Orthogenic in the Public Schools
The Psychological Clinic Vol. III. No. 2. April 15, 1909.
An Editorial.
The Psychological Clinic publishes this month with peculiar satisfaction reports of the work accomplished with special classes by Miss Doll in Cincinnati and Miss Devereux in Philadelphia. We wish to make plain our reasons for believing that the publication of these articles is of special inportance at this time for the satisfactory development of the study and educational treatment of backward children.
Problems connected with retardation and degeneration have already won a place in the consideration of the trained economist, sociologist, psychologist, and medical expert. Continuous scientific progress may with certainty be predicted, which will lay bare the social and physical causes of retardation and degeneration, and their preventive and curative treatment.
This journal not only desires to encourage scientific investigation, it seeks also to gain the cooperation of the general public in solving the problems which fall within its chosen province. The community must be made to respond to something more than the sensational elements of these problems. A campaign of education must acquaint the general public with the specific causes which are active in producing abnormal development in the individual and the race. The public is keenly alive to what promises a return, either in individual or social improvement. A social and philanthropic impulse, backed in many cases by strong religious enthusiasm, is in the last resort the motive power which drives to success even work of a specifically scientific character.
It is therefore the prevention and cure of mental deficiency and defect which must be made to hold the centre of attention. To gain this advantage, we proposed the word orthogenics, as the name of a science which concerns itself with the restoration of those who are retarded or degenerate to a condition where normal development becomes a possibility. This word we believe ade(29) quately defines the field of work which The Psychological Clinic has made its own, and at the same time reveals the social motive which impels the cultivation of this field of investigation. This journal has published a number of individual histories, prepared in most instances by those who have had the equipment of trained psychologists. These we hoped would set a scientific standard for reporting work of this kind, as well as reveal what could be accomplished through expert training.
The prevention and cure of retardation and degeneration on a large scale is beyond the power of the representatives of any branch of science. It must be undertaken by society, and above all by the teacher in the school room. We find in these reports of Miss Doll and Miss Devereux the first fruits of the work of skilful teachers in the public schools. No one can read these articles without recognizing the psychological insight shown by these teachers in approaching their problem, and without being convinced that a high degree of success has rewarded their efforts. The school room is a psychological laboratory, and the successful teacher must be trained in psychological method. It would be fruitless to demand that either the community or the grade teacher shall recognize at one stroke the necessity for a change in mental attitude, which means the turning of attention from questions of pedagogical method to what clinical psychology may be able to reveal concerning the individual peculiarities of children. The grade teacher is interested in teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. The special teacher must be interested in developing the individual child. We consider it unfortunate that grade teachers should be asked to give attention to individual cases. In the grades, attention must ever be centered upon the curriculum, pedagogical methods, and the result as shown through class promotions. There is a problem of mass instruction, and there is an entirely different problem of individual development. These two should be kept separate and distinct, and the public schools should never give up the older ideals of mass instruction. Clinical psychology and the special teacher will not supplant the more general features of the public school; they, will only supplement what is already to be found in the schools, in order to make the work effective in meeting special conditons.
We see in these reports of Miss Doll and Miss Devereux a still more significant fact for the progress of clinical psychology. The special ungraded class must be the laboratory of a clinical psychologist. The teacher of the special class must have an adeORTHOGENICS. 31 quate and satisfactory training in psychology, and must moreover possess originality, in solving actual conditions for which she never could have been prepared beforehand, and finally she must be able to make her experience and results available for others. The solution must be worked out in the special class room as it were from the bottom up, and not from the top in the psychological laboratory, of a university.
If the work, which doubtless many teachers are doing elsewhere than in Cincinnati and Philadelphia, is to have a vigorous effect in changing educational opinion and in serving as an example, the teachers who are actually doing the work must become articulate. They must be able to express in suitable language their observations of the conditions which they find, to state the methods which they have employed, and to report the modification in mental and moral character which they have succeeded in effecting. The Psychological Clinic believes that it has no more important service to render the community than to inspire teachers like Miss Doll and Miss Devereux to make reports such as they have prepared, and to furnish the medium through which their methods and results may be made a matter of common knowledge. Men and women of scientific training, such as Ayres, Falkner, Smith, Heilman, and Town, have been contributing to this journal results which are making clear many phases of the problem of retardation; superintendents who have found it possible to do original work while actively, engaged in their profession, like Bryan, Twitmyer, Van Sickle, Martin, the Indiana superintendents, and others, are establishing a basis of fact upon which the problem may be worked out in various communities. Scientific and administrative work is only preliminary to the real work, which must be done in the school room. In every school with an enrolment of a thousand children there should be found a special class. We believe that the problem has been worked out far enough for us to be practically certain that the special school cannot solve the peculiar problem of the backward child. It is to be solved only through a special ungraded class in close association with graded classes. The remarkable results of Miss Doll and Miss Devereux in returning to the grades children whom they had had under training for only a brief period, are convincing on this point.
If a special class is to be formed, it is necessary first of all to organize it under conditions which make success possible. The teachers who are assigned to this work must have received the proper training. Miss Devereux’s success is as much a credit to the Philadelphia Normal School, where she was trained, as to her own skill and ability,. The Philadelphia Normal School, under Miss Prichard and Miss Iiutchin, has probably, as progressive a course in psychology as can be found in any normal school in this country. An official visitor from abroad, who was examining on behalf of his government the normal schools of the United States, pronounced the course in psychology at the Philadelphia Normal School the best which he had seen. There is only one foundation for satisfactory work in this particular field, and that foundation is laid by a sound psychology. The teachers of the special class should have had for a time at least some experience in teaching primary grades. The charge of a special class should come to them as a promotion. After due regard has been given to training and experience, these teachers should be let alone by their principals and superintendents to work out their problem as best they can in the light of their training, their experience, and their natural abilities. For many years to come, the young men and women who graduate from our better normal schools will be more competent to deal with the problem of the backward child than will those who are to be found in administrative positions of authority, whose training of necessity has been along the lines of an older psychology, and a more conventional pedagogy. If these teachers are to be promoted to special class work because they have enjoyed special psychological training, and their work in the grade has marked them out as teachers of ability, this promotion should carry with it an increase in salary. The special classes will be a failure Unless the teachers of the special class receive the highest salary that is being paid to a grade teacher. The work is difficult, it requires ability and training, and the special class teacher should become the school’s center for the diffusion of new knowledge gained through experimentation in the special class room.
These teachers must not be overloaded with large classes. From fifteen to twenty-five is the largest number that may safely be assigned to one teacher. The class must be equipped with material for hand work, because it is through the use of the hands that attention and moral character may be trained. All, this is expensive. The per capita cost of the work which Miss Doll and Miss Devereux are trying to do must be from three to five times the per capita cost of teaching a child in the grade. There is no use trying to conceal this fact from boards of education. These are usually composed of men of business insight, and their first question is rightly enough, what is the cost, and why should this expensive venture be undertaken ? Boards of education must themselves be made to go to school. The material for tlieir instruction is to be found in such articles as that of Mr. Ayres in this number of Tiie Psychological Clinic, on “The Cost of the Repeater,” which shows that fifty-five cities are spending from 5 to 30 per cent of their school funds on children who are doing the same work for the second, third, or fourth time. Facts like these must in time convince even boards of education that the calculation of the per capita cost is only the first step in forming an estimate of the relative value of school expenditures. Falkner and Thorndike have shown that owing to elimination only a small percentage of children are getting an education in our public schools. From 25 to 50 per cent pass out of the school uneducated if we believe that an education involves graduation from the primary school. The per capita cost may be kept so low that we fail to attain the object for which the schools are supposed to exist.
The problem of the schools, therefore, is to educate, which means to-day to foster normal mental, moral, and physical development during the most important years of the child’s life, from six years of age until early adolescence. The results which The Psychological Clinic is placing before the community show how large a percentage of these children fail of normal development. ISTor shall we rest with a mere presentation of the facts. We must find the proper methods for restoring these children to the normal path of development.
To-day we are feeling our way, and this is not the least interesting feature of the study of orthogenics. By some minds the well trodden path is favored, to others it is pioneer work, the blazing of a new path through the forest, the climbing of an unexplored mountain, which makes the strongest appeal. Even statistics appear no longer dry and hopeless when one plods through them without knowing where he will come out, and reaches such unexpected results as have been obtained by Bryan, Cornman, Ayres, and Falkner. The pioneer work which must be done by the teachers of the special classes, presenting constantly new problems and unexpected results, must fill those engaged in the work with an enthusiasm which will surely be contagious to all whose educational interests have not become too thoroughly conventionalized.
Disclaimer
The historical material in this project falls into one of three categories for clearances and permissions:
Material currently under copyright, made available with a Creative Commons license chosen by the publisher.
Material that is in the public domain
Material identified by the Welcome Trust as an Orphan Work, made available with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
While we are in the process of adding metadata to the articles, please check the article at its original source for specific copyrights.