The Foundations of Culture 
213 
and unspoken precept which is of greater educational significance 
than the sum total of formal schooling. This diversity in endow- 
ment, capacity and environment must be reckoned with in our 
educational system. Our present custom of herding together all 
of the children of a given age is an injustice to all of them. 
It is probably true that from 5 to 10 per cent of the children 
in the public schools of our large cities, for one reason or another, 
fail to derive much benefit from the ordinary grade work, and 
Dr, Gould is of the opinion that about 50 per cent of city school 
children are below a desirable norm of health. In the New York 
and Boston public schools it is estimated that about 1 per cent 
of the total school population is sufficiently defective or sub- 
normal to make their segregation in special classes desirable. 
In Boston these defectives have for a number of years been 
taught in special classes in which the individual needs are closely 
studied. The result is that the normal children are not retarded 
by their slowness, and, on the other hand, by skillful special train- 
ing the laggards are greatly improved, instead of being lost from 
school altogether, as otherwise often happens. A definite series 
of psychological tests has been devised by which doubtful cases 
can be analyzed, to determine whether the mental development 
of the child is progressing at the normal rate as compared with 
his physical development. In smaller towns and villages it is 
not often possible to grade the children so closely; but in nearly 
all cases it is at least practicable to break up each of our present 
grades into two sections, A and B, containing respectively the 
better and the poorer pupils, the A section completing the assigned 
work of its grade and being promoted to the next grade in advance 
of the B section. This plan is working well in many schools. 
The first and most obvious practical step in carrying out such 
a program is a proper medical inspection of all school children. 
In cities where this inspection has been given a fair trial it has 
from the start justified itself on economic grounds by the check 
placed upon the spread of contagious diseases in schools, and at 
the same time it has revealed some surprising conditions. 
The public school teacher’s greatest problems are usually the 
dull or incorrigible pupils who never reach full efficiency and 
usually drop out in the lower grades. In a very high percentage 
of these border-land cases actual physical defects are found whose 
removal restores the child to the normal at once. And where the 
