Some Problems at the Work Age Level
- Author:
Ide, Ph.D.,
University of Pennsylvania. The school law of the State of Pennsylvania requires that from the age of eight until the age of sixteen years each and every child residing within the limits of the state shall be a regular attendant at school, whenever school shall be in session, unless such child shall have reached his fourteenth birthday and have completed the sixth grade, in which case he may satisfy the requirements by attending continuation school one day per week. If an attendance officer reports a child not in school and a sufficient excuse is not forthcoming, provision is made for the punishment of the parent by the imposition of a fine.
This law was framed with the idea of preventing the exploitation of children in industry during the formative years when the requirement of an education and the establishment of habits of correct living only are possible, and also to avoid the dwarfing of body and mind through too early an application at monotonous tasks to which children in their immaturity are particularly likely to be set. In this way foreign-born parents have been prevented, to a certain extent at least, from placing their children at work at an early age, or from exploiting them themselves by labor performed within the limits of the home, and native-born fathers and mothers have been required to place their children in school and to join the ranks of wage earners themselves instead of living on the earnings of a numerous brood, able by reason of their number rather than by their skill to support their parents and themselves. Vigilant attendance officers have co-operated with social agencies in the elimination of both of these groups from society, and with the aid of a growing public opinion, the school, employer and parent are moving together as one unit toward the great goal of public education for all. The law specifies that each and every child between the stated ages shall be in school. The tendency among social workers interested in the problems of education in the United States today has been to urge an increase in the number of years of school attendance required rather than to accept the present limitation. Just now a strong movement is being initiated to require eighteen years rather than sixteen years as the minimum age for leaving school. So far no one has suggested that it might be possible that this law, if passed under present conditions, might prove even more of a boomerang than the present law?a boomerang which would react upon society through the fields of adolescent crime and non-conformity. At the present time the law requires the child to remain in school until his sixteenth year. It presupposes the ability of the child to profit by such school training as he shall receive, and presupposes further that each child is able by reason of this ability to do such school work. Just here is where the joker lies. Notwithstanding the attitude of the American people towards ideas of inequality, there is no question of equality in the physical and mental characters supplied to children by their ancestors. Men are not born equal. They are born most unequal in both mental and physical characteristics, and this inequality is further increased by differences in environment and training.
At the present time schools are reporting figures for retardation? whatever each and everyone may mean by the term?varying anywhere from twenty-five to fifty per cent. This indicates that somewhat less than half of the children entering school are not making normal progress, that is, are not being promoted regularly at the end of each promotion period. Some of these, of course, are legitimate retardations due to illness, changes of schools, late entrance and the like. None of these are to be considered here. A large number of children, varying in estimates from five to twenty-five per cent of the total number of children entered in school, are definitely retarded and do not overcome their backwardness even under the best of conditions. Either sitting in the regular class with their mates or occupying a seat in a room devoted to the special class, they do not learn to read and write as other children do, or if they do succeed with these subjects, they are not able to make use of them as tools for daily use.
It is this group of retarded children which is the source of much of the unruly element of adolescent age both in school and out, and which increases enormously the cost of education through the added number of classes which are required in the school, or which lessens the efficiency with which the class work is done because of the increased numbers in the classes. The group falls naturally into two divisions. The first includes those who are obviously feeble-minded; the second those who may be diagnosed as mentally deficient, without meaning by that term anything other than that these children are so equipped mentally that they are unable to learn the fundamental operations in reading and arithmetic in such a fashion as to make them available as tools.
Two grades in the public schools retain more of these children than any others. These are the third and the fifth grades. Many a child who is able, after several repetitions of the first and second grades, to reach the third grade, where the four fundamental operations of arithmetic are emphasized and where the reading is expected to be fairly done, finds the third grade an impassable barrier. Many of these children, if tested by a teacher who knows her business, will be found to be not near the proficiency level of the third grade. After stranding in the first two grades for a time age and height tend to promote them, and they are passed along to the third from which the conscientious teacher finds it impossible to dislodge them. From this point they are sent to a special class if there is one, and if not they sit in the third as long as it is possible to retain them in the seats, when they automatically move on to the next grade. The fifth grade children do fairly well on the memory diet which has been theirs in the acquiring of their educational tools. The applications required of them, however, are their points of deficiency. They are utterly unable to make use of these tools in the acquiring of new knowledge. Because of this they remain in the fifth grade or are pushed into the sixth merely because the school finds it an easy solution of the question.
The law permits a child who has finished the sixth grade to go to work, providing he is fourteen, and providing further that in case he is less than sixteen years of age he shall attend continuation school one day per week. The mentally deficient child almost always fails to reach his fourteenth birthday and his sixth grade class at the same time, owing to the fact that the school usually makes no effort to get rid of him so early. It is the next two years that are the critical point for the school and the child as well. It is the next two years that often finish the habits and practices begun in the lower grades and now at this point just reaching their fruition.
Well-to-do parents of children retarded in their progress are apt to make some other provision for a child obviously growing beyond the opportunities of the school. A private school or a tutor helps to supply the deficiencies, while recreation and boy or girl activities add lessons of value to the child. Where no extra-school care can be provided the mentally deficient child is left to get along as best he can with the school work as it is. He is left to clog the system with his presence, and to such an extent does this happen that at present the schools have within their precincts a large number of children who are not receiving the sort of training they are expected to receive because they are utterly incapable of taking this training for use to themselves. Because of the curriculum about which so much is being written at the present time, the children are not offered in the school the sort of training they are capable of receiving, that is, they are not offered manual work of a kind which will give them training suitable as a foundation for their future means of livelihood, or a training in some line of endeavor such as will be of direct future financial aid?a not undesirable aim from schools claiming themselves as a preparation for life. Trade schools and manual training schools for either boys or girls require a higher standard for entrance requirements than is possible for the deficient child to attain, and in consequence he is denied the only sort of training he is capable of receiving and utilizing. The feeble-minded are even worse off, for their school training is neither education or training but a hodge-podge of the three R’s which offers nothing as a supplement to either a fuller life expression or an aid in the earning of a livelihood. In passing, it may be well to remark that certain schools in the United States have offered to their feeble-minded children such excellent courses that they are directly able to extract financial profit from them at the close of their school career, and in consequence even the normal children of the grade schools are passed up by industries for the better trained, though mentally inferior, children. Socially this works out to the disadvantage of the community, as it places a premium upon the mentally ill-equipped and permits the official sanction of the group to be placed upon them.
The mentally deficient child finds himself handicapped all through his school career by the conditions in school which fail to offer him anything that he can assimilate and use. He finds himself as the years roll on seated in rooms with children who are not nearly his size physically but who surpass him mentally. He finds himself the butt of his class, and although he may seek those of his age on the playground and in his youthful social group, he finds himself handicapped in his contact with them because of his position in school. As he approaches his fourteenth year, he has a healthy desire to encounter the world in all of its aspects and especially in that of finance. He is anxious to earn his own living. Early adolescence has thrust its problems upon him, and his inability to do work plus the extra urge which comes at this period of life is apt to induce in the child a feeling of restlessness not likely to be desirable in the school room. It is here that the small, petty misbehavior becomes so troublesome to the teacher, especially in the regular classroom where so many children require her care that there is plenty of opportunity for the one or two older children in the room to perform those small acts of annoyance so well known to the average teacher. After a few months, if possible, the child is transferred to the special or disciplinary class where a stronger autocrat of the schoolroom holds sway. With a large number of such children much of the work becomes more or less perfunctory, so that it is found that the principal job of the teacher is to keep the children, as one principal put it, “from jumping out of the window.” The question of education is quite lost sight of in the necessity of maintaining discipline. Under the conditions which the average child of this sort encounters there is a strong tendency for him to become unruly. Not all the children of the mentally deficient type are unruly, but even those children who are well-conformed often become wards of the state or of social agencies because their great suggestibility renders them peculiarly liable to certain kinds of mal-adjustments, while those who tend toward lawlessness almost always require the help of the social agency or the court in their care. Part of their insubordination comes from their contact with the school which fails to maintain its discipline through proper expression, and which thus unknowingly promotes habits of inattention and laziness through its improper curriculum. Coupled with the usual environmental conditions which offer to these children more temptations than come to the ordinary lot of children, the situation reaches a point where the child refuses longer to recognize the authority of the school, and often includes within this proscription the authority of the parents also, although often enough the latter side with the children rather than with the law.
Many a case of stealing, of running away and of bagging school may be traced back to the unsatisfactory relationship which the school has built up between itself and the child. Many children get a job with the intention of casting off the yoke only to find themselves in the clutches of the law. Others refuse to attend school and, when sought by the attendance officers, are secreted by relative or friends. Others attend school just often enough to avoid being dropped where attendance officers are not over-zealous in looking after those whose attendance does not involve three consecutive days of absence. By this system many children are able to get along with not more than two days of attendance at school each week. In this way they avoid the attendance officer and are even enabled to work a little on the side.
The greatest difficulty comes with those who involve themselves with the law. Oftentimes a parent is dragged into court to answer for a child who is not in school attendance, when the parent is not really to blame except in so far as he is unable to solve the problems which center around his child. Institutional care does not answer the question either, for the difficulty is more fundamental than the institution can solve, the whole situation being attacked as it is some six years too late. There is no reason to suppose that any given child could not have been trained in such a fashion as to have become a useful citizen, but six years of spoiling are not to be atoned for in a night, and the institution, no matter how good, has never been considered exactly a place for atonement. The difficulty must be solved from some other standpoint.
It is certain that the schools will have to face the question sooner or later. It is the public school which says that a child must go to school, and back of the school is the taxpayer who ought to be expecting that some good result is to come of this requirement. It is he who is going to ask why the law has worked out as it has for this single group, and it is he who is going to expect an answer. Since the war we have really learned how very poor our educational system is, and at the present time there is a tendency toward demanding reformation, a tendency to ask why we do certain things and a tendency to ask for results. Out of this tendency there ought to come, full-fledged at least, this one judgment. Many of our children are not receiving the sort of education they require in our public schools. What can be done about it? Several things may be done.
In the first place, without permitting unscrupulous persons to exercise the power, it is possible to permit children who have reached their fourteenth year, and who are not receiving the full benefit which they have a right to expect from their school experience, to leave school on the basis of the judgment of some duly qualified person, and to permit them to engage in some field of labor designed to be remunerative both in experience and money. This is not an ideal way, because the children who would be candidates for this treatment need training of a kind which the school does not offer but which, under pressure, it should be induced to offer.
In the second place, it is an unnecessary waste for the schools to be burdened with children who are going to do badly in school without learning about it a great deal earlier than they do. Unless a child remain several years in a grade, little or no effort is expended to discover why it is retarded. The sheep are never separated from the goats, so that at times it is very evident that the teacher is forced to labor in a specified way with a class most of whose members are obviously unfitted for the treatment. The sensible thing to do would be to differentiate the group from the beginning. Time and money would be saved by the process, for each child who is kept in school or in a grade beyond the allotted time is a source of extra expense. This early differentiation is essential to success with any other sort of school work than that regularly given. After this comes the curriculum which also must be differentiated. The minimum amount of the three R’s is all that is necessary, and, let me whisper, all that is ever received either, and after this should come the real work which is manual entirely in its character. For both boys and girls should be provided manual training and domestic science, agriculture and any other sort of work which is suited to the life of the community and will therefore have a direct bearing upon the training for adult life. There should be work of both kinds for both sexes, since part of the aim of this sort of education is the building up of homes; and, where early marriages are the rule and the children quite unlikely to marry exclusively from among their own schoolmates, it is wise indeed to give to both sexes work in the fields necessary for each child to become a propaganda committee of one to increase the general efficiency of the household and to make of that household a distinct asset to the community not only in itself but in that of its descendants. Besides this, girls and boys now enter the same fields of industry to earn a livelihood, and the schools need to supply the sort of training which shall directly assist in the earning of a living. While the manual work need not be a direct training for a trade, it will nevertheless train in the handling of tools and machinery, valuable indeed as an asset in industry. It may, however, deal directly with some phase of work calculated to fit the child for remunerative labor.
With training directed along lines calculated to be immediately fruitful from the family as well as the industrial standpoint, the mentally deficient child may hope to enter some line of work with equipment likely to be of immediate value to him?value calculated in dollars and cents. Besides this, his school training, of interest and with an aim in view, avoids that ennui which is so common an effect today, especially with the group under discussion, but not entirely unknown among those of higher grade mentally. Habits of industry, perseverance and concentration are built up in this sort of school?habits which will function positively in the years to come. Alertness and interest displace dullness and apathy, well-trained and co-ordinated muscles displace flabby ineffectiveness, and joy in useful work displaces stupid application at a job. The mental deficient can be made effective. Why not try to make him so? Many of the cases brought to the Psychological Clinic for examination show retardation in school of three or four years. Most of these are found by analytic diagnosis to have defects which warrant the prognosis that no matter how long they stay in school they never could do the work of the fifth grade as it is now given. A few of these cases are given here for illustration of the type, and as samples of the facts upon which the statement of the problem is based.
Ernest.
Ernest stood on the corner with an unlighted cigarette hanging from a pendulous lower lip. His bold narrow eyes sized up the passers-by as he lounged around with hands in his pockets. Considerably undersized for his fourteen years, unwashed and unkempt, he looks like the tough lad he tries to be although his ideas are so few that of himself he could never achieve so lofty an ideal. By imitation he can acquire toughness and does. By breaking windows, petty thieving and shooting craps with boys older than he does he maintain his reputation. A poor, weak mother has failed in her early attempts at discipline, and now Ernest and his younger brother, fast following in Ernest’s footsteps, are both shaping their lives with little reference to the family at home.
Ernest sits in the fifth grade. After repeated attempts it might have been possible for him to pass into the sixth this year if he had worked at all, but he added to his other accomplishment that of bagging school and has played fast and loose the entire year. Without actually missing enough days at any one time to bring down more than a reprimand on his mother, he has yet evaded more than half of the sessions.
At a psychological examination Ernest gave an excellent performance with any sort of mechanical material. His memory span, retentiveness and trainability while not of the best type are nevertheless distinctly adequate. But he has no ability in the use of words, his vocabulary is very limited, and in consequence any test requiring language as a factor in its answer is never successfully performed. Ernest has remained at practically the same level in regard to language as he would have had he never entered school, if comparison with his mother is evidence. Ernest is much dissatisfied with school. The habits he is acquiring there and on the street corner are not assets in the field of industry. He is surely being taught to be lazy, to be vicious in his talk, to be contemptuous of the law and to be disrespectful toward authority. He is acquiring tastes which are too expensive for a boy in his financial straits to gratify but which will enslave him and require their gratification as surely and completely as it is possible.
This boy is capable. He might have been made into a good worker, even a skilled one. He has no deficiencies so great as to eliminate him from the field of the skilled industrial worker. His inherited background is a weak one but in no sense vicious, and its weakness lies in the same plane as does that of Ernest?in bad training or in none at all.
What can be done for Ernest? He has nearly two years more of school ahead of him. No special class, no manual training, nothing but the same old routine which he has already experienced for the two years past. Will it do him any good to remain longer in school? What would you recommend?
John.
John came into the house, slamming the door and stamping his feet. His face was white with anger as he told his mother of indignities he had suffered at the hands of the “old man” as he termed him. The “old man” was the principal of his school, and the trouble was over the arithmetic which John said he could not do, and which his teacher and finally his principal rather insisted upon his attempting. Thin and aenemic, the nervous offspring of a nervous mother, constantly under stimulation from her and from his teachers, John found it impossible to satisfy the conditions which they imposed, and in order to avoid them had finally learned to work himself into a passion such as would eliminate the question from the books for the time being. John would go to bed for a day or two with a bad headache. His mother would retire with smelling salts and a dozen handkerchiefs, his father would beat a retreat from the over-charged atmosphere, and the rest of the family, two smaller children, would remain in the back yard talking with bated breath until the trouble had blown over.
The trouble lay in the fact that John was quite unable to do the work which he was expected to do. He was a normal boy, of rather superior imagination, but he lacked intellectual capacity in the sense that he found it difficult, in fact all but impossible, to solve the problems expected from him in the fifth grade. Ambition at home and pressure at school could not produce what was not in the boy. The psychological examination determined without a doubt that he was a normal boy deficient in the intellectual field. His home surroundings were very bad, and their effect was felt in the constant nervous excitement induced and did not primarily account for the difficulties in school.
John finally rebelled against the whole situation and got a job with a gas company. He gave his age as seventeen and cautioned his mother not to report him to the attendance officer who soon appeared. Some statement of hers challenged the interest of the officer, and John was soon notified to appear at school. Further rebellion at home, more nervous attacks, and a place was found for John in Maine where he worked for a doctor for his board and room and some instruction. John was much dissatisfied with this proposition for he did not like farmwork but he remained at this place until he had reached his sixteenth birthday when he returned home, took a good job and has been getting along very well at it. His health has improved wonderfully and he seems much better satisfied with the world in general.
Alice.
A tall, husky raw-boned girl bent over the washboard wrestling with the family washing. As she sloshed the clothes in the hot water she smiled and sung snatches of the popular songs of the day. No one would have judged her to be a day less than eighteen years of age, but like the chickenhawk over the hen yard silence and anger descended over the happy face, when an attendance officer put in an appearance and required an answer to the question “Why is Alice not in school?” This sounds easy but is really a hard question to answer when a mother knows that the reason her well-grown daughter is not in school is because she won’t go. Even the father had found it hard to look into the level eyes of his daughter, whom he topped not more than an inch, and threaten bodily force if she did not go to school. Alice did not like to go to school and sit in the fifth grade with the other children when she was larger than any of them and the teacher besides. In spite of her fifteen years Alice was a woman and looked it. Her parents reported her a good girl and an excellent worker in the home. The school found no fault with her behavior, but she was not bright and did not learn, and her impatient teacher stated that she did not “apply herself.” Alice turned sullen through it all and refused to have anything more to do with it.
A social agency was called in. Their worker, being a young woman of bookish tendencies who could not understand anyone who could not take an interest in academic matters, insisted upon a psychological examination. The mental examination revealed a girl of good manual ability. Her memory span was but four digits her learning ability poor, and her judgment, according to the Terman Revision of the Binet-Simon tests, was ridiculous, yet this girl was able to do the family marketing, to care for the younger children and to cook for a family well above middle size. She had held one job in vacation time where her work was satisfactory to her employers ?in fact, her entire social history seemed to show a girl of normal tendencies but of low intellectual capacity entirely incapable in school. Still the law required her to remain there. The only possible recommendation that could be made was that she be permitted to go to work as soon as possible. Since the recommendation could not be legally carried out until her sixteenth year, she went back to school, staying out every time she thought it possible to get away with it, and at the end of the fourth month of this sort of trifling, her sixteenth birthday being attained, she left school and went to work.
Harvey.
Harvey has been in school since he was six years old and he is now fifteen. In that time he has been promoted from four grades but has really learned the work in the first two. He can read, but only simple material, and he is quite unable to remember it to retell. His trainability and retentiveness of memory are wholly inadequate for educational purposes. Even with a special teacher Harvey found it impossible to retain material from one period of teaching to the next, and for that reason the Psychological Clinic which was dealing with the case deemed it unwise to insist further on efforts which, by experiment, had proved to be of no avail.
Harvey’s mother is a widow with five children under her care. She is aided by the state, but the efforts of every member of the family are necessary to keep four children in school. The older son is independent and helps a little at home, and the mother works to supplement the income. Harvey wishes to help, but the law requires him to remain in school, and, as hopeless as it is, Harvey has continued his attendance. There is no special class in his school, and Harvey sits in a regular grade, where he is accepted only because he is quiet and well-behaved. Well-disciplined as he is Harvey really presents a more difficult problem than if he were misbehaving. Of initiative he had possessed little, and thorough disciplining has reduced thai which he had. Sitting in classes where the work done was much beyond his depth, he has developed habits of inattention and of laziness which are going to be stumbling blocks to him all the rest of his life. The training which should have developed habits of industry and perseverance in the boy has been lacking. What little ability he had is as undeveloped as it was the day he entered school, while in the place of the training he expected has grown this crop of mental weeds which offer the boy nothing for his future, and which he will find only a disadvantage to him in his adult life. The school did not fit this boy, and the only effort made has been to fit the boy to the school, his needs entirely unconsidered. Society has thus lost what might have been a productive member through its own wasteful methods.
Ella.
Ella could pass for a girl of twenty years anywhere. She is physically mature, good looking, well above middle height and quite prepossessing. She is, however, but fourteen years of age and in the fifth grade. Since she outgrew the rest of her class early she has objected very much to going to school at all, and on six different occasions has gone out by herself and secured six positions, any of which she could have retained but for the skill of the attendance officer who was armed with a record of her birth date. None of her employers suspected that he was dealing with a girl under school age. Ella utterly refused to go back to the fifth grade, so as an experiment she was accepted by a school that caters to those who wish to learn a trade. This school ordinarily demands that its girls reach seventh grade proficiency before they are admitted. Ella has done fairly well at this school since she has been there, but she is not qualified to do the work that the other girls do, and the school is not satisfied with her. Because the school wished to know more about her, Ella was brought to the Psychological Clinic by the social worker from the school.
At the clinic Ella gave good performances with the mechanical tests. She was co-operative and responded very well whenever she was able to do so. She read mechanically a story of about fifth grade level, but was unable to retell it or to answer questions about it which she was asked. A simpler selection was given her, but she was unable to return more than one sentence out of five. She had a good memory span and apparent trainability of memory, but her retentive power was very slight. She had little language ability but neither her home nor the school offered any training along this line. Notwithstanding these deficiencies Ella could not be called feeble-minded in any sense of the term. She is able to hold her own with other members of her own group, and in respect to initiative she is probably better than many of them.
No reasonable recommendation could be made in Ella’s case. With her maturity, both physical and mental, there was little value for her in the guidance which the school was exercising over her. The social worker who came with her thought she ought to be taught how to get a job, but a girl who has successfully negotiated six jobs needs no instruction in that line. The school offered her little that she could assimilate, and her instincts and tendencies were all directed toward activities calculated to interest a person older than her fourteen years.
Peter.
Peter has difficulty in accommodating himself to the presence of a stepfather. In fact, Peter is having difficulty just now in accommodating himself to anybody or anything. Peter wants to do something. He doesn’t know just exactly what but he knows some of the things he doesn’t want to do, and one of these is to go to school, another is to remain at home under the present conditions. Peter’s dissatisfaction of course lies deeper than would appear on the surface. It is only recently that Peter has not been getting on well with his stepfather, and it is only recently that Peter’s stepfather has been called in by the school. Today Peter and the school are distinctly at “outs,” so much so that Peter refuses to go to school whenever it is possible for him to arrange any other sort of amusement, and the school is equally positive in its statement that Peter shall not remain a member of the fourth grade. There is no special class in this school, and the teacher of the fourth grade, with fifty other children, has no time to waste on Peter’s peculiarities. If he won’t be good, he must get out. Peter agrees perfectly with the teacher’s judgment in this case and is ready to leave at the earliest possible moment.
Because of the situation in school and the one at home the principal of the school referred Peter to the Psychological Clinic. There the boy was judged to be not feeble-minded but of low grade normal mentality. He is retarded in school development and shows the same mental retardation that he does in school retardation?about three years in both cases. The examination showed that he had about fourth grade proficiency in school, that he gave fairly good performances in mechanical tests, had a sufficient memory span and retentiveness of memory for a boy of his years but that his knowledge of language and his ability to answer questions involving judgment are distinctly lacking. At school these disabilities prevented his conforming to the requirements of his grade in behavior, although he proved quite able to do the work. In the same way the emphasis placed on school accomplishments by his stepfather had quite alienated the boy although previously he and his stepfather had been on good terms.
Now Peter’s situation might not be so serious if it were possible at this time to change his environment and arrange for a different sort of training in school, but this is impossible. The school situation can not be changed since there is no other place or course of study for the boy, and the finances of the family do not admit of his placement in some other home or of sending him to the country. In short, there seems to be no possible solution for Peter’s problem. His mother is anxious but is burdened by three young children and has little time to watch the playmates and take care of the morals of her older son.
The school has placed “thumbs down” on the boy and is pushing the burden off on someone else. The whole defiant attitude of the boy is being increased by the very evident spirit displayed by both the school and parents. The boy pretends that he wants nothing so much as to get away from it all and nobody is helping him. A school curriculum adjusted to his needs would help the situation materially. At the present time there is no possible recommendation that can be made to aid him.
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