ON MENTAL AND PHYSICAL FACTORS INVOLVED IN EDUCATION. 203 



may have noted the sentences used in the methods previously referred 

 to and specially taught these to the child. It is also necessary to bear 

 in mind that a child may be able to read only small letters or only 

 capitals, or vice versa; that he may or may not know anything of 

 cursive script. In cases of doubt, when using the sentence methods, 

 the teacher from the child's school should write the sentence in the 

 way usually adopted at school. 



Certain other points crop up and may be recorded in regard to 

 reading. There is the impressionist child who, seeing two letters, 

 builds a word and reads away apparently fluently, but if you chance 

 to be watching the passage, often inaccurately. There is a similar 

 type who will take a book and at once begin to read, but not a word 

 that the child says may be on the page in question; yet such children, 

 usually girls, may appear to read long and reasonably connected 

 sentences. Such children must have good memories of a kind, I 

 should think, with an aural basis. Others spell out words very slowly, 

 obviously gaining the word from the letters. Of such there are two 

 types : those who say out loud or under their breath the letters named 

 as letters, c-a-t, and then produce cat and those who deal in sounds, 

 ker-aJt-te, and may also give cat. In unusual words both these 

 methods lead to disaster, which should be credited to the system 

 rather than the child. Indeed, one of the great difficulties in assess- 

 ment, especially for a recently appointed medical officer, is the weight 

 to attach to the effects of different systems of teaching reading. Due 

 allowance must be made for the method used at the school whence the 

 child came. Most stress should be laid on whether the reading is 

 accompanied by any understanding of the subject-matter read. It is 

 often necessary at these admission examinations to enlist the aid of 

 the teacher to get the child to read at all, and in any case the reports 

 of school performance are of great value, particularly in the case of 

 a child who does nothing at the examination. In the rarer case, in 

 which a child said to do nothing at school performs well at the examina- 

 tion, the capacity must be estimated by the better performance, and 

 sometimes a change of school may be advantageously suggested. 



Writing. 



This, as before mentioned, is tested as to transcription, dictation, 

 and spontaneous writing. It is quite common for it to be said that 

 a child can write, and on investigation for it to turn out that it can 

 write its name and nothing else, sometimes not even a component 

 letter. The form of inquiry from the teachers might well be modified 

 so as to cover these points, since the answer too often applies to 

 transcription only. 



If a child of seven to eight cannot do transcription, and has 

 received a reasonable amount of instruction, he would be regarded as 

 defective. Dictation reveals several types of defect included generally 

 under the word blindness. In some instances the child may make a 

 little progress in reading, but in writing, although quite able to copy, 

 show by the gibberish put down in dictation that letters are nearly 

 meaningless. On this account it is well to have at the examination a 

 specimen of the child's ordinary school production. The milder grades 



