Backward children

Front matter

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Author's Preface

This volume is an inductive study of backward children. It presents in a series of concrete illustrations studies of cases to exemplify the principles and methods underlying the diagnosis, treatment and training of backward children. It aims to describe the cases as simply, non-technically and humanly as the subjectmatter 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 purposely 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 of showing the dangers to society lurking in their neglect and misunderstanding by the public. Their separation from the temporarily backward requires a clinical 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 indebted 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 laggards 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 retardation illustrated — The social standards in the home .—Pedagogical standards of retardation — Age and grade — Progress — Playground standards — Scientific standards — Their objection — Binet tests — Standards in general — Meaning of backwardness depends upon standards — Backwardness sometimes good.

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 leading 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-inlaw, the family returned to the wife's native town. The Individual Standards. — After Harold's birth, his mother's ambition, disappointed in its social 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 native village, Harold was entered in the public school with his mother's certain conviction that, having had such exceptional opportunities at home and such perfect preparation in kindergarten, he would easily excel his less fortunate fellow pupils.

But his mother was doomed to a second life-disappointment. The boy developed into only an ordinary 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 opportunities 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 open rebellion or complete depression by that same blessed mediocrity which called down all the condemnation 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 judgment of himself or of others who know him. According 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 opportunity we did have. Hence, by that standard, \ve are all backward.

The Social Standard in the Home. — Quite different is the story of another boy who lived in a family of two brothers and two sisters in an ordinary 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 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 prepare 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 performed a piece of manual work heartily and energetically. 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 translucent; 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 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 judgment 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 "retarded"; 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 standards 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. Generalized, the matter might be stated thus: Every child that begins school at the legal age and is promoted 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' allowance 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 children 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 argued, 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 Doctor Leonard Ayres, who comes to the conclusion that the two methods really do not disagree very materially 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

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 certain 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 manual labor, were very dubious about their dreaming son's future. His teachers, victims of the limitations 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 trying, 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 is compelled to live in. Taking these two phases 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 reserves of energies; that he is not failing because he lacks interest, because he is indifferent through wilfulness 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 w4io 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 future. 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 acquaintance 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 jostling play-world each atom of humanity inevitably settles into its proper place with the fatality of potatoes on the way to market. As the forces of nature fit the stars to their undeviating orbits and the glaciers to their rocky beds, so do these youngsters fit each companion to his groove. Such classifications of children are as accurate as they are unconscious 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 largest 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 unsupervised 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 playground 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 reason for her helplessness is to be found in the vagueness and incomprehensiveness of the "general intelligence" to be measured. What is intelligence? Is it a single faculty? Surely not; for idiots often possess marvelous musical and mathematical faculties. Is it reason? Philosophers reason to perfection, yet are the most impracticable people; so impracticable that they may starve where another man will live well. For witness, read DeQuincey's account 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 measure 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 consider 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 supreme importance to the teacher or parent, these, for the moment unobserved and unimportant processes, may be the very ones that will make the child eventually a famous and successful man. For example, success in life most frequently depends on coolness and readiness in times of great crises. Artificial tests in clinics and schoolrooms can not, by their nature, afford such situations, while play produces over and over again as a part of its very essence critical moments full of originality and burning with excitement.

The Binet-Simon Standard. — Besides the foregoing 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 describe 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 suitable to a younger age. These standards have the qualities of simplicity and of giving their measurements 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 series. Not one of twenty-five adult, well- trained, experienced teachers, whose mentality was unimpeachable, 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 criticism of the Binet tests themselves, but as an illustration again of the vital truth not too often to be reiterated that backwardness itself and the significance 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 measurements 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 accurate. Unfortunately, in dealing with living children, 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 wonderfully made that to classify one child requires literally innumerable measurements ; thirdly, and especially, 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 problem 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 perfection 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 ai'ise. 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 individual 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, according to somebody's judgment. The mere fact that a child is backward is seen immediately as soon as the standard of measurement is stated. Until that is stated backwardness in itself and by itself has practically 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 undesirable. Sometimes it keeps children out of danger, 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 respects. "Your boy is backward," begins the schoolvisitor, and mother's face falls and her forehead wrinkles, "in smoking," or "swearing," adds the visitor, 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. Before 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 backwardness is seen to be desirable or undesirable. I have actually seen a young girl of fascinating appearance and an excellent mind brought to a psychological clinic because, according to the strait and strict standards of conduct in her community and the people who had her under their control, she displayed tendencies to degeneracy. The truth was that the girl was simply forward in company, and forward too, only according to the exceedingly conservative 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 elbowing 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 Margaret 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 goldpiece 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 agitation 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 determine its exact nature. To put our inductive study into a form easily assimilable we append the following summary of standards :

I. Individual Standards, — A backward diild 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 Standax-ds.

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 activities. Neighbors usually judge less mercifully 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 anthropological 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 pedagogical standard is a child who begins school at the legal age and is promoted regularly with his class. Pedagogical retardation is a fact, and has nothing to do with causes, is not always a detriment, and should not be condemned until 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 standards give about the same results. 3. In General Intelligence. — ^According to several 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 standard 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.

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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 ordinary, retarded children, superficially alike, noted only for the fact that they helped to swell the thirtythree and seven-tenths per cent, of backward children in American schools.

Their Personal Appearance. — To the hasty observer all difference in personal appearance favored

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 possible.

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 manner 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 shoulders, flat chest and general debility, with the lusterless eye and vacuous face — were still very much in evidence. He came with no such good report for conduct as Mary had brought. By his former teachers 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 improvement through the adenoid operation. The hope was slow to materialize and John was sent to the special class.