752 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



It is bard for the uninitiated to understand that the grade, be it 

 high, middle, or low, is not associated with promotion and advance- 

 ment as in schools for normal children. On the contrary, it sig- 

 nifies the quality and status of the individual, his limitations, bis 

 possibilities, and consequently determines almost unfailingly the train- 

 ing for bis life work; not by any hard-and-fast lines, but by a general 

 mapping out of means which experience has proved will best insure 

 his development, because best suited to his needs. Every latitude is 

 allowed and, as the comfort of both the teacher and the entire class 

 depends upon each going to his own place, there is easy and natural 

 transference according to the necessity indicated by either progress 

 or retrogression; but the varied occupations in each grade give ample 

 scope for indulgence of individual proclivity in the means of develop- 

 ment, and it is found that the original diagnosis, based upon experi- 

 ence, rarely errs. 



The motto of the schools — " We learn by doing; the working- 

 hand makes strong the working brain " — shows manual training to be 

 the basis of the scheme of development, varied for each grade to suit 

 the intelligence. Thus classified, various occupations are arranged 

 and presented with the double intent of securing all-round devel- 

 opment, and of giving at the same time opportunity for choice accord- 

 ing to individual bent, the child being gradually permitted to devote 

 himself more exclusively to that in which he shows a tendency to 

 excel, and to gain a certain automatic ease in what shall prove the 

 initial of a life employment. A knowledge of writing and of num- 

 bers is acquired incidentally as a necessary part of these occupations 

 in daily practice, and arithmetic, taught with objects, is chiefly count- 

 ing, separating into fractional parts, and practical measurements. 

 Books are used rather as a convenient means of attracting and hold- 

 ing attention while inducing habits of consecutive thinking than for 

 a knowledge of facts to be memorized. Those who can learn to read 

 gain naturally a means of self-entertainment, of self-instruction, 

 hence a certain amount of culture, so long as protected in an insti- 

 tution from indiscriminate and pernicious literature. 



The low-grade imbecile, but a slight degree removed from the idio- 

 imbecile, is, like him, totally incapable of grasping artificial signs or 

 symbols. He can therefore never learn to read or write; figures have 

 no meaning for him, nor numbers, beyond the very simplest counting- 

 acquired in the daily repetition of some simple task such as knitting, 

 netting, braiding rope, straw, or knotting twine. The excitation of 

 interest in these, which will also give hand and arm power, the arous- 

 ing of the sluggish, indolent will, through the stimulus of pleasurable 

 emotions, the physical development by means of the various drills and 

 the moral influence of refined, orderly surroundings — these, together 



