June 13, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



897 



is wholly or chiefly or partly educational. 

 In the term educational I include training 

 of a hygienic, physiological (in Seguin's 

 sense), pedagogical, psychological, socio- 

 logical or moral character. 



GROUPING OP CASES 



It is thus evident that the clinical psy- 

 chologist may group his cases into two 

 main classes. 



A. Those in which the mental variations 

 are fundamental or primary, and the phys- 

 ical disabilities only accessory or sequen- 

 tial. With these cases the treatment must 

 be primarily educational and only second- 

 arily medical. What types of children are 

 included in this group? 



I. Feeble-minded Children. — Feeble- 

 mindedness formerly was regarded as an 

 active disorder — a disease — and was ac- 

 cordingly treated exclusively medically. 

 The theory of causation was wrong and so 

 the results were unsatisfactory. Since the 

 year 1800 (Itard, the apostle to the feeble- 

 minded) and particularly since the year 

 1837 (Seguin, the liberator of the feeble- 

 minded), it has become increasingly appar- 

 ent that feeble-mindedness is an arrest of 

 development; and accordingly since that 

 time the condition has been primarily edu- 

 cationally treated instead of medically. 

 This change in point of view has revolu- 

 tionized the treatment of the feeble-minded. 

 The person who did most to ameliorate 

 their condition is Seguin, whose method, 

 almost entirely educational, has served as 

 the model for the effective institutional 

 work for the feeble-minded done since his 

 day, although we have outgrown various 

 details of his system. Moreover, it served 

 as the chief inspiring force for the con- 

 structive orthogenic work done for the 

 feeble-minded within the last decade or so 

 by Montessori. She, herself a physician, 

 but with special training in psychology 



and pedagogy, tells us that in 1898 as a 

 result of a careful study of the problem of 

 feeble-mindedness she became persuaded 

 that the problem was primarily a pedagog- 

 ical and not a medical one. It is granted 

 without question, of course, that there is a 

 medical side to the care of the feeble- 

 minded just as there is a medical side to 

 the care of the normal child. Nay, owing 

 to the heightened degree of susceptibility 

 to disease and accidents found among the 

 feeble-minded, the medical side looms 

 larger in the care of the feeble-minded than 

 in the care of normals. Indeed, no institu- 

 tion for the feeble-minded can be properly 

 organized without an adequate staff of 

 medical experts; but fundamentally the 

 problem of the amelioration of the lot of 

 feeble-minded children is an educational 

 one — their hygienic, pedagogical and moral 

 improvement, as well as their elimination 

 by the method of colonization or steriliza- 

 tion. 



II. Retardates, technically so-called — of 

 which there are probably on a conservative 

 estimate 6,000,000 in the schools of the 

 United States. Some of these are retarded 



(1) merely pedagogically in a relative 

 sense — relative to an arbitrary curricular 

 standard. Many children do not fit the 

 standard, because the standard itself is off 

 the norm. It is largely a case of a misfit 

 curriculum instead of a misfit child. So 

 far as this class of misfits is concerned the 

 problem is simply one of correct adjust- 

 ment of the pedagogical demands of the 

 curriculum. 



A considerable percentage of the re- 

 tardates, however, are retarded because of 



(2) genuine mental arrest of development. 

 They are as truly arrested or deficient as 

 the feeble-minded, but to a lesser extent. 

 The difference is a quantitative and not a 

 qualitative one, and the problem of correc- 



