Lurton—A Study of Retarded Children. 
289 
Minnesota Psychological conference, of which the writer was a 
member, unanimously states its position thus: 
“The Minnesota schools are organized on the assumption 
that all children enter the first grade at six years of age, and 
that children normal in body and mind will advance one grade 
each year. This is the theory supporting not only our state 
schools, but their entire administration, and the theory fixes 
a certain normal school age for all children in each successive 
grade. Prom the administrative point of view, the child of 
six is in his proper place in the first grade, the child of seven 
in the second grade, and so on until under the Minnesota plan 
of school organization, a child should begin his eighth grade 
work at fourteen and finish at fifteen. The child who does not 
enter the first grade till he is seven is already behind schedule 
and loses as a result, a year or two of economically productive 
life, which, after all, is what the state would avoid in the 
theoretical organization of the schools. 
“This retardation the committee designates as administrative 
retardation. 
“It must be manifest, of course, that a report which shows 
the number of pupils too old for their respective grades will 
not indicate the number of mentally defective children in the 
schools. The number of over age pupils in any system of 
schools will always be larger than the number of feeble-minded. 
The number of children in the public schools of Hew York 
City whose mental defectiveness is recognized is seven thou¬ 
sand, or about one per cent of the total school attendance. If 
expert neurologists examined all the children, the number 
would probably reach ten thousand. Haturally, the number of 
mental defectives who come into the Children’s Courts would 
form a higher percentage than would be shown in the schools. 
And while in the schools a certain small number is pressed into 
the ungraded classes established for children unable to make 
normal progress, where they are provided with special instruc¬ 
tion, there is, nevertheless, no real sifting-out process. Even 
if there were, the city at present has no adequate provision for 
the proper treatment of such mental defectives. 
