Margaret McMillan

“ Yet Séguin had gone far to demonstrate all this in his school thirty years ago, and to expound it in his books, L'Idiotie and L'Enfant Normal and Abnormal.
The phrase "a defective person" was once commonly believed to mean an idiot, or a person with no brain-power at all. But it is now known that every human brain is defective more or less, just as every world or planet is "defective." A world may have many fertile places and be very beautiful on the whole, but it is certainly not equally fair and equally fertile in every part. No more is any human brain. ”

“ NOTHING is more strange and touching than is the part played by the defective child in the history of education. Long ago the feeble minded as well as the insane were treated sternly. It seems that people felt they were to blame in some way for their misfortunes. Even among those who did not blame them, there were many who thought that the feeble minded are a burden. ”

“ In short, the impulse that made the human project his hand in tools, and create even language at first through the hand, was no mere development of brute force or brute cunning. It was the impulse of a higher order of energy, preparing for one knows not what future of enfranchised and transformed power. ”

“ Speech offers a great many difficulties for a large number of them. Through their various failings in language we have indeed learned what a wonderful conquest human speech is. More than a hundred years ago doctors were classifying mentally defective children by speech defects. Up to a certain point then, language, or connected speech, and beyond it tool projection, are final tests. They spell victory—the victorious arrival of the voyaging mind at the door of a new life, and that is why the study of the feeble minded leads up at last to the study of the tool projectors! ”

“ The burden of supporting the unfit is heavy. Moreover, a certain percentage of all defectives are a constant danger to the people among whom they live. The moral imbecile is often clever enough, and outstrips every one at school. Then one day he may put all he learns to a terrible use. There is reason to think that certain chambers are missing in his otherwise well-built brain. As the teacher cannot create these chambers, it seems vain to bring fine furniture in the shape of good precepts. Perhaps one day doctors and teachers will know what to do. ”

“ Séguin followed this order, and he gave his reasons. But though brain physiology was not so far advanced in his day as it is in ours, for many years after his death, and even to-day, the natural order of growing control is violated in some infant schools all over the world. Yes, one may even yet find places where little children are forced to try to get control of their fingers in writing small letters long before they have real control of the larger arm and elbow muscles. Reform is slow, not because people have never heard of new methods, but because they do not know the meaning of them. ”

“ But since that time it has become clear that speech involves activity not in one part of the brain, but in many. Thus there is a place where the sound of the spoken word is received, another place where it is stored; then there is an attention centre far away, but in connexion with the storage place, and all these various parts must be active and healthy before a word is heard, stored, and attended to. Now the mechanism being so involved, there may be a breakdown at one point or another. One may be deaf through the ear, or through the memory chamber, or through the higher brain. ”

“ Kerr in his pamphlet on defectives as stigmata which are found very much more often in the feeble minded than in other children. A deeply seamed and ever-frowning forehead, an open mouth, tight nostrils, are also common in them. Every one of these signs tells something about the unseen brain. And yet a great deal is left untold. Some of these children are always surprising their teachers and friends. One has an extraordinary memory for certain things—remembers when trains start or are due, finds things that are lost or remembers things that were done and forgotten long ago by other people. ”

“ The first real teachers of the feeble minded were physiologists. Not of course that they were all medical men. Some were priests like Itard, and some were artisans. But the great teachers stand out from all others in that they began their work by studying the physical side of education. A great many of course, such for example as Esquirol and Pinel, who began in Paris the study and treatment of so-called idiots and insane persons, were doctors by profession. In England and Scotland too, doctors took up this new work, and certainly no one disputed their right to do so. ”

“ We have not to anticipate the tool projectors here however, in this chapter on "defects." We have to linger yet a little with the feeble, the unhappy minority. The family history of the seriously defective is very obscure. The parents do not want to lift the dark curtain that hangs over the past, and, in many cases they cannot. But enough is known to make it clear that alcohol—a poison that seems to have a strangely evil effect on the higher brain—is one great cause, if not the great direct [3] cause of arrested development. ”

“ But of course all "defective" persons do not belong to this class. There is a class of children who are not defective, but are very dull. And there are some who are dull and also defective. In short, every degree of dullness, and every variety of defect, may be found in schools.
To-day the classifying of children is carried out in a rough and ready fashion, but the advent of the school doctor has already had its effect.
Dr. Kerr has drawn a diagram to indicate roughly the variations of mental power in school children to-day. ”

“ For punishment is a short cut towards many supposed goals, and the tradition of it has come down, sanctioned by the authority of wise men, who knew no more about the brain than Plato knew about Lake Michigan! "There are all degrees of word blindness," writes Dr. Kerr, "from the ordinary bad speller to the individual who cannot recognize any word." And there are all degrees of word-deaf people, from the person (so common!) who has difficulty in remembering what he has heard to the person who cannot remember spoken words at all in the ordinary way. ”

“ Only after years did people begin to see that it was no more a new kind of art than is skipping, no more a new order of exercise than is walking or crawling, that its uses are physiological and that one may, and as a rule must, quickly pass beyond the need for it as the power of control becomes finer and more delicate. ”

“ To-day, even in the best institutions, the doctors of the feeble minded and defective prescribe treatment, and supervise education. But there is no provision made for research work, or the application of the most recent discoveries in the methods of teaching, and this deprives the work of its highest value as well as of its greatest interest.
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We have seen that some people, who are notably defective, are yet very far from being inferior to the average in mental or moral qualities. They are like people, who being rich, have not access to some shops. ”

“ What have we been doing always, what are we doing now, but experimenting?— and always more or less in the dark. In the new order of school, the experimenting would be done under safer conditions, and with a more definite end in view—that is all. ”

“ Some take a great interest in certain things, such as horses, or ships, or fire-engines, or in their father's trade. Some can draw better than the child in the ordinary schools. They show you vigorous sketches, of cows, dogs, and parrots, and some (even among the more hopeless cases) can remember a great many airs, and can sing well and even play on instruments. None, so far as I know, have shown the usual amount of inventive power, or have made tools and used them masterfully. ”

“ One of the most crying needs to-day is the need for a school for the study of the abnormal. A school where defects, that may, or may not, constitute mental inferiority can be studied, and where physiological methods of teaching may be put to the test. ”

“ But to-day, the doctor can merely point out why society should protect itself. It is proposed that finger-print registers should be kept of all children who have had to come before a children's court—that is, before a body formed to deal with the crimes or serious offences of the abnormal. The fact that they are known would act it is hoped much as a conscience acts in the normal person. ”

“ Many problems that puzzle the ordinary teacher would, we may hope, be cleared up as the result of the work, for the new knowledge gained would be put within the reach of all schools, and even of every parent. ”

“ For example: the healthy infant, as soon as he can make other than reflex movements, begins to move his limbs by lifting the arm from the shoulder. The brain first takes control of the limb as a whole, then it takes control of parts ”

“ Pleasanter to know that it is the revelation, not the betrayal, that is common. The betrayal is comparatively very rare. It is a promise and a prophecy, not a betrayal, that is in the work of the average man. ”

“ Kerr to be very much more commonly found in the North than in London. Perhaps the reason may be that exhaustion produces one type of dullard (thus the Mongol children are usually born late in the life of the mother) while lack of natural stimuli may affect the offspring in quite another way. In any case it is pretty certain that within small areas even children vary almost as greatly as do sometimes the seams of a rock. In a single county—the West Riding of Yorkshire—the type of feeble-minded child presents strange contrasts. ”

“ A great mistake was made, however, when it was assumed that all children could be normal if they liked, and that all teachers could force them into the ranks of the majority.
To begin with, let us take the children who certainly might become normal, and are not—those who cannot keep up with the others for causes that might be got rid of. They form a large group. From 15 to 20 per cent of all perhaps, are dull simply through illness or bad conditions of life. ”

“ But through an impluse that some call unreasonable the most forlorn found helpers, and then it was found that even the very defective can be of great use, and not only in small, but in great ways. Many processes, so rapid that they cannot be observed in the well endowed, are slowed down as it were in the feeble minded. ”

“ Intermediate schools are opened for them—schools which are really health centres. There baths are provided, and excellent ventilation. The class rooms are sunny, the classes small. The education of the senses and the motor cortex is carried on vigorously, and deliberate efforts are made to awaken the higher centres of the brain. ”

“ The study of the normal and the abnormal side by side proved very fruitful. When one begins to look into the exercises he gave to his defective scholars one finds, as we have already said, that he was just following the order in which a normal child develops. ”

“ If such people lived in a world where musical memories were the only means of intercourse—in a grand opera world—they would be considered imbeciles." ↑ The lowest grade of child, known as the idiotic is, of course, a still smaller group—a decimal fraction per cent of the child community. ↑ Very few would deny that the great indirect cause is poverty. ↑ In an interesting paper on speech defects, Dr. Thomas points out that all the four memory centres dealing with speech and for the performance of delicate actions are stored in the brain in close proximity to one another. ”

“ It was the flower of a lowlier life. It may exist in the sickly; but disease tends to destroy it. It is found in the defective, but not always. It is always manifested by the healthy and normal individual. ”

“ Still, it should be there, and one day every educator will look for it; for self-projection in work—even in work of the roughest kind—represents the something that makes man not merely higher than the beasts, but different from the beasts. ”

“ In the middle are the normal children, probably from 60 to 70 per cent of the whole. To the right are the very bright children, 10 per cent, and a small fraction for the genius. To the left are the dull and backward, and beyond these a much smaller class—the imbecile and idiot class. ”

“ A great many suffer from adenoids, and some are dull and backward because they are ill, or in a chronic state of discomfort, strain, or depression because of bad feeding, bad air, want of sleep, and the burden of a life passed under difficult conditions. ”