Education of Defectives in the Public Schools
REVIEWS AND CRITICISM. :Author: Meta L. Anderson. Yonkers, N. Y.: World Book Company, 1917. Pp. xvii+104.
Miss Anderson has set forth, in a thoroughly practical way, the methods used by teachers of defectives in the more progressive American cities. A serious weakness in her book, is that she ignores nearly everything that has been accomplished outside of Newark, N. J., Vineland, N. J., and Berlin. Dr Goddard, in his preface, seems to be laboring under a similar psychic blindness, when he says, “Others may have caught some glimpses of the truth, and may have for one reason or another worked into their practice certain elements which are also used by Miss Anderson. Perhaps still others have seen the whole plan clearly but have not had the opportunity of working it out. At least it has remained for Miss Anderson to work out a complete program free from all tradition of the methods with normal children, and based only on the needs of the children in her care, the procedure being constantly modified and corrected by the results.” In this connection it is only necessary to think of New York, Boston, Minneapolis, and Detroit, among the cities whose treatment of defective children has given proof to the contrary.
Miss Anderzon is an advocate of Binet testing. She goes so far as to say, “The ideal way to select children for the defective or backward classes would be to have every child in a given school or school system examined by intelligence tests and graded accordingly. Those retarded three years or more would be placed in classes for defectives, those retarded two years or more in backward classes, and doubtful cases in observation classes.” Nevertheless, she generously admits, “While we speak of a defective child having a given mentality, it by no means follows that the defective can compete in all things with a normal child of the same mentality. The advantage is always with the normal child.” And again she says, “Theoretically, at least, the child of fourteen with the mentality equal to a nine-year-old child should be able to do the work of a fourth-year grade. Practically, that is not generally true of the children selected for a defective class. The defectives, if there are any, who can do the work of their mental age are probably retained in the regular grades, passing as dull children and not being recognized as true defectives until they are ready to leave school.”
A strong point is made by Miss Anderson when she repeatedly advises the teacher to “begin where the child is.” But her preferred way of finding out “where the child is” would seem to be through the Binet tests. Psychology has no place in her scheme. It is passed over in silence, left flourishing in some outer world along with the successful teachers in other towns than Newark, N. J. Of diagnostic teaching,?teaching directed to getting a child to take the next step, based upon a psychological analysis of his present capacities, Miss Anderson seems unaware. Her work is practical, not scientific. It is of today, not of tomorrow. For that reason it may be expected to have a brief, though intense, period of usefulness. It will hardly, as Dr Goddard claims, become “the guide for teachers of defectives for many years to come.”
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