Library Collections: Document: Full Text

The suspicion of pauperism would not be felt in the special classes.

These special classes can be quickly and easily organized and increased in number, making a very flexible system of providing and extending opportunities for training defectives. They do not involve the expenditure of large sums of money for construction of buildings. The actual expense of such teaching is directly assessed upon the community receiving the benefit.

It is a striking fact, however, that the reason for the great majority of the applications for the admission of pupils to our institutions is quite as much for the relief of the mother or the family or the neighborhood, as for the benefit which the child himself is expected to receive. A feeble-minded child is a foreign body in a family or modern community. Countless loving mothers have been worried into nervous breakdown or insanity by the ceaseless anxiety and sorrow caused by the presence of the blighted child in the home. Many fathers have been driven to drink and daughters to the street to get away from the unnatural and unpleasant home conditions caused by the defective one.

Unfortunately a very large proportion of the feeble-minded children come from homes where the class training would not be supplemented by the good hygienic conditions and the desirable moral and intellectual influences which are quite as necessary as the strictly scholastic training.

Another practical obstacle would be the unwillingness of the average American parent to publicly admit the fact that his child was mentally defective, when the defect seemed slight. The tendency is to blame the teacher for the lack of results.

It is doubtful if the few hours per day under school instruction will accomplish satisfactory results with the average defective pupil. The necessarily small classes or groups of classes do not afford the opportunities for desirable and important classification of the pupils according to age, mental ability, etc.

It should be remembered that under the most favorable conditions hitherto, a very large proportion of feeble-minded persons, even of the higher grades, eventually become public charges in one way or another. No one familiar with the physical and mental limitations of this class can believe that any plan of education will ever materially modify this fact. Any relief as to public support to be obtained from public school training can be only temporary. Feeble-minded children may be tolerated in the community, but it is a great responsibility to inaugurate any plan on a large scale which does not withdraw from the community the defective adults. The feeble-minded are powerless to resist the physical temptations of adult life and should be protected from their own weakness.

"The brighter class of the feeble-minded, with their weak will power and deficient judgment, are easily influenced for evil, and are prone to become vagrants, drunkards and thieves. The modern scientific study of the deficient and delinquent classes as a whole has demonstrated that a large proportion of our criminals, inebriates and prostitutes are really congenital imbeciles, who have been allowed to grow up without any attempt being made to improve or discipline them. Society suffers the penalty of this neglect in an increase of pauperism and vice, and finally, at a great increased cost, is compelled to take charge of adult imbeciles in almshouses and hospitals; and of imbecile criminals in jails and prisons, generally for the remainder of their natural lives. As a matter of mere economy, it is now believed that it is better and cheaper for the community to assume the permanent care of this class before they have carried out a long career of expensive crime."

"The fate of the average feeble-minded girl out in the world is only too well known. A feeble-minded girl is exposed as no other girl in the world is exposed. She has not sense enough to protect herself from the perils to which women are subjected. Often bright and attractive, if at large, they either marry and bring forth in geometrical ratio a new generation of defectives and dependents or become irresponsible sources of corruption and debauchery in the communities where they live. There is hardly a poorhouse in this land where there are not two or more feeble-minded women with from one to four illegitimate children each. There is every reason in morality, humanity, and public policy that these feeble-minded women should be under permanent and watchful guardianship, especially during the child-bearing age."