !'' 
 brings a "Hurrah" from the healthy boy; a "Dear, 
 how lucky" from the pleasure-seeking belle ; an "Oh, 
 God!" from the heavy-laden widow. AH these 
 ideas came from "It snows!"; each one came in 
 answer to the feeling of the subject. If the person 
 is melancholy, sanguine, choleric or phlegmatic, his 
 associations of ideas will be more or less directed 
 by this temperament; he will see things in his en- 
 vironment congruous with it ; and he will remember 
 harmoniously with it. A study of temperament is, 
 therefore, part of a teacher's diagnosis. 
 
 The Perceptive Processes. — Once she has 
 found what a pupil is primarily and most constantly 
 interested in, the teacher is ready for her next ques- 
 tion, "How does he learn — by eye, ear, or hand?" 
 Some children learn chiefly through their eyes and 
 are called visual types. They must see a thing and 
 then they recall the picture of it in their minds. Oth- 
 ers learn by ear, or are auditory types. They must be 
 told and recall what they remember by hearing it. 
 
206 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 Some are kinesthetic, or motor types. They seize 
 upon their knowledge chiefly with their hands and 
 store it up in their muscles and motor-nervous mech- 
 anism. Absolutely pure types of any one of the three 
 enumerated are almost never found. Children 
 learn through the eye, ear, nose, mouth, hand and 
 body muscles; but it often happens that a child is 
 predominatingly one type or the other and a teacher 
 succeeds marvelously by studying which faculty is 
 dominant and working accordingly. 
 
 Examples of each kind of child show how the 
 neglect of this simple fact of innate differences in 
 perceiving and remembering has led to more than 
 one tragic ending of a child*s school career. In- 
 stead I will confine myself to a brief statement of 
 some few facts that have been collected by Doctor 
 Elmer E. Jones, which, quite in harmony with the 
 very recent study of personal difference in the inborn 
 capacities of children, illustrate this special sense- 
 difference. Thirty-six pupils in the eighth grade of a 
 public school were permitted to look at ten familiar 
 objects for a second and a half and then were asked 
 to recall what they had seen. The divergencies in the 
 results were amazing. The lowest record was two 
 and six-tenths and the highest seven and four- 
 tenths; that is, children assigned the same les- 
 sons and expected to learn them by the same 
 methods varied nearly threefold in their capaci- 
 ties to perceive quickly and accurately, and to 
 recall faithfully the things they saw. Such a test 
 
THE JEACHER^S DIAGNOSIS 207 
 
 feasible in any schoolroom with the simplest kind 
 of apparatus, will tell with fair certainty whether 
 a child is a visualizer or not. 
 
 The same thirty-six children were tested for their 
 auditory memory. Ten lists of names of common 
 objects were read to the class and each one was to 
 write down what he remembered. The lowest rec- 
 ord averaged three and a half and the highest nine 
 and seven-tenths, showing that some children pos- 
 sessed nearly three times the power to receive and 
 to recall auditory stimulations that the others had. 
 While the experiments did not show that good vis- 
 ualizers were necessarily good auditors, nor vice 
 versa, they did seem to show that children early 
 form the habit of learning chiefly by ear or by eye. 
 
 Another group of children was given each a cer- 
 tain sound and asked immediately to respond to it by 
 a specified act. This test measured power of atten- 
 tion, fatigue, quickness of reaction, and other quali- 
 ties. Again the greatest differences came out. Some 
 reacted three and a half times faster than others; 
 some were slow and regular ; some rapid, but unreli- 
 able. Is it necessary to add the obvious that each 
 child should have the lesson presented to him so that 
 he can apprehend it in the easiest and quickest way? 
 One must read it with his own eyes ; another must 
 hear it from some one else; another must write it 
 out. Usually, since each child is a mixture of the 
 three types, each child should receive the lesson by 
 eye, ear and hand whenever that is possible. It 
 
208 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 certainly is safe to say that all the children should 
 not be compelled to learn the lesson one way, and 
 one way only. 
 
 Intellectual, Emotional and Volitional Chil- 
 dren. — Closely allied to this division made ac- 
 cording to perceptive methods is another which 
 rests on the dominance or frequency of one of 
 the three great processes in the mental life of the 
 child, thinking, feeling or willing. The effects of 
 these predominances on teaching and the method 
 of discovering to which type a pupil belongs is in- 
 dicated in the following illustration. 
 
 A teacher held up an orange before her class and 
 watched the effect on them as she went on talking 
 about it. Henry, a rather cold, languid, triangular- 
 faced lad, gave a glance at it and then seemed to 
 pay no more attention to it. The anxious teacher 
 was somewhat irritated by his apparent indifference 
 to her well-planned object-lesson, but she went on 
 asking questions and discussing the orange. Sud- 
 denly she noted by Henry's face that he had reached 
 a question mark in his mind. 
 
 "What is it, Henry?" 
 
 "Was Luther Burbank the man that made the 
 Burbank potato?" was the unscientific and surpris- 
 ingly irrelevant question. 
 
 A moment's consideration revealed that Henry 
 had traveled by a long train of thought, as long and 
 complex as the philosopher Hobbes' friend who 
 suddenly interjected the apparently trivial question 
 
THE TEACHER'S DIAGNOSIS 209 
 
 about the value of a Roman penny into a discussion 
 of the Crucifixion. The Crucifixion had suggested 
 the betrayal ; the betrayal, the pieces of money; that, 
 the Roman penny. Henry saw the orange, thought 
 of California or the seedless orange; then of Bur- 
 bank, then of the potato. Such a boy belongs to 
 the intellectual type. He gets knowledge by think- 
 ing things out for himself. All he needs is a start, 
 some suggestion or other, and lo, his train of 
 thought has pulled out of the station on a long and 
 unknown journey. He is the student par excellence. 
 
 In front of him was a little girl who seemed all 
 interest. 
 
 "What do you think of the orange, Mary?" 
 asked the teacher. 
 
 "I got a little baby-brother at home and he likes 
 oranges and when my mama gives him an orange 
 he gets his face all smeared with it!" volubly re- 
 plied the little "mother" and it would be easy to see 
 the trend of her mind toward feelings, even if she 
 did not use the word "likes." Her thoughts are 
 determined by her emotions, and an orange, the 
 same object that carried the cold Henry off to Cali- 
 fornia and plunged him deep into science, trans- 
 ported Mary to her home and the treasures there. If 
 the teacher wishes ever to lodge an idea so it will re- 
 main in Mary's mind, she must surround it, over- 
 lay it and hedge it in with emotional associations; 
 for Mary represents the emotional type. Her read- 
 ing should tell stories of human pathos, her writing 
 
210 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 should be letters to folks at home ; and her arithmetic 
 must figure how the poor widow can buy clothes for 
 her four children on the pittance she earns. We 
 can not hope for text-books to suit every type of 
 child, but we can hope for teachers who will diag- 
 nose their children and will have ingenuity enough 
 to fit their teaching to each disposition. 
 
 While the teacher was asking these questions, 
 Tommy, the chubby, freckle- faced, red-haired boy 
 who had to sit on the front seat where the teacher 
 could watch him, was nearly wriggling himself to 
 pieces. He could hardly keep his seat under the al- 
 most irresistible impulse to grab the orange in both 
 hands. Every time the teacher raised it, his hands 
 involuntarily went up too, ready to catch it. 
 
 "Well, Tommy," at last said the teacher, "what 
 are you bursting to say?" 
 
 "I climbed the tree and shook the apples down, 
 last summer, in the country, and the limb broke," 
 he exploded in a breath. Action, vigorous action 
 all the way through; his mind explodes; his sen- 
 tences shoot out promiscuously and illogically; his 
 thoughts are all dynamic with motion. He wants 
 to seize the orange, handle it, toss it up in the air, 
 climb the tree it grew on. Whatever lessons the 
 teacher wants him to learn must be full of action, 
 learned by writing them on the blackboard, if pos- 
 sible, where plenty of movement is necessary, or 
 by walking, or beating time, or in any way that 
 will lodge the thing to be learned in his muscles. 
 
JHE TEACHER'S DIAGNOSIS 211 
 
 His chief organ of apprehension is his hand and he 
 will take and hold what he can get his hands on. 
 
 These three children are extreme types. The rest 
 of the class were not so pronounced. They were 
 mixtures of these, partly intellectual, partly emo- 
 tional, partly volitional. It demands a closer ob- 
 servation to bring out which process dominated with 
 them, but it can be done by simple expedients sim- 
 ilar to the presentation of the orange. Elaborate 
 tests are useful and have their places, but no teacher 
 need wait for an inventor to formulate them, nor 
 an expert to apply them. When her eyes are once 
 open to such typical differences in pupils, the Hen- 
 rys, Marys and Tommies thrust themselves on 
 her attention. From these exceptional children 
 often come the backward pupils who can learn by 
 only one method. 
 
 The Intellectual Processes. — When a child 
 sees "c-a-t" and can from those letters gain the 
 knowledge "cat" he has used all the mental proc- 
 esses given to a human being. This is true for the 
 simplest bit of knowledge one can imagine. The 
 more complex acquisitions are but repetitions of 
 these simpler processes in which many processes 
 once conscious are now unconscious habits. Mental 
 ability of a high order, then, depends on the ra- 
 pidity and accuracy with which this simple and uni- 
 tary process of knowing is performed and on the 
 ease and rapidity with which it becomes habitual 
 with regard to certain objects and certain processes. 
 
212 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 Any observer can get a glimpse of this truth by 
 noting how exceedingly difficult is the first step of 
 a baby, or the first word written by a pupil, and 
 how exceedingly easy are the most complex and 
 intricate intellectual operations to one who has prac- 
 tised them until he has reduced a large part of the 
 operation to mere habit. The real conscious ac- 
 quisition of knowledge, the real ''learning process" 
 is therefore unitary and can not, strictly speaking, 
 be separated into parts. Certain phases of it can 
 be attended to by an observer, and these phases can 
 be named perception, memory, imagination and rea- 
 son, or any other convenient terms, and can then 
 be considered separately. The teacher, however, 
 need not carry this analysis so far and treat it so 
 seriously as to believe that certain studies will in- 
 volve only certain of these parts and not other parts. 
 It may be somewhat difficult to see reasoning in 
 consciously securing the idea cat from "c-a-t," but 
 a little thought will convince any one that the one 
 who recognizes it as such must see that it is similar 
 or dissimilar to many other symbols. It is similar 
 to the symbol he studied yesterday; therefore, it is 
 "cat" to-day, is the reasoning involved and made 
 explicit. Mathematics, which is a shorthand lan- 
 guage, makes this reasoning process, usually uncon- 
 scious, prominent and noticeable. It therefore is 
 said to train the reason. 
 
 An analysis of these higher intellectual processes, 
 while not important in themselves to the teacher, 
 
THE TEACHER'S DIAGNOSIS 213 
 
 is of enormous importance when applied to the art 
 of her profession. We have already seen that cer- 
 tain children belong to certain types because of 
 their methods of perceiving. The same classifica- 
 tion also applies to memory. If a child must see 
 an object in order to know it, he will then be almost 
 certain to recall it by seeing a visual memory-image 
 of it. If he can do that easily and quickly he will 
 probably make a good scholar; for learning by eye 
 and recalling what is learned are the chief require- 
 ments of schools and colleges as now conducted. 
 If he must hear what he learns, he will recall the 
 sound of it. As this method is not so prevalent for 
 giving knowledge he may be handicapped some- 
 what. But the sorest trial is reserved for the motor- 
 type pupil who must handle things to know them, 
 or must write words to grasp ideas, and must ex- 
 press what he knows in action. Though he may 
 make the sure scholar he is usually slower and 
 easily falls into the backward class of pupils. 
 
 Further, memory itself can be analyzed into cer- 
 tain phases. To say that a child has a poor memory 
 is not at all sufficient; and to say that he has a poor 
 visual memory is not enough. Possibly the trouble 
 lies in his vague perceptions due to some physical 
 defect of the eyes. When the lesson is presented 
 to him properly he has no trouble with his memory. 
 Possibly the lesson does not interest him and it 
 should be connected more closely with his dominant 
 instincts. Then, when we come to memory proper, 
 
214 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 possibly he can not retain what he learns ; possibly 
 he can not recall it at the proper time; possibly he 
 can not recognize it when it is recalled. These 
 subsidiary parts of the process of memory are so 
 closely related that just as with the great processes 
 of consciousness, they can not be disentangled ex- 
 cept for consideration and for correction in pupils 
 with poor memories. 
 
 This discussion leads us to the training of the 
 memory. With so much popular information on 
 the subject, it may be difficult to say anything that 
 is not already known. First, it should be noted 
 that we have the simple, natural physiological mem- 
 ory which acts seemingly automatically in recording 
 an object, retaining it till we wish to have it again, 
 recalling it and recognizing it. Such a memory is 
 an innate power and it can not be increased by any 
 amount of training. Whatever one gains in one 
 direction he loses in another. Secondly, we have 
 also a memory organized according to certain laws 
 of association, which can be trained to remember 
 certain facts which we now habitually forget. That 
 is done by consciously forming links of association 
 between the items to be remembered. These links 
 must be formed according to the laws of memory, 
 the first and most general of which is the law of 
 contiguity, according to which law things occurring 
 in the mind together once, tend to come back to- 
 gether when one of them is recalled. Horse and 
 yvagon, house and yard, father and mother, are 
 
THE TEACHER'S DIAGNOSIS 215 
 
 joined by such tendencies. When one term is men- 
 tioned the one that comes back out of the many that 
 are possible, will be determined to some extent by 
 other laws. If one says "teeth" the habit of tooth- 
 brushing may make one think of brush; if this 
 morning he bought some new tooth-powder, recency 
 may make him think of that; if yesterday he had 
 a painful molar filled, intensity may make him think 
 of that; if he is feeling particularly bad, senility 
 and death may come to him through the interme- 
 diate thought of the loss of his teeth. A special 
 emotion, like a permanent temperamental disposi- 
 tion, will affect the train of association and memory. 
 To train the memory one must go over and over 
 a lesson; or he must connect it so vitally with his 
 interests or instincts that one impression is an in- 
 eradicable one because of its intensity; or he must 
 review it just before he wants it; or he must learn 
 those things congruent with his mood. 
 
 Some of these requirements are more readily 
 brought under control than others. Repetition is 
 almost the sole method of training the memory, or 
 of learning, in the schoolroom. Sometimes in- 
 tense experiences are associated with the thing to 
 be learned by punishments or rewards. Recency 
 of experience is insisted on by demanding a re- 
 view of the lesson just before coming to class. 
 Feelings are given only an indirect and small part 
 in the matter. 
 
 Of the associations under control the easiest to 
 
216 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 use for memory-training are associations by sim- 
 ilarity and dissimilarity. The range of these two 
 relations is very, very wide, running through all 
 the different senses, affecting sights and sounds, 
 pains and pleasures, emotions and ideas. It seems 
 so easy to remember things that are like something 
 we already know, or opposite to what we know. 
 Anywhere we meet the date 1492, no matter in 
 what history, it is an old friend readily taken into 
 the family of facts we already have. "Tom Camp- 
 bell burned natural gas at Barcelona Harbor," is 
 full of similarities for me. The man's name is as- 
 sociated with what our old school-bell used to say to 
 us years ago; "b" in bell and burn is enough to re- 
 mind me of burning the natural gas; *'bar" and 
 "har" enough to locate the place. The schemes that 
 have been worked out are almost infinite in number 
 and variety, but they all base their claims for useful- 
 ness on the laws of association, especially the last 
 two. These two form the foundation for all rea- 
 soning. 
 
 At first sight the statement that reasoning and 
 conscious, deliberate association by similarity are 
 the same, may sound strange, but I am sure that 
 a little reflection by any one will give enough knowl- 
 edge on the subject to cover his needs in analyzing 
 the mental processes of a pupil. The difference 
 between the association by similarity in memory 
 and in reasoning comes from the fact that in mem- 
 ory it leads to facts already known and in reasoning 
 
THE TEACHER'S DIAGNOSIS 217 
 
 it leads to truths not yet known. In reasoning it 
 amounts practically to imagination with imagina- 
 tion putting together ideas in new forms instead of 
 putting things together in new forms, and putting 
 them together because they are similar rather than 
 for any other purpose. Thus it is seen how easily 
 the higher processes of the mind merge together 
 so closely that they defy analysis. It is enough for 
 the teacher to note the processes of perception and 
 of memory and to study these in each pupil. If 
 she does that wxll she will be able to suit her in- 
 struction to the peculiarities of her pupils, which is 
 the end and aim of her diagnosis. 
 
 It is of more importance to know what a boy 
 imagines than how he imagines. His imaginings 
 throw light on his interests and reveal the instinc- 
 tive stage in which he is living. The same is true 
 of his reasonings. Both of them will show the 
 teacher the way to lodge her lessons in his mind. 
 An ingenious teacher can do it, and the way to do 
 it will often be found by diagnosing her pupil. 
 
 Happily, in the American schools the individual 
 child and his innate peculiarities are being under- 
 scored for an emphasis heretofore only dreamed 
 of but never really hoped for by progressive edu- 
 cators. New tests for measuring not only what is 
 in his mind but also how he perceives, remembers, 
 imagines and reasons are being formulated as rap- 
 idly as careful investigation and wide experiment 
 will permit. Already there are many systems ready 
 
218 BACKWARD CHILDREN^ 
 
 to put into the hands of the teachers for diagnosing 
 individual children. Both of the emphases, the em- 
 phasis upon the individual and the emphasis upon 
 diagnosis, have long been explicit in teaching back- 
 ward children. They date from the day when Doctor 
 Itard studied the wild-boy of France, and Doctor Se- 
 guin set up his first class to teach the mentally 
 defective in 1837. Teachers in institutions for the 
 feeble-minded would not know how to proceed with 
 their teaching without first making or having made 
 a thorough diagnosis of each child. What has been 
 found in these fields to be of so much value will 
 surely yield results when applied to normal children 
 and to temporarily backward children. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE TEACHER AND EQUIPMENT FOR A SPECIAL CLASS 
 
 A COUNTRY girl, a real country girl, as awk- 
 ward and unsophisticated as the proverbial 
 Liza Ann of fiction or comedy, one day presented 
 herself to a training school for special teachers in 
 a large city. She had grown up on a farm, taught 
 school in a one-room country schoolhouse, heard 
 something about teaching backward children and 
 out of the "invisible ether" came the vision of her- 
 self as a special teacher. Forthwith, she began to 
 investigate, found how much it would cost to take 
 the course, saved the exact amount, and one day 
 presented herself to the principal of the training 
 school. 
 
 The Teacher. — Needless to say it was a shock 
 to that expert trainer. It all looked so hopeless to 
 her who knew so well the difficulty in that great 
 city of securing positions for the best and most 
 promising graduates, the need of personality, the 
 labor of the training, sometimes the weary waiting 
 after the training was over. She delicately broached 
 the situation to the applicant and was appalled when 
 she heard how little money, and silenced when she 
 
 219 
 
220 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 noted how much confidence this raw country girl 
 had brought with her. There was nothing to do 
 but enroll her. That was done and the girl took 
 the course. 
 
 When she finished, as fortune would have it, a 
 call came to the supervisor for a special teacher to 
 go to an out-of-the-way corner of the city, a mis- 
 carried subdivision, sterile, frustrated, sparsely 
 settled, consisting chiefly of the school-building and 
 scattered frame dwellings with stretches of sand 
 and weeds between them. Nobody else wanted to 
 go there. The supervisor thought of the country 
 graduate and wondered if she dared send her. The 
 principal out there was a friend of hers and she 
 hated to serve him so, but something had to be 
 done and the happy country girl was dispatched. 
 
 For two weeks the supervisor trembled every time 
 the telephone bell rang. But no word came from 
 the suburb. When the silence became no longer 
 bearable, she took the car and traveled out to the 
 school. Her friend, the principal, resolutely avoided, 
 reference to the new teacher. At last the super- 
 visor made the plunge. "How-er is Miss C, the 
 new teacher doing?'' she ventured. ^'Splendidly! 
 Splendidly!" was the principal's breath-taking re- 
 joinder. "She's a wonder. When she came we 
 gave her an empty room and ten boys nobody could 
 teach or -control., -She sent those boys out to scour 
 the country for lumber, tin, nails, tools, string and 
 everything they needed. They got tools from home, 
 
THE TEACHER AND EQUIPMENT 221 
 
 begged packing-boxes, spent their own money for 
 nails and before long they had that room finished 
 and equipped in a home-made but up-to-date man- 
 ner and were busy making other articles they 
 wanted. Now we send to her any pupils anybody 
 has any trouble with and she adopts them into the 
 family !'* 
 
 And to make the truth seem still more like fic- 
 tion, the country girFs class carried off the prize in 
 that urban school system for the best exhibit of 
 special-class work. This teacher represents both a 
 method of teaching and a type of teacher. 
 
 Her Mental Qualifications. — In general there 
 may be said to be two types of teachers : the vital 
 and the mechanical. Of these two the special-class 
 teacher must undoubtedly belong to the former. 
 Many reasons urge to" that conclusion. A few are 
 mentioned here and many more will suggest them- 
 selves to the reader. First, the teacher's field is 
 comparatively new. The first class ever organized 
 for the deliberate teaching of the mental defectives 
 was taught by Seguin in 1837. For decades after- 
 ward such instruction was limited to institutions and 
 unknown to the public schools. Sporadic classes 
 occurred earlier, but the real movement for special 
 classes in public schools did not begin until the 
 nineties of the last century. A score of years would 
 nearly cover their history in this country. The 
 field is hardly more than touched ; the methods are 
 experimental; invention and ingenuity have the 
 
222 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 widest latitude and the most promising opportuni- 
 ties in this educational realm. The teacher must be 
 of the vital, wide-awake, facile, inventive type, 
 eager for improvement and development and con- 
 stitutionally opposed to routine. Two young 
 women go to a college for specialized training. 
 One fills her avid note-book full of detailed notes. 
 She notes that singing comes at 9 :00 a. m. and lasts 
 six and a half minutes on Monday, six on Tuesday ; 
 six and a half on Wednesday, etc.; that for clay 
 modeling the children are given wet clay on news- 
 papers; that a pupil spoiled one piece of board and 
 threw it into the waste-basket ; that James modeled 
 a turnip by beginning at the bottom; that Harry's 
 chalk scratched horribly on the blackboard and Miss 
 F., the teacher, never seemed to notice it, etc., etc., ad 
 infinitum. These illustrations are by no means fanci- 
 ful but have been culled from teachers' actual notes 
 made on their observation of special-class methods. 
 On the other hand, here is a young girl from 
 a mountain-town. She sees, observes, notes and 
 queries. **Why does singing come first?" ''How 
 can sand be kept moist in a sand board?" "Should 
 boys make toy guns, swords, spears?" "At what 
 age should the children have a garden?" Such a 
 type of mind is bound to get down to the bases of 
 methods and to grasp the principles of teaching. 
 From such inquiring minds have always come the 
 reformers and leaders of the educational world. 
 Probably there is room for both kinds of minds in 
 
THE TEACHER AND EQUIPMENT 223 
 
 general teaching; and surely the ideal teacher of 
 the special class will conform to the thinking type. 
 
 Secondly, the teacher must always be further 
 preparing herself. She can not stop for a year or a 
 term and rest on the fact that she has years of expe- 
 rience behind her. Experience here does not count 
 for much. Yesterday's experience is supplanted by 
 to-day's discoveries and the yesterday's static 
 teacher is supplanted by to-day's dynamic one. 
 
 A third reason is the well-known one that this 
 kind of teacher deals with individuals rather than 
 classes. Her results are not measured in terms of 
 grades, amount of book-space covered, discipline or 
 schoolroom order, but in regenerated lives of boys 
 and girls who came to her hopelessly bad or back- 
 ward and unfit for regular classes or for regular 
 lives. Her work is wrought on them individually, 
 and by their ability to come back to class and take 
 a new part in school life her efficiency is determined. 
 Her stupid scholars can not be relegated to a back- 
 ward class and her bad ones must not be expelled 
 from school. 
 
 Her Physical Attributes. — Because we are so 
 much bound by conventions we seldom think of the 
 physical qualifications for any teacher as after all, 
 very vital. We see so many types of women and 
 men, weak and strong, entering the profession, suc- 
 ceeding in it, and working even down to the day 
 of their deaths that we tend to discount robust 
 health as the first requisite for a teacher who lives 
 
224 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 to teach. Still, it 13 true that health is a prime es- 
 sential for any teacher, and this truth is doubly 
 true for the special teacher. Her health must be 
 of that impregnable, unflagging, unfatiguing kind 
 that radiates the joy of living. Headaches, colds, 
 blues, stresses and strains, fits of discouragement, 
 discontent, temper, vague aches and vaguer long- 
 ings, whims, notions, crotchets, disagreeable per- 
 sonal traits of mind and character, all the little lux- 
 uries of life that other people may allow themselves 
 and still succeed must be resolutely forbidden to 
 this teacher. Her daily life must be a poised one; 
 quiet, serene, free from worries and doubts that 
 come from constitutional defects, reigning over her 
 flock with the assured power of personality acting 
 directly and without apparent means. All this must 
 be reflected in her every movement and her every 
 tone. One who has only seen such teachers moving 
 so serenely about the class-room during the day can 
 guess the nervous energy and absolute self-control 
 it requires to keep every motion precisely regulated, 
 every tone perfectly modulated. No matter what 
 sudden catastrophe occurs, whether a degenerate 
 suddenly flies into a rage and slashes his neighbor 
 with a knife or knocks him on the head with a 
 hammer, or two children at once fall down in epi- 
 leptic fits, the teacher must remain serene. An in- 
 stant's failure on her part would work havoc on 
 her nervously unstable brood. Only the perfectly 
 healthy woman can be ready for such emergencies.., 
 
THE TEACHER AND EQUIPMENT 225 
 
 As to her other physical quahfications, like size, 
 age, looks, etc., they are secondary to healthy poise. 
 
 Temperament of the Teacher. — With the 
 abounding health required of the special teacher, 
 it need hardly be said that she must be of a san- 
 guine-phlegmatic temperament. If there is a trace 
 of melancholy in her constitution it will surely de- 
 velop in the atmosphere of the slow, dull, stupid, 
 oftentimes hopeless, and frequently deformed and 
 afflicted flotsam and jetsam that are cast by the ebb 
 and flow of pedagogical tides upon her hands. Liv- 
 ing in such an atmosphere requires the hopeful 
 temperament that can see glimmerings of a bright 
 future in the worst cases and a phlegmatism that 
 will neither wear itself out in useless and ceaseless 
 strivings for the impossible nor fret itself to pieces 
 against the infinite worries of every day. To these 
 qualities of temper must be added a motor disposi- 
 tion ; the desire to move about, not hastily nor rest- 
 lessly but purposively and deliberately ; to get things 
 done, to organize, to push forward with a quiet un- 
 ceasing perseverance. The chief emotional element 
 required is the spirit of kindliness that naturally 
 arises from a healthy body and a willingness to do. 
 
 The Teacher's Special Training. — The special 
 fitting of a special teacher for her work should be 
 acquired in a school or college devoted to teaching 
 teachers of public schools rather than one devoted 
 to teaching teachers in institutions for the feeble- 
 minded. That must not be taken to mean that the 
 
226 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 instruction to teachers in the latter institutions is 
 not efhcient nor at all adequate for the work. Such 
 preparation is good, and in certain institutions is 
 certainly far better than the instruction in some uni- 
 versities or normal schools. But, on the whole, the 
 preparation in institutions is calculated to fit teach- 
 ers best for institution work. Public schools are 
 different. Likewise the whole background of schools 
 and institutions is dissimilar and this often spells 
 the difference between successful and unsuccessful 
 teaching. Besides, as I have already said, the types 
 of children taught, and therefore, the objectives of 
 teaching, are different. Let the young teacher then 
 seek out a school having the best equipment, the 
 longest record of experience in teaching special 
 teachers, one with a special class of special children 
 secured from the public schools, and there let her se- 
 cure her special training. It should, of course, in- 
 clude all the methods of the special class-room. 
 Much as I have here emphasized diagnosis as a nec- 
 essary preliminary and eliminator of waste, still the 
 student preparing for teaching must not overem- 
 phasize this most fascinating portion of her future 
 work to the exclusion of principles and methods of 
 teaching. Both phases are necessary. The diag- 
 nosis is preliminary, comparatively brief, and once 
 done needs not to be repeated. Teaching is the real 
 work; is comparatively lengthy, full of monotony 
 and often discouraging, requiring both skill and 
 character to maintain efficiently and to complete tri- 
 
THE TEACHER AND EQUIPMENT 227 
 
 umphantly. Besides the usual methods of special- 
 class training she should learn manual work, in- 
 cluding bench work in carpentry, basket weaving, 
 raffia work, clay-modeling, sand-modeling, draw- 
 ing, water-color work and, what only a few teachers 
 have yet attempted, enough knowledge of machinery 
 to take apart a clock, odd bits of household plumb- 
 ing, faucets, gas-cocks, electric bells, sewing-ma- 
 chines, phonographs, etc. Such an array of knowl- 
 edge may seem formidable but she is not through 
 yet. The expert teacher must add to her other ac- 
 complishments the art of physical culture encom- 
 passing the usual calisthenics, swimming, a number 
 of indoor and outdoor games, and enough skill to 
 follow the directions of a physician in corrective 
 gymnastics. Closely allied to this is speech-training, 
 which so many of her pupils will need and on 
 which so much mental development intimately de- 
 pends. Such demands may seem appalling but they 
 are entirely reasonable and will in practise be found 
 little enough. Full proficiency in all of them may 
 never be acquired. In the beginning only the rudi- 
 ments need be known. But a preliminary knowl- 
 edge of many things is essential. A knowledge of 
 the daily demands of the schoolroom will soon be 
 transformed into an easy familiarity and a master- 
 ful skill. 
 
 Experience. — ^Whether she is a young teacher 
 specially prepared for the work or one from the 
 regular grades with a long and varied experience 
 
228 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 is secondary to the question of vitality. The latter, 
 by reason of age and the mechanizing effect of 
 grade-teaching would more likely be unfitted in this 
 respect than the beginner. However, no rule can 
 be made absolute here. A middle-aged woman with 
 years of experience through every grade of a pub- 
 lic school and a young woman with but a few years 
 of teaching to her credit both came from western 
 cities for one summer's training in special-class 
 Work in an eastern university and both went back 
 home and made successes of their careers. Prep- 
 aration is indispensable. This preparation may be 
 gained in the regular grades and supplemented with 
 regular training in some school; or it may be ob- 
 tained without the regular-class experience. It 
 should, however, be gained in a school or university 
 rather than in an institution for the feeble-minded 
 where, in the first place, only one great class of back- 
 ward children are met and the methods are not ar- 
 ranged for the purpose of restoring the pupils to 
 society; and, in the second place, where the prob- 
 lems of the public school system are not met at all 
 or, at best, only in a modified form. It would be 
 preferable to choose teachers who grew up in the 
 country rather than those limited to the city life 
 alone. So many of the pedagogical methods are but 
 adaptations to the natural life of children in the 
 country that at least some first-hand experience in 
 country life is as valuable as modes of procedure in 
 the class-room. 
 
THE TEACHER AND EQUIPMENT 229 
 
 The Need of Special-Class Teachers. — A word 
 might be added concerning the need of special teach- 
 ers and the possibiHties of the profession. I fear 
 that I have set the ideals so high and have dwelt so 
 lengthily on the strenuousness and exactingness 
 of the work that it might seem to a young person 
 appalling rather than appealing. A very brief ex- 
 perience would assure any one of the contrary. The 
 evident need of the children, the novelty and free- 
 dom of the field, the daily sight of appreciably grow- 
 ing boys and girls, the personal pride generated in 
 each pupil as he responds to the training, the extra 
 recompense in salary, the increasing expansion of 
 the work throughout the world, the constant and un- 
 ceasing development of the teacher herself, are all 
 factors that make this field of endeavor one of the 
 most fascinating and most cheering to the real 
 teacher aiming to spend her life in good works. All 
 the horror of '^abnormal" children perishes with a 
 closer acquaintance with the little people whose only 
 fault is their littleness in mind and often in body. 
 In this Lilliputian world of intellect old standards 
 are quickly adjusted to new conditions, and the 
 ''bright," "cheery," "loving," "hard-working," 
 "grateful" children are to be found here just as they 
 are found in any group of children. ' The terms may 
 take on a relative meaning but they are as real in 
 their content and comfort here as anywhere else. 
 The genuine teacher will soon find herself just as 
 proud of her charges, just as fond of them and with 
 
230 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 just as many friends among them as the teacher in 
 the regular grades. Slow they may always be, need- 
 ing unlimited patience and giving innumerable 
 trials; but the person who puts life above livelihood 
 knows that trials overcome bring patience with a 
 sense of victory and of life through growth. 
 
 The first requisite for holding a special class is 
 a place in which to hold it. Usually such classes are 
 organized in schools already established and the lo- 
 cation and number of the rooms and the material 
 equipment are determined largely by the exigencies 
 of the circumstances. Such should not be the con- 
 dition. The whole plan and every procedure should 
 be determined alone by the peculiar needs of the 
 pupils to be taught. Many of these pupils present 
 paradoxical mental states. Their attention is the 
 flightiest and their nerves the most unstable. Yet 
 their sensibilities are dulled, their perceptions 
 blunted, their gift of ideation either nil or very weak. 
 This is true of the mental defectives and partially 
 true of the temporarily backward. To excite the 
 liveliest possible sensations, and so produce the most 
 vivid and lasting perceptions and yet not to over- 
 stimulate the explosive nervous systems, is one of 
 the prime and most constant functions of the pass- 
 ive surroundings of these pupils. In the location 
 and the furnishing of their class-rooms this objec- 
 tive, with others, must be kept always in mind. 
 
 The Location of the Rooms. — The first point 
 of attention is the location of the rooms. They 
 
THE TEACHER AND EQUIPMENT 231 
 
 should not be adjacent to other class-rooms, if pos- 
 sible, since the tramp of physical exercises, the noise 
 of manual work, the sound of music and singing 
 may entirely interfere with other classes. While 
 thus comparatively removed for the sake of quiet 
 to others, the children must equally be protected by 
 location from the noises outside the school build- 
 ing. The side of the building with a favorable 
 exposure for sun and air must be chosen. Some 
 class-rooms have no sashes in the windows but are 
 open to the air continually. Light and sunshine, 
 shade and shadow must all be provided for by proper 
 lighting and proportioned shading with awnings. 
 Heating and ventilation of course must be well ob- 
 served; as well as that very indefinite but essential 
 quality known as airiness. Easy access to suitable 
 lavatories is another convenience not to be over- 
 looked. In brief, quiet, air, light, space, comfort 
 and convenience, these are cardinal points in the lo- 
 cation of the class-rooms. How necessary some of 
 these factors are may be seen from the fact that a 
 whole special class was demoralized by the ex- 
 citement aroused by taking a flash-light photo- 
 graph. All class activities had to be suspended for 
 the rest of the day. One child was almost thrown 
 into a fit; and this, too, not from fear, for all of 
 them had been doubly reassured that nothing would 
 hurt them, but from mere nervous tension over the 
 unusual and novel. 
 
 The Number of Rooms. — At least three rooms 
 
232 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 are needed for a class of fifteen pupils. This com- 
 paratively generous number is required partly be- 
 cause the nature of the work demands divisions and 
 subdivisions of the class reaching almost, if not 
 wholly, to individual instruction, though it is not' 
 impossible to carry on all the activities involved in 
 one room. One room may be devoted chiefly to 
 manual work and in it all the work-benches, tools 
 and lumber can be stored. Another is devoted 
 chiefly to class work of the usual kind. The other 
 should be reserved for a rest room and possibly 
 physical training, including speech-training. The 
 last exercise must usually be carried on with one 
 pupil at a time and in a room where other sounds 
 are almost wholly eliminated. Besides the rooms, 
 a swimming pool, an outdoor playground, a park, 
 museums, and many points of living interest like 
 factories and shops, are all additional and very help- 
 ful advantages. In fact, the equipment for a spe- 
 cial class should realize the ideal equipment for any 
 school. 
 
 The Furnishings of the Rooms. — Each room 
 should be furnished to suit the children. Pictures, 
 flags, ferns, flowers, aquaria, birds, curios, samples 
 of manufacturing products, all the endless odds and 
 ends that go to make vip the complex world about 
 them should be where these children can see and 
 handle the things themselves. They can not read 
 and image as a normal child can; they must see, 
 hear, taste, smell, handle in order to become ac- 
 
THE TEACHER AND EQUIPMENT 233 
 
 quainted with the strange and overwhelmingly com- 
 plex world about them. Therefore the aim must be 
 to create a replica in microcosm of the world out- 
 side the schoolroom where, under direction, without 
 danger and at their leisure, they can become ac- 
 quainted with things themselves. 
 
 Home-Made and Store-Bought Equipment. — 
 Besides furnishings the usual equipment of tools 
 and materials for a complete kindergarten must be 
 furnished. Here, however, a radical departure is 
 sometimes made by most able teachers. Instead of 
 fully furnishing and equipping rooms the children 
 themselves are set to that task. Homely and home- 
 made articles take the place of elaborate manufac- 
 tured ones. The greatest achievement thus attained 
 is not the objective results in the room, but the ef- 
 fect on the children themselves. To make some- 
 thing from something is something; but to make 
 something from nothing is an achievement supreme. 
 The interest aroused in hunting up soap-boxes, lum- 
 ber, strings, cord, nails, screws, paints, tools, toys, 
 plants, flowers, sand, clay, shells, pebbles, vegetables, 
 pictures, charts, maps, etc., etc., the use of old things 
 for new purposes, the applications of things on hand 
 to needs, the invention and discovery of means, 
 methods and materials to do things, have a charm 
 and spontaneity, a spirit of Robinson Crusoe ad- 
 venture that breeds and maintains interest better 
 than the most elaborate equipments. The possibili- 
 ties of such a procedure and the actualities accom- 
 
234 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 plished in some places ought to deter any new 
 teacher from discouragement over her meager ad- 
 vantages. For those who have the opportunity and 
 face the need a Hst of tools and materials actually 
 used in special class is appended : 
 
 Equipment 
 
 10 ordinary pine-top kitchen tables with drawers, 
 
 36x23 in. $1.95 each. 
 20 children's chairs, 12-in. and 14-in. leg. 80 cts. 
 $8.50 per doz. 
 3 double work-benches, 51x22 in. $22.00 (5 
 
 drawers). 
 1 sand tray. 
 
 1 couch or cot. $1.50 up. 
 
 2 teacher's desks. No. 26,875, 42 x 30 in. $11.50 
 
 each with back panel tall top. 
 Plants for room decoration. 
 20 steamer chairs. $1.50 and $2.25 with rest for 
 
 feet; $1.25 and $2.00 without foot-rest. 
 20 3>^-ft. wands. 10 cts. each. 
 15 pairs of 1-lb. dumb-bells. 45 cts. per pair. 
 15 pairs of ^-Ib. Indian clubs. 35 cts. pair. 
 
 1 Pianola piano. 
 Yt, doz. bean bags. 
 J4 ream oaktag paper, 9 x 14. 
 
 1 large jar of library paste. 
 
 1 medium bottle glue. 
 J4 doz. lead-peilcils, hard. 
 
 - Supplies 
 
 Tools: 
 
 1 brace. $1.25 to $2.50. 
 
 y2 doz. bits. 6/32 (30 cts.), yi (30 cts.), Y^ (35 
 cts.), Y2. (35 cts.), Y\ (45 cts.). 
 
 2 fret saws. 25 cts. 
 
 6 doz. blades. 15 cts. a doz. 
 
THE TEACHER AND EQUIPMENT 235 
 
 2 varnish brushes (small). 
 
 3 chisels, ^i-in, 45 cts. ; J/^-in. 45 cts. ; 1-in. 75 
 
 cts. 
 Brads. ^ No. 19, 12 cts. a lb. ; 1 No. 16, 12 cts. 
 
 alb. 
 Nails. Uyi No. 12, 8 cts. a lb. 
 Sandpaper, No. 1. 1 ct. a sheet. 
 
 4 planes, smoothing. $1.35. 
 
 1 pliers, square nose. 45 cts. 
 
 2 steel rulers. About 75 cts. 
 4 10-in. back saws. $1.35. 
 
 1 crosscut. $1.50 to $2.00. 
 1 rip-saw. $2.25. 
 1 screw-driver, medium. 30 cts. 
 Screws. Flat, 1-in. No. 6, 30 cts. gross; Ij^-in. 
 
 No. 10, 35 cts. gross. 
 4 files, flat, 10-in. 25 cts. each. 
 1 mallet, round. 
 1 hammer, claw. 60 cts. 
 6 hammers, tack. 45 cts. 
 4 try-squares, 6-in. 30 cts. 
 1 oil stone. 25 cts. 
 ^2 gal. turpentine. 
 
 1 can stain, oil walnut. 90 cts. a qt. 
 25 dowels. 
 Cane for chairs. 
 1 lb. fine-fine. 75 cts. bundle. 
 1 lb. fine. 75 cts. bundle. 
 1 lb. medium. 75 cts. bundle. 
 4 lbs. raffia. Light brown, green, 55 cts. lb. ; old 
 
 blue, natural, 25 cts. 
 1 lb. reed No. 1. $1.25 lb. 
 1 lb. reed No. 2. 95 cts. lb. 
 1 lb. reed No. 3. 75 cts. lb. 
 1 lb. reed No. 5. 55 cts. lb. 
 Iy2 doz. scissors, sharp pointed, 5-in. $2.25 doz. 
 Paper: 
 
 12 pkgs. Prang's colored paper, 4x4; 20x25. 
 5 cts. sheet, 50 cts. a doz. 
 
236 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 Clay: 
 
 50 lbs. clay. 25 cts. a brick (5 lbs.). 
 
 1 jar for clay. 
 Chalk: 
 
 1 box of white chalk. 35 cts. a gross. 
 
 1 box of colored chalk. 10 cts. 
 Paints: 
 
 18 boxes of water colors. 25 cts. small ; 65 cts. 
 large. 
 
 2 doz. water color brushes. 10 cts. each; $1.00 
 
 doz. ; No. 3 brush medium. 
 2 doz. box grease crayons. SO cts. doz. 
 Wood: 
 
 50 basswood planks, % in. 
 25 ft. joists, white pine, 1^ in. 
 2 boards, % white pine, clear dressed. 
 2 boards, ^ white wood, clear dressed. 
 2 boards, ^ white wood, clear dressed. 
 15 ft. % joists, white pine. 
 
 10 ft. pine strips, white, % in. square, dressed 
 four sides. 
 
 Courses for Backward Children. — By the very 
 nature of the case strict courses of study are inap- 
 plicable to backward children. Many of them are 
 made backward because attempts are made to con- 
 form them to courses, and many are cured by the 
 simple expedient of giving them exercises fitted to 
 their needs and capacities. They require individual 
 instruction not only in the sense that they must re- 
 ceive personal attention from the teacher directed 
 to each child individually, but that each one must 
 have studies and methods of teaching those studies 
 adapted to him. With this understanding, namely, 
 that liberal variations should be made from the 
 
THE TEACHER AND EQUIPMENT 237 
 
 curricula set down, we can offer a few suggestions 
 to those without a technical training, regarding the 
 day's program and the merest sketch of manual 
 work for the first several grades. 
 
 The daily time schedule is one similar to that used 
 in ungraded classes. 
 
 Daily Program of Special Class 
 
 9:00- 9:15 — Opening exercises all together. 
 
 9:15- 9:30— Morning talk to all. 
 
 9 :30- 9 :45— Written language. 
 
 9:45-10:00— Paper language. 
 10:00-10:15— Number. 
 10 : 15-10 :30— Relaxation. 
 10 :30-l 1 :0a— Manual work. 
 ll:00-ll:3a-Reading. 
 11:30-12:30 — Gymnasium and pool. 
 12:30- 2£)0 — Luncheon and rest. 
 
 2 :00- 2 :20— Drawing. 
 
 2 :20-T, 2 :40 — Sense training. 
 
 2 :40- 3 :00— Games. 
 
 3:00- 3:15 — Physical work — all children. 
 
 3:15- 3:30 — Folk dancing or corrective gymnastics. 
 
 3:30- 4:00 — ^Articulation or story dramatization. 
 
 As a suggestion for manual work of the simplest 
 kind, the following has been found valuable: 
 
 Guiding Principles 
 
 • 
 1. The purpose of the work should be to develop 
 the children, not merely to produce results in mate- 
 rial things. The progress a child makes in comparison 
 with his first efforts is far more significant than his 
 
238 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
 output. His interest, attention, perseverance, ingenu- 
 ity are factors of the greatest moment. 
 
 2. The lessons given below are designed to suit the 
 capacities of children of different ages, and approxi- 
 mately also arranged to appeal to their instinctive 
 life-stages. 
 
 3. The materials used should be, as far as possible, 
 those found in the neighborhood. What to make, out 
 of what to make it, where to secure the material for 
 making it, are questions often opening up more edu- 
 cational processes than actually making the thing itself. 
 
 For Children From Five Years to Eight Years 
 
 1. Bead-stringing, using small fruits like haw-ap- 
 ples, and seeds, combined to form effective color-de- 
 signs. 
 
 2. Paper boxes. A multitude of forms will occur 
 to any mind. 
 
 3. Paper- weaving, mats, baskets, book-marks. Wil- 
 low-twigs, grasses, long pine needles, etc., can also be 
 used. 
 
 4. Card-board work. All kinds of models ; animals, 
 birds, fish, weapons for boys, Indian life, pioneer life, 
 colonial life, boats, toys. Nearly everything possible 
 to make with cards can also be made with burs from 
 common burdock, and many things can be made from 
 leaves. 
 
 5. Clay-modeling. The clay can be procured by 
 the children. Sometimes different colors are found 
 in the same locality. Clay provides a most excellent 
 medium for developing children's perseverance, for it 
 can be rekneaded and reshaped again and again until 
 an effect is produced. An infinite variety of objects 
 can be made. Let the children follow their own fan- 
 cies. 
 
 6. Sand piles. Let fancy, instinct, utility and art 
 dictate what shall be made. 
 
 7. Permit the children to take apart and examine 
 
THE TEACHER AND EQUIPMENT 239 
 
 every common article possible, like puzzles, faucets, 
 coffee-mills, pumps, clocks, model stoves, steam-en- 
 gines, etc., etc. 
 
 Children From Nine Years to Twelve Years 
 
 1. The same kind of work as that given to the 
 lower grades but more advanced in detail, exactness, 
 intricacy and beauty can be given. 
 
 2. With the various materials required, — card- 
 board, wood, clay, cement and stone, — make models 
 each of the typical industries of the neighborhood. 
 This can be carried out in as much detail as the most 
 advanced pupil desires. For example, farming re- 
 quires bams, stables, animals, fowls, wagons, ma- 
 chinery, trees, streams, etc. 
 
 3. With the materials required make toys suitable 
 for play and games appropriate for children's ages. 
 Bats, oars, sleds, skees, clubs, spears, bows, swords, 
 guns, dolls, doll-clothes, clay-dishes, etc. 
 
 4. Weaving grape-vines, corn-husks, rye-straw, wil- 
 low, reed, raffia, carpet-rags, cane, etc. 
 
240 BACKWARD CHILDREN 
 
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THE TEACHER AND EQUIPMENT 241 
 
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INDEX 
 
INDEX 
 
 Adenoids : 41 • signs of, 38-46 ; mental signs of, 46, 47 ; surgi- 
 cal treatment, 154. 
 Amentia, 164. 
 Apperceptive Mass, 195. 
 Association, 214, 215-217. 
 
 Backwardness: meaning of, 13-16; causes of, 110; badness, 
 83 ff. ; coffee, 116; companions, 118-129; food, 117; 
 home training, 134-138; marks of, 174, 184-189; treat- 
 ment of, 145. 
 
 Badness: environmental, 83-89; hopeless, 90-94; misdirected 
 energy, 94-97. 
 
 Binet Tests, 179, 180. 
 
 Bodily Organs, 175. 
 
 Breathing, 45. 
 
 Bridgman, Laura, 169. 
 
 Catlin, 94. 
 
 Chapin, 116. 
 
 Chicken-pox, 160. 
 
 Classification of Backward Children, 165. 
 
 Clinical Diagnosis, 162, 183, 184. 
 
 Colds, 158. 
 
 Complexion, 174. 
 
 Cough, Whooping, 158. 
 
 Courses of Study, 236-241. 
 
 Darwin, 100. 
 
 Diagnosis: 163-165; of backwardness, 138; teachers', 191493. 
 
 Diets, 147-153. 
 
 Earache, 160. 
 Eczema, 159. 
 Emotions, 208. 
 
 Environmental Causes of Retardation, 3S. 
 Examination: oral, 167-170; physical, 170, 171; school. 195: 
 ear, 49; eye, 49, 52-53. 
 
 Family History, 167-178. 
 Parrel, 62. 
 
 Feeble-Mindedness, 164. 
 Foods, 148. 
 
 245 
 
246 INDEX 
 
 Gangs, 125-133. 
 Grippe, 158. 
 
 Headaches, 159. 
 Heredity, 168-170. 
 Hutchinson, 100. 
 
 Idiot, 183. 
 
 Imagination, 217. 
 
 Imbecility, marks of, 171-183. 
 
 Immediately Recoverable Cases, 25-27. 
 
 Instincts, 197-203. 
 
 Intellectual Processes, 208, 209, 211-218. 
 
 Interest, 72-82, 196, 197. 
 
 Itch, 160. 
 
 Jones, Elmer E., 206. 
 
 Keller, Helen, 169. 
 
 Laziness, 99-102* 
 
 Malnutrition, 45. 
 Manual-Minded, 61-72. 
 Measles, 158. 
 Memory, 186, 213, 214. 
 Mental Capacity, 165. 
 Mental Content, 193, 194* 
 Mental Tests, 178-180. 
 Moron, 183. 
 
 Mouth-Breathing, 42, 43. 
 Music, 184. 
 
 Pedagogical Retardation, 5-7. 
 
 Perception, 205, 206. 
 
 Permanent Retardation, 24 ff. 
 
 Physical Defects, 36 ff. 
 
 Physical Examination, 38-46. 
 
 Physical Marks of Retardation, 171-178, 
 
 Physicians, Royal College of, 164. 
 
 Pinkeye, 160. 
 
 Play, 200, 201. 
 
 Potentialities, 166. 
 
 Program of Special Class, 237. 
 
 Psychological Clinic, The, 94. 
 
 i 
 
 Quinsy, 159. 
 
lNt)EX 247 
 
 Rapidly Recoverable Cases, 28-30. 
 Reading Tests, 47-50. 
 Reasoning, 216, 217. 
 Retardation — see Backwardness. 
 Rhythm, 76, 11, 184. 
 
 Scarlet Fever, 159. 
 
 Seguin, 218, 221. 
 
 Sewing, 78. 
 
 Simon, 179. 
 
 Skin Diseases, 159. 
 
 Slow Pupils, 59-61. 
 
 Slowly Recoverable Cases, 30-33. 
 
 Sore Throat, 159. 
 
 Special Class Equipment : 233-236 ; furnishing rooms, 230-232. 
 
 Special Sense Organs, 176-178. 
 
 Standards of Backwardness: 1, 2; Binet-Simon, 11; individ- 
 ual, 1 ; pedagogical, 6 ; play, 7 ; scientific, 5, 9 ; social, 3 ; 
 summary, 16, 17. 
 
 Tartar, 155. 
 
 Taylor, Charles Keen, 116, 132. 
 
 Teacher of Special Class, 219, 230. 
 
 Teacher-Mother, 142-145. 
 
 Teeth, 44, 154-157. 
 
 Temperaments, 203-205. 
 
 Temporarily Retarded, 18, 23 ff. 
 
 Tests: Binet, 179, 180; ear, 49; eye, 49, 52, 53; memory, 207. 
 
 Tonsils, 44, 157. 
 
 Training: home, 140-142; moral, 27, 80. 
 
 Treatment : constitutional, 54, 55, 145, 146 ; surgical, 153. 
 
 Truancy, 103-108. 
 
 Varieties of Retardation, 23-25. 
 Varieties of Standards, 23 ff. 
 Volition, 210. 
 
 Wilfulness, 161. 
 
xxxxo liv^uiv JiSy uu^ UJN xniu IjAJSA UAX±i 
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