board of education; the appointment may be made by the former board with the approval of the latter. ment for large towns and small cities. in the city of Rochester, Minn. This is an excellent arrange- 4. County health officers, if properly qualified, may be appointed as school officers as well, and in this joint capacity supervise the school health of a village or a whole county, according to the population and distance involved. This will often solve the problem of hygiene in rural schools. 5. The compensation for a school health officer may be based upon the time required of him and upon the amount of his responsibility. A full-time officer should receive from $2,500 to $5,000, according to the size of the community.1 A part-time officer may be paid for onehalf of every school day from $900 to $2,000. In some instances where, for example, one man is responsible for the entire health supervision of a rather large community, as in Pasadena and San Diego, Cal., the salary should be from $1,600 to $2,000. Where less than half of every day is required, it is advisable to base the remuneration upon the number of pupils examined, and not less than 50 to 75 cents should be paid for each examination. At this rate a town with a school population of 600 pupils should pay from $300 to $450. Any community with less than 1,800 pupils would do well to adopt the per capita plan of payment as a basis for salary. Voluntary or cheaply paid service is never advisable. It invariably fails after a comparatively short trial. 6. Large cities should employ a director of school hygiene and several assistant directors on full time. A few half-time men may be required, but in general the work of half-time men in large cities will be better done by full-time school nurses. 7. School health officers should familiarize themselves with the following divisions of school and child hygiene: (a) Transmissible diseases; (b) school sanitation; (c) physical defects; (d) mental defects; (e) dental hygiene; (f) the teaching of hygiene; (g) juvenile delinquency; (h) retardation; (i) school hygiene literature; (j) the elements of school architecture. The position of health officer in schools must no longer be regarded as a cheap job for a cheap man. Schools which are satisfied with. inferior officers and teachers will no doubt be satisfied with incompetent medical officers. Progressive schools will appoint only welltrained medical officers who are worthy of the respect of the com 1 Oakland, Cal., pays $3,600; St. Louis, Mo., pays $3,500; Milwaukee, Wis., pays $3,800; Minneapolis, Minn., pays $3,500. All of these salaries are too low for the service given. 2 Pasadena pays $1,600; San Diego pays $1,800. Each of these cities should pay $2,000. munities in which they live. American school communities may well study the subject of school health supervision as carried out in England, Germany, Denmark, and some other European countries where the matter has long ago passed the experimental stage. There a school health officer is treated with at least as much deference as the school superintendent or head master. THE STUDY OF EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN. Exceptional children of various types have been in our schools since schools began, but only within the past two or three years has any systematic attempt been made to recognize and classify them. Indeed, such recognition and classification was almost impossible until psychologists developed practical, direct methods for the use of schools. Teachers have always been able to point out some "fools" in their classes, and other types of exceptional children have been vaguely recognized, but "fools" have been present who were thought to be merely slow or dull; "misfits" who were supposed to be "fools"; dullards who were considered "misfits"; and so on indefinitely. It remained for clinical psychologists to devise methods whereby these various types might be studied and classified, and among these must be particularly mentioned Lightner Witmer and Goddard of this country, and Binet and Simon of France. Although exceptional children have for years been studied by various well-known methods in various institutions, no direct means have ever been developed for the study of exceptional school children until recently. In 1905 Binet and Simon, of Paris, first published their tests, now popularly known as the "Binet test," and in 1908 and 1911 they still further developed and improved this method. These tests have from time to time been modified, enlarged, and improved by various other psychologists, including among others Goddard of Vineland, Huey of Johns-Hopkins, Kuhlmann of Faribault, and Terman of Stanford. The Binet method still leaves much to be desired, but is nevertheless serving to stimulate teachers as they have never been stimulated before to make careful observations of the unusual types of children under their care. According to recent investigations, and especially those of Goddard, from 1 to 3 per cent of the children in our public schools are mentally defective, and this in spite of the fact that they are frequently unrecognized as such by either their parents or teachers. Such children often present no physical signs of such defectiveness and may indeed be among the best-looking children in a grade. Sooner or later, however, children of this type become retarded, and attention is thus called to them. A safe rule for teachers to follow is that every child who is retarded in school two or more years without evident reason should be suspected of possessing some degree of mental defectiveness. Not every child who is thus retarded is feeble-minded, but proof to the contrary should at least be established before the child is removed from suspicion. Degrees of feeble-mindedness are present among school children, varying all the way from actual idiocy to the condition of the high-grade feebleminded person known as the "moron," who is nearly, but not quite, normal. These children become mentally fixed at various ages, beyond which they do not usually progress much. For example, the writer recently examined a girl of 14 who had been in the first grade for five successive years, and it soon became apparent that she was mentally fixed at about the age of 3. Beyond this degree of intelligence there is no reason to believe she will ever pass. Another child had a chronological or actual age of 14 and a mental age of 8. This boy may perhaps develop to a mental age of a normal child of 9 or 10 years, but this is extremely doubtful. Still another pupil had an actual age of 16 with a mental age of only 9. Another was 12 years old with a mental age of 7. In every one of these cases the teacher knew, of course, that something was wrong, for all were retarded in school, but that it was true feeble-mindedness was never suspected except in the first instance, and even here it was not understood by parent or teacher that the child was practically noneducable. On the other hand, a boy of 14 was considered feeble-minded by his teacher when he was only a misfit. Every village and city school system visited in Minnesota by the writer has produced cases of retarded, feeble-minded children, and where there was time to make any sort of adequate study of the question the proportion has appeared to be just about that estimated by Goddard, viz, 3 per cent. The following types of exceptional children require careful attention on the part of teachers: (1) Retarded children (especially those retarded two or more years); (2) slow children (not necessarily retarded); (3) precocious children (especially those who are delicate); (4) delinquent children; (5) misfit children; (6) highly nervous children. In order to decide whether a child is actually deficient in mentality, some competent teacher in every school system should familiarize herself with the Binet method for measuring the intelligence. of children. Such a teacher need not be expected to become an expert or to obtain very exact results, but she may at least in the majority of cases arrive at a conclusion which will establish the fact of feeble mindedness or normality. The exact degree of feeble-mindedness present in a child is a matter for a clinical psychologist or school medical officer to determine, but this, though desirable, is not always indispensable knowledge in the practical classification of school children. There are several methods by which a teacher may acquire the knowledge necessary to fix the fact of feeble-mindedness, if present, or other peculiar mental conditions. First. The teacher may attend a few weeks' course of study at such places as Vineland, N. J., under Dr. Goddard; Philadelphia, under Dr. Witmer or Dr. Holmes; or Faribault, Minn., under Dr. Kuhlmann. Second. The teacher may obtain some training at various universities, especially at Stanford, Johns-Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, University of Minnesota, University of Pittsburg, and some others. Third. The teacher may under some circumstances (if her previous training has been adequate) learn a good deal of practical value through the literature of the subject. For this purpose she is referred to the brief bibliography on the mental study of children given on page 54. In every school system the superintendent, principal, or some teacher with special aptitude should take up in some way the study of the exceptional child, understanding, of course, that the results obtained are merely relative, not exact, but that they furnish, nevertheless, a better basis for classification than any other now available. A word of caution is required. Do not depend upon the Binet or any other method exclusively. Use common sense. Do not disregard ordinary school methods of judgment. Do not regard the Binet Scale as one which can be used with the certainty of a measuring stick. Make use of any and all methods available in the estimation of the intelligence of exceptional children. Finally, regard your conclusions in most instances as tentative, and carefully watch the development of each case. The other types of children mentioned, viz, the dull, precocious, nervous, and misfit, require as careful study as the feeble-minded. Indeed, they deserve perhaps more attention, because these are the types which under proper discipline make satisfactory progress, and inay be saved years of unnecessary sorrow and ineffective effort. In Minnesota during the school year of 1912-13 several school communities have undertaken the study of exceptional children with a marked degree of success. Among these should be mentioned Faribault, Owatonna, Cloquet, St. Peter, Austin, Hibbing, Minneapolis, Duluth, and Rochester. The five normal schools located at St. Cloud, Mankato, Winona, Duluth, and Moorhead are also undertaking some effective study of the subject of mentally divergent children. The excellent beginning thus made should be extended to every school district in the State and in other States as well. When this is done, the schools will not only be relieved of a tremendous drain upon their daily efforts, but a large sum of money will be saved every year in avoiding the expense of carrying hopeless repeaters. That sum might well be expended for the special education of pupils who receive little or no profit from the ordinary public schools. |