FEEBLEMINDEDNESS IN DELAWARE 



Survey by Children's Bureau Finds Many Mental Defectives, Mostly In Bad 



Surroundings and Not Properly Cared for — Reduction of the Fecundity 



of the Socially Inefficient May be the Most Effective Way 



of Preventing the Multiplication of Feeblemindedness 



UNDER what home conditions do 

 mental defectives live ? To get a 

 fair picture, the federal Chil- 

 dren's Bureau made a study^ of 

 New Castle county, Delaware, and 

 found that the conditions were very bad 

 indeed. 



New Castle is the northernmost of the 

 three counties of Delaware. Containing 

 the large city of Wilmington, it has a 

 population of 131,670, a majority of 

 whom are whites of the old American 

 stock. 



While the study was far from thor- 

 ough, 212 very obvious cases of feeble- 

 mindedness were found, and 361 addi- 

 tional who were suspect. Not one in 

 twenty of these persons was receiving 

 proper care, Delaware being one of the 

 few states of the Union which has no 

 provision for its feebleminded. ^ 



"The coincidence of mental defect 

 and low grade of environment was 

 striking," says Miss Lundberg, author of 

 the report. But is it a coincidence? 

 She herself probably does not think so; 

 certainly most of those who have given 

 the problem most study think other- 

 wise. The idea that a child has a low 

 grade of intelligence because he comes 

 from a poor home is now held by few, for 

 it is recognized that the home is an 

 index of the kind of people who make it, 

 and that on the average the inferior 

 homes are the expression of germinal 

 inferiority of their occupants. 



"The common opinion that the child 

 from a cultured home does better in 

 tests [of intelligence] solely by reason of 

 his superior home advantages is an en- 



tirely gratuitous assumption," as Profes- 

 sor Terman says.^ "Practically all of 

 the investigations which have been 

 made of the influence of nature and 

 nurture on mental performance agree in 

 attributing far more to original endow- 

 ment than to environment. Common 

 observation would itself suggest that the 

 social class to which the family belongs 

 depends less on chance than on the 

 parents' native qualities of intellect and 

 character. 



DIFFERENCES ARE HEREDITARY 



"The results of five separate and dis- 

 tinct lines of inquiry based on the Stan- 

 ford data agree in supporting the con- 

 clusion that the children of successful 

 and cultured parents test far higher than 

 children from wretched and ignorant 

 homes for the simple reason that their 

 heredity is better. 



"It would, of course, be going too far 

 to deny all possibility of environmental 

 conditions affecting the result of an 

 intelligence test. Certainly no one would 

 expect that a child reared in a cage and 

 denied all intercourse with other human 

 beings could by any system of mental 

 measurement test up to the level of 

 normal children. There is, however, no 

 reason to believe that ordinary differ- 

 ences in social environment (apart from 

 heredity), differences such as those ob- 

 taining among unselected children at- 

 tending approximately the same general 

 type of school in a civilized community, 

 affect to any great extent the validity of 

 the scale. 



"A crucial experiment would be to 



1 U. S. Dept. of Labor, Children's Bureau, Pub. No. 24. A Social Study of Mental Defec- 

 tives in New Castle County, Delaware, by Emma O. Lundberg. Washington, 1917, pp. 38. 



2 The only provision in Delaware for the care and training of mental defectives is the State 

 fund for the maintenance of fourteen Delaware children in the Pennsylvania Training School for 

 the Feebleminded Children at Elwyn, Pa. 



'Terman, Lewis O. The Measurement of Intelligence, pp. 115 ff. Boston, 1916. 



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