if Mr. Barnes could add that one little bit of experience to what he has now, he would be one of our greatest prophets of the new education. He does not know the feebleminded child; he does not love the feeble-minded child-as those who teach and care for the feeble-minded child come to love him-and so he cannot see that it is worth while to give almost infinite patience to raise that child a little way toward the stature of

a man.

Is it worth while to make this great effort when the result is so slight? Yes, because the feeble-minded child still is a child and therefore entitled to his share as a human being in the best we have. If you do not believe that the child is not a mere thing of today, to be classed along with an animal and treated like an animal, or to be operated upon like an animal because he has some function which he ought not to exercise, if this is your idea, leave him alone, please, and let somebody have him who thinks he is a child of God, a weaker little brother, and worth a very great deal. He must not go out into the world, never! He must not become a father, never! He must not be exposed to hardship and abuse and ill treatment and temptation. Why cannot the feeble-minded child who has been trained in a school go out and earn his living? Because people will not be fair to him; because his father and mother are not fair to him; because his sisters and brothers are not fair to him; because his employer, if he have an employer, is not fair to him, but expects from him, tho he pays him a child's wages, the work of a man. He seems to have the physical capacity for a man's work, but he has not and cannot have a man's judgment. That is the chief reason why the feeble-minded child must be segregated and separated. The chief purpose of the special school, as far as the feebleminded child is concerned, is to differentiate, to make quite sure that every one of the really feeble-minded children shall be placed in the state's care for life.

Dr. Barnes' theory of the child requiring the special class going home when school is over is splendid. It is in line with all our theory about institution work. The less institutionizing the better, thru all grades and classes of school life. The less you institutionize your pupil the better teacher you are all the way thru. Institutionizing does not require necessarily a brick house with a plastered wall and slate roof. Matrimony is an institution, the Christian church is an institution, the school itself is an institution. The real antithesis is not between placing a child in an institution and leaving him at home; it is between the institution method and the case method. What is the case method? It is this: you have the child before you, for instance an incorrigible boy; you have a great variety of institutions, schools, classes of all sorts and conditions. Your business is to forget everything but that boy, all your mechanism, every one of your preconceived schemes and plans, just as tho you were alone in creation with that individual boy; you must study the boy and ask yourself what ought to be done with this one boy; what is the best possible thing to be done with and for and to and by him When you have made up your mind on that question, you are ready to start doing something. It may be that you have a school exactly arranged to fit this boy's case; it may be that there isn't anything in the universe that fits his case; you may have to create a new scheme for this particular boy; that is the "case method." The opposite is the institution method. You have a curriculum and you take the boy and jam him into that curriculum and push him in and make him fit, and in the old days when he didn't "larn" you "licked" him. You don't "lick” as much as you used to. Every time you have to use “physical treatment" (as Brockway calls it), you feel ashamed of it. That is the institution method; it does not matter if it is within the four walls of a building or out on the prairie.

If the feeble-minded child is to have the advantage of comradeship and all those things that make boys into men (because what they get outside of the school room does more for them in making them men than any teacher can do, he must be among his own kind and hence in a well-classified institution. It will be in the large institutions that we can classify. I am talking about the feeble-minded of all grades now, from the lowest to the highest. There must be a thousand children, with fifty kinds, to make twenty

of a kind, and if the classification is close there will be five hundred and fifty kinds of children in a thousand.

We must take advantage of every natural and useful instinct of the child and develop these tendencies by means of education and employment. The maternal instinct may be utilized and satisfied by allowing them to take care of the more helpless of their own kind; profitable and suitable work may be found for each and every feeble-minded child of the higher grades. Work for the feeble-minded must consist in segregation from the body politic for life and protection by the state first, and then happy surroundings and pleasant occupation with as much mental education as they are capable of receiving.

MARY MCCOWEN, teacher in charge of the Deaf-Oral Department, Chicago Normal School. I am strongly reminded this morning of the fact that only a few years ago manual training and the kindergarten were both struggling for tardy recognition on the program of the National Education Association; and more recently, when friends of the deaf were asking for the establishment of a department in the interest of their special work, the request was finally granted only on condition that the teachers of the blind and feebleminded should also be included with the deaf, and there was great discussion and hesitation lest adequate support for such a department would be lacking. But the character of this large audience justifies beyond question the establishment of that department and proves a continued and enthusiastic interest in its problems which have come to be recognized as the problems underlying all education.

From statistics as to the number of the so-called defective classes it appears that in the population of our country one in fifteen hundred is deaf, a smaller proportion blind, and one in about five hundred is said to be feeble-minded. If each of these classes represented distinct educational problems it would naturally follow that the numerical preponderance of interest in this department would be in the section for the feeble-minded, but as long as there are deaf children who are also blind, both deaf children and blind children who exhibit all degrees of intellectual acuity from the very bright down to the imbecile and even among normal children many who have some peculiar abnormal habit or condition or some slight defect of hearing or sight, no problem can possibly arise with any one of these classes, the deaf, the blind, or the feeble-minded, that it does not at once become of deep importance to all who are interested in education, whether it be of socalled normal children or of any special group of the so-called defective classes.

In continuing this discussion, therefore, while not following directly the line of thought already presented, I shall count upon your interest in a brief statement of certain conditions among the deaf that are too often misunderstood. I refer to the children gradually becoming deaf who are to be found scattered all thru the grades in our public schools. Many of these children have perfect speech and for a time may not seem to lose much of what is going on about them, but the deterioration described so clearly by Mr. Earl Barnes in the case of the feeble-minded child, who is kept in an environment which does not meet its needs, is just as inevitable in the child gradually growing deaf. From week to week such a child loses more and more of the language used in his presence and gets more and more out of touch with the hearing world until finally he becomes utterly discouraged and unhappy and leaves school altogether or perhaps finds his way into the deaf department when too late for us to render our most valuable service to him.

If partially deaf children, instead of remaining in classes with hearing children until they reach the hopeless stage, were placed with a teacher of the deaf as soon as even a slight degree of deafness developed, they could be given speech-reading, the power to understand spoken language by observing the face of the speaker, which is the only thing that can keep them in touch with a hearing environment. True, it takes time to become an expert speech-reader but as the child gradually grows more and more deaf he will also become gradually more and more proficient in reading speech from the face and will thus escape altogether the awful isolation that is inevitable to one who becomes deaf without

knowing anything of speech-reading. Time was when the advantages of speech-reading might be looked upon with incredulity but when the congenitally deaf child who knows not a word can be given his mother tongue and an education thru observing the face, as is being done in many different schools today, no one can question the possibility of giving the same power to understand speech from the face to the partially deaf child who already has language and more or less education and who can in many cases after acquiring speech-reading return to the classes with hearing children.

Now a word about the congenitally deaf and the reason why they are often confused with the feeble-minded. Both classes of children are equally unresponsive at first, but for very different reasons. The deaf child may be of keen intellect with infinite possibilities but nature has closed one avenue of approach, that thru which speech and language comes most easily and naturally to the human family, and he fails to respond when spoken to because he does not even know that there is such a thing as words. Our problem is to recognize his possibilities and to lift him out of that darkness which without education is as hopeless as the condition of the feeble-minded. It is a problem of peculiar pleasure because we are not lifting back into society that does not want it a child who can only be a burden, but a human being with beautiful possibilities who but for our help would be defrauded of his heritage and left in the lowest grade of mental development.

For deaf children with the additional handicap of feeble-mindedness let us have the protected seclusion of the institution or residential home as advocated for other feebleminded children, where they may be surrounded by kindly care and given the opportunity to pass their lives in happy usefulness, becoming largely self-supporting and the state meanwhile fully protected.

But for the normal deaf child let us provide ample opportunity for development and educational training under the most favorable conditions possible, and then maintain a high standard of required excellence.

H. H. GODDARD, Training School for Feeble-Minded, Vineland, N. J.-There is a seeming disagreement between Professor Barnes and Mr. Alexander Johnson, but between the two sides presented there, we shall find one of the most important truths in connection with this whole matter. We, in institutions, and the people in the public schools in this country, and in Europe, are wasting an immense amount of time and energy on feeble-minded children trying to teach them to do that for which they have no organs, no capacity; namely, to master elaborate abstraction, the abstractions of reading and writing and number work. As I understand it, it was that kind of wasting of energy that Earl Barnes had in mind, and that he agrees with Alexander Johnson as to the value of manual work for lifting up these children to help them as far as possible.

If a child is a pretty bright imbecile, he can learn to do a good many things with his hands. If he is a pretty dull one, it may take him the whole fifteen years to learn to do one thing. When he is past the trainable age, twenty or twenty-five, perhaps, give him one of those things for which he has shown the greatest adaptibility, as his life work, as his trade, and let him be happy and useful in doing that.

I want to remind you teachers that just as we have within the past years discovered that the most dangerous cases in our schools are not the blind children or the deaf children, but the children that are slightly defective in sight or slightly defective in hearing, and consequently were not discovered, we waste our energies by not getting at these defectives. In the same way we must recognize that the most dangerous child in a community is the moderately mental defective child because the population cannot understand him, does not recognize that he must not be allowed to mingle in the community, to marry and to beget his kind. The schools abroad are training these children until they are fourteen years of age and then turning them loose on an unsuspecting public. We, in this country, are in a condition to recognize and to act much more wisely on this subject, if we will give it attention and study the problem.

M. P. E. GROSZMANN, Plainfield, N. J.-What Mr. Barnes said in regard to warning against institutionalism may perhaps need a little modification. I wish at least to go on record as stating that there is a class, not absolutely imbecile, that also needs institutional life in preference to bad school and bad home influences. I refer to that class which Dr. Goddard has also mentioned, but which has not been mentioned at all before, the moderately defective, as he puts it. The home environment of such a child may present defects which impress themselves upon the child. Some children have parents who create a home environment and a home atmosphere which is overcharged with nervous tension, and there exists, even among mothers who attend child-study lectures and mothers' clubs, a great deal of ignorance in addition to many inconsiderate notions in regard to the education of children.

I would like to emphasize the fact which has become very clear in my mind ever since yesterday when we had the first meeting of the child-study section, and today, when we had the first meeting of the special department, that those two departments have struck the key note of educational progress for the entire National Education Association. You will remember that even the National Council appointed a Committee of Investigation of the Problem of the Exceptional Child. And this is a very significant fact: In the study of the exceptional and defective child, we learn to understand the normal child. The way in which children are handled in classes for defectives is a model, it seems to me, for the teacher of ordinary classes. In this city of Cleveland, I was told yesterday, there is a teacher who undertook the work of teaching a defective class, so-called, but that class was the only class in the city of Cleveland where it was a punishment for the children not to be allowed to come back the next morning. If a teacher for the defective children can accomplish such a result, it seems to me that she is a model for other teachers.

THE HOME AND THE SPECIAL CHILD

JANE ADDAMS, HULL HOUSE, CHICAGO, ILL.

In discussing the problem of the special child it is, of course, necessary to consider it from the point of view of the child who is somewhat mentally deficient, and of the child who is what we now call incorrigible or delinquent.

Mr. Barnes is doubtless right when he says that it is difficult for a parent to make a clear judgment in regard to his own child, especially in respect to the child's mental or moral capacities. But, if parental affection clouds the power of diagnosis, at the same time, after the diagnosis has been made by the trained mind, parental affection enormously increases the power of devotion which is necessary to carry out the regimen which the trained mind has laid down. To convince the parent that by following a certain line of action his child will be enormously benefited is simply to turn affection into a scientifically prepared channel.

When deficient children are discovered in their homes, are taken care of by trained teachers, after they have been diagnosed by child-study departments, and when all the apparatus of public education is turned on, the parent is convinced that his child is not an exception. When the parent is besought to aid in this process of special education, then he first loses his peculiar sensitiveness in regard to his child. The reaction of this change of attitude upon the entire family is something astounding. I think it was Father Huntington who once said that the essence of immorality is to make an exception of one's self, and certainly the essence of self-pity is the con

viction that one is so isolated. Comradeship dispels self-pity as the sun dries up dampness. You think you have a child unlike other children; you are anxious that you neighbor shall not find it out; it makes you secretive; it makes you singularly sensitive; it places you and the normal children in the family in a curious relation to the rest of the community; but if you find out that there are many other such children in your city and in other cities thruout the United States, and that a whole concourse of people are studying to help these children, considering them not at all queer and outrageous, but simply a type of child which occurs from time to time and which can be enormously helped, you come out of that peculiarly sensitive attitude and the whole family is lifted with you into a surprising degree of hopefulness and normality. I could illustrate this with many tales. I remember one case where a family consisted of a widow, two self-supporting children, and three younger children, the eldest of whom was feeble-minded. The entire family had lived a perfectly abnormal life. In the first place, they always rented a rear tenement, because it was thus made easier to conceal the boy from public view. The four other children were never permitted, under any circumstances, to bring companions to the house. The boy was treated with tenderness and care, but with the utmost secrecy. The mother's attitude was gradually changed after days of patient talk and many visits on the part, first, of a trained nurse, and later of a person who was especially interested in the care of backward children. The day finally came when the boy was put in the omnibus for crippled children-for it was one of those cases where mental abnormality is combined with deformity—and taken to the public school openly and boldly, with the omnibus standing in the street, and the child carried out in the arms of a policeman. From that day there was a worldwide difference in the status of the family to the entire neighborhood. Of course such a change could not be brought about until the mother was freed from her sense of isolation, until she discovered that there were many other people who had children of that sort who were not thereby disgraced, that the community recognized such children and provided for them, demanding her coöperation.

That, it may be, is the most valuable result which the recognition of the duty of the state to these children is bringing about. But not even second to this is the opportunity of unlocking their affection, this peculiar care and solicitude which parents have for the abnormal child, whether he is abnormal thru his deficiencies or thru his moral development; thus pouring into public education almost a new force. Froebel used to believe that if he could unlock the love for little children which is manifested by their mothers, if he could pour into the educational system the gaiety of the mother, her delight in her child, her spontaneous desire to play with it, it would bring into education a new and transforming element. At the same time, of course, his kindergarten systematized its manifestations, as the educator of the deficient child would have to train and use scientifically this mysterious tender affection.