Retarded Children, not Defectives
- Author:
Anna Johnson,
Teacher in Elmwood School, Denver, Colorado.
Since the searchlight of investigation has turned its ray on childhood, we find children classified in the following terms: normal, abnormal, subnormal, supernormal, and retarded. Those who know, or think they know, tell us that normal children are children that conform to the average human type representing the present stage of civilization. Abnormal, subnormal, and supernormal children are those who deviate from the average human type, and retarded children are those who have failed to make the usual progress in school work, as prescribed by school authorities and courses of study. This article is to deal exclusively with retarded children. For the past five years, I have had the privilege of observing the intellectual and spiritual unfolding of about one hundred and fifty retarded children who were classified in the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. Out of this by-product of the school system, I can safely say that not one could be grouped as a mental defective. This naturally provokes the questioni “Why were these children retarded?” On investigation, the most prevalent causes were found to be economic, temperamental, disciplinary, slow mental growth, physical defects, and general illness. Those tabulated under general illness were only about one per cent. Frequently these children are very bright, but their continual absence from school duties prevents them from making that seventy per cent which stares them in the face in every subject. Hence on account of the disorganized knowledge these children have, they become retarded, but they are not defective.
If children were passed on their ability to make a conscious connection between the work of their present grade and the work of the grade to which they should be advanced, it would decrease retardation, and be a fairer passing test than the seventy per cent. The physically defective children found in the Retarded School, are those with poor eyesight, defective hearing, adenoids, bad tonsils, and the hundred and one ills attributed to childhood. But when these physical defects are corrected so that the mind can function without any outcry from the physical body, these children recuperate mentally and often make greater progress than the so-called normal children in the regular grades.
Another type is the child of slow mental growth who fails year after year in his studies, and we think surely this is a mental defective of some sort. But we are wrong again. We found any number of such children, after one or two years of adolescence, blossom out all at once. Such children live in that quiet, subconscious state where the real mind does its work in secret. When they find themselves, and their conscious mind is awakened to the realities of the external world, they take hold of the problems confronting them in the most effective manner. And then it is a case of the stones which the builders rejected becoming the corner stones of the temple. Frequently in after-life these young people make great success of the very subjects in which they appeared to be slow.
A heavy percentage of retarded children are so through economic conditions. Last year 30 per cent of the children in my room came from homes where the mother either had’to help support the family or was the sole support of the family. When the father can’t get work or when he considers the burden of life too great, he often walks away from home and forgets to come back. The mother becomes the burden bearer, the meager supporter of the family. She usually sews, cooks, waits on table, or works in a department store. She is gone all day and the children are left to shift for themselves. They are hungry, poorly clad, and unclean. They come to school all out of sorts, they fail to get their lessons, they show no consideration for the rules of the school, and why should they??life has extended no courtesies to them. We cannot hope that children who come from such dwarfed and twisted homes should be obedient and good, and step right into the many activities which are worked out of a course of study. So these victims of broken homes and the economic conditions of our splendid civilization become retarded. They do not pass and the teacher with forty or fifty children on her hands has no time to look into’their home conditions, to say nothing of studying their mental and moral natures. Possibly then some wise head comes along and pronounces them defective, mainly morally. But they are like those children we call the normal type. When set right with the world they show keen appreciation for what is done for them and become anxious and willing to do right. The conscience of a child is not hard to reach, and what higher result in education can we aim for than to bring a human being face to face with his own conscience? Every child is a new world and we must help make that world beautiful both internally and externally. Speaking of temperamental causes of retardation I have reference to superior or talented children. These children are the most misunderstood and abused children in the whole school system and invariably become targets for that word “defective”. They are the children of genius and treat no subject with respect except that one toward which they feel their divine impulse. They have strong outbrusts of temper and passion, in other words they are moody and emotional. Instead of such antics being evil, they are marks of a noble and original temperament. In it lies dormant the creative genius that characterizes the poet, the artist, the inventor, the reformer. Children with such natures should be carefully disciplined. Their emotions must not be rooted out but controlled with a discipline that is just yet firm as steel. In this surging sea of feeling rocks the future of the child, as well as that of the race. It is the soil from which will sprout the seed that will afterward determine the saint or the sinner. Through the study of biography both past and present, we learn that genius can never be molded along the lines prescribed by the ordinary school system. The most specific type I ever saw of the temperamental child was a boy I had in school for three consecutive years, and who is now a cartoonist 011 one of the foremost daily papers in the country. He was not discovered in the most gentle way, but he was discovered. For two of the most precious morning hours I tried to get something out of him through various lessons, but of no avail. He showed little active resentment until technical grammar was thrust upon him, then life became unbearable. He picked up the book and hurled it at me. Going back to his desk I found him engaged on a cartoon. The spirit of genius was crowding him and he had no time for my petty subjects. At times, we didn’t speak for days, but at the end of the period a cartoon was sold, and perhaps it was found on the front page of the paper. Then we were all happy.
In addition to his ability as a cartoonist, this boy has marked talent along literary lines. He has written several short stories of merit as well as two or three poems that have been published. He never took the Binet-Simon tests, but he was considered somewhat defective, chiefly from a moral view point. I made a record of all his moral moods where real conscience was involved, and found he had the keenest sense of justice, as well as cleaner morals than most boys of his age. It is decidedly worth while to give special attention to children of this type. They are the ones that adorn our civilization; they produce food for our emotional nature, and spin the threads that bind together the finer fibers of life. The children who are in the Retarded School for discipline are those who have no liking for a classical education, or rather for school books. They come to school year after year resenting most of the subjects in the school curriculum. They are nagged at and punished at school by the teacher and the principal, and sometimes by the truant officer, until in self-defense these children become almost fiendish in trying to preserve their natural impulses. As a last resort they are dumped on the Retarded School. Usually they have worked fairly well until they have reached the fifth or sixth grades, then they begin to resent everything in the school system. Right here some sort of industrial education should be presented to them because they are eager for the industrial side of life. Most of the boys are truants but they are bright. They can give a teacher more practical information than she can give out to them. They like lots of arithmetic and sloyd. They prefer to read about current events, mechanics, and all sorts of industrial matters rather than in the school reader. They want to be in partnership with the teacher instead of being subordinate. These boys are optimistic and versatile. They work in gangs and are usually loyal and honest. If we could look beyond the pale of the school system we would see in these young people the captains of industry, the leaders and managers of great commercial enterprises.
Girls of this type like sewing and cooking; they like to make beautiful, things for the home and are invariably fond of little children. They are very neat and spend much time on their personal appearance. After finishing the eighth grade they usually marry in a year or so, and our observation has been that they make good wives.
There is something to be said in favor of these children who vibrate along the industrial wire. All we need is to take an outlook on life and we shall find that at least 85 per cent of the human race are engaged in productive labor. Is it not right then that many of our children should be eager for the industrial side of life? Instead of attaching to them that word “defective,” which has been so freely misused for the past few years, let us set our children to the tasks which are to their liking, and so turn their activities into creative channels, instead of allowing them to be wasted in concentrated crime. Progress can do nothing better than make the most out of all of us as we are, therefore our aim should be to prepare the children for whatever work life brings them, and for whatever they are capable of doing. We must never forget that future history plays at our feet, and if we hope to perpetuate any lofty ideals in the race, we must do it through the children, by educating them as ndividuals along their God-given impulses.
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