Types of Children
D. P. MacMillan, Director of Child Study, Chicago Public Schools. Educational Review, Vol. XXXIII, No. 3, March, 1907.
By “child study” the author designates a scientific inquiry into the life conditions of children. A branch of child study is concerned with the mind of the child, its natural order of growth, and the various conditions which effect a change in its development. In a certain wide application of the term, psychology concerns itself with the descriptive explanation of mind wherever found. But in a narrower and strictly proper application of the term, standard psychology deals with the mind of the normal adult human individual,?normal in contradistinction to abnormal, human as opposed to animal, adult as contrasted with the child, individual as differentiated from the collective or group mind. This normal adult psychology furnishes the standard to which the mind of the child and the mind of the aged must be referred.
From a body of scientific facts comprising the most general truths concerning each of these classes of individuals,?the child, the adult, and the aged,?must be ascertained the prevailing type of the class, and also the differences exhibited by individuals.
In order to determine this normal or average type of the child, it is important to find some fixed standard by which to grade the individual children. A distinct step in advance in this direction was made by the application of fixed tests to a large number of children.
The author then enumerates the various points of view from which children have been studied and classified; beginning with the methods oased upon the most fundamental processes and thus giving the more natural reactions of the child, he passes on to those which are based on qualities that are the result of education and environment. First in this series is described the purely physiological method of Dr W. S. Christopher, which groups children according to the organic susceptibility of their bodies for nutriment. Then follow in regular order the classifications based upon differences in reflexes and automatisms, on differences in instincts, in the emotions, and finally in ideas. When the average type is established according to one of those classifications, two sub-types are discovered, the first comprising those children markedly above, the second those below the average. The subtypes he further classifies as follows: the first, precocious children, talented children, and geniuses; the second, idiots of the first degree, idiots of the second degree, imbeciles of the first degree, imbeciles of the second degree, subnormal children, and backward children. He also finds useful a further classification from the social-economic point of view, based upon an estimation of what the children may become in adult life: (1) those unable at maturity to contribute to their own support; (2) those able under direction so to contribute; (3) those fully able, under special training, to become self-supporting; (4) those who will be not only able to support themselves, but others; {5) those who at maturity will be in a true sense contributors to the social welfare.
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