News And Comments
The Massachusetts Board of Education in January, 1907, issued a little pamphlet containing suggestions to teachers and school officials regarding medical inspection of the schools. The book is designed to assist in the effectual execution of the act of 190G, which requires the school committees of every city and town to cause every child in the public schools to be separately and carefully tested and examined at least once in every school year. The object in view is to ascertain whether he is suffering from defects of sight or hearing, or from any other disability or defect tending to prevent his receiving the full benefit of his school work, or whether a modification of the school work is advisable in order to prevent injury to the child or to secure the best educational results.
Infectious diseases, diseases of the eye, ear, throat and nose, skin, bones and joints, teeth, children’s diseases and nervous diseases, are discussed by specialists, their evils are pointed out and also the signs by which their presence may be detected.
During 1905-0G an examination of the eyes of 883 students of the University of Pennsylvania was conducted by Dr William Campbell Posey and Dr R. Tait Mclvenzie. The results show that 30 per cent of the students had defective vision and also that there was a steady increase of myopia during each of the four college years: 12% Per cent of the students in the two lower classes were myopic, while 19% per cent of those in the two upper classes were myopic, an increase of about 2V2 per cent of myopia for each college year.
The finding of so large a percentage of progressive eye defects in university students emphasizes the necessity of a more thorough examination of the eyes of the children in the lower schools in order that their defects may be corrected early in life before the strain of study has unnecessarily increased them.
“Promotion and Retardation in the Elementary Schools” is the title of a little pamphlet in which Dr Corman presents and interprets the collated exemption and promotion records of the Philadelphia public schools for June, 1905, and June, 1906.
The tables present by districts and also by grades the total number of children enrolled, the number exempted, the number passed on examination, the total number promoted, the average number of months in a grade, the number of children who spent twenty months or more in a grade, and the number of children who spent thirty months or more in a grade.
These tables bring to light the grave fact that more than one-fourth of all the pupils failed of promotion each year; also that the largest percentage of promotion failures occur in the four lowest grades. Dr Cornman attributes the failure to the conditions existing in these grades,? overcrowding, half-time, inexperienced teachers, and lack of supervision. He does not mention the possibility that the greater success of the higher grades may be partially due to the fact that many children in the lower grades never reach them: these children either drop out of school or remain in the elementary grades.
As regards the number of retarded children in the schools, the tables show that from 9 to 10 per cent of the pupils spend twenty months or more in one grade; while from .5 to .6 per cent, or about 720 children, spend thirty months or more in one grade. It is evident, as Dr Cornman states, that a child who spends three years or more in a grade through which the average pupils passes in one year is “different” from his classmates. Such children are unquestionably backward, and the classes for backward children should be increased in number in order to accommodate these 720 children.
Dr F. L. Wells, lecturer in psychology in Columbia University, has been appointed Pathological Psychologist in McLean Hospital, Waverly, Mass.
In Belgium the movement to care for defective children after they leave the special schools was organized in 1901 by the Societe Protectrice de l’Enfance anormale. The after-care system is not yet completely developed, but in Brussels and Antwerp its usefulness has been thoroughly demonstrated.
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