Library Collections: Document: Full Text

"Oh no," the attendant said. "Jimmie likes to lie there."

"You don't look very comfortable, Jimmie," I said. Jimmie grinned, sat up and pulled a stub of pencil out of his overalls.

"Would you like some paper?" I asked. He nodded eagerly so I pulled some blank pages out of my notebook and gave them to him.

"Jimmie can't write," said the attendant.

"Well, he can have fun scribbling," I replied, thinking of the reams of paper my own children had happily covered with scrawls during their preschool days. And Jimmie did have fun scribbling. Not only that, he began behaving quite normally. He pulled a chair up to a table and sat down.

LATER, when I told this story to Dr. Charles A. Zeller, Director of the Indiana Council of Mental Hygiene, his indignant comment was, "And maybe Jimmie could have been taught to write!"

For this institution of fifteen hundred there are two doctors, without a single graduate nurse to assist them. In the hospital building I did not even see the two doctors. One, I learned, was on vacation. The superintendent didn't know where the other was. The sixty-odd epileptics in the place do not get the modern medication that can largely control seizures. But when the people of a state are willing to spend only a dollar and ten cents a day for each child -- exclusive of clothing -- you cannot expect the children to get the benefits of modern medical science.

You can't expect good teaching, either. Most of the teachers in this school are unlicensed.

Little or no education is the rule rather than the exception in state training schools. Here are some typical facts gleaned from the United States Public Health surveys:

In a western school there is only one teacher, who has other duties, for three hundred children. In another western school "no educational and training program." In a southern institution's school only sixty to ninety minutes a day, four days a week, with only one of the two teachers at all qualified. In another southern institution of three hundred and fifty only three children in the school can read; the one teacher is also responsible for recreation, "of which there is very little." A southwestern school has two teachers for twelve hundred and fifty; when the present superintendent took over a few years ago she found attempts were being made to teach mental deficients algebra!

Even at the Mansfield State Training School in Connecticut, where the quality of teaching is superb, of six hundred children who might benefit by teaching only two hundred and fifty can be taught for one hour a day each because the schoolhouse won't hold more. A new schoolhouse is being built.

From these facts, you well may ask: What chance does a backward child have of getting the training that would enable him to go out and lead a normal life in the community?

Throughout the country I also observed many evidences of what is politely called restraint. At one place an epileptic boy was lying in a strait jacket, though doctors say movement should be free during seizures. Elsewhere I came across two small girls tied like dogs on leashes, one end of a rope around their waists, the other attached to a hook on the walls. "It keeps them from getting hurt," I was informed. I did not visit, but read an official report on a western state training school where one little girl was chained in bed and many children were confined in steel cages.

At one school I was appalled to learn that the brighter boys and girls are sometimes disciplined by being placed in "untidy" wards -- wards for low-grade children unable to control their natural functions. And I was still more appalled when I later learned from a psychiatrist with wide institutional experience that this practice, not only cruel but dangerously likely to cause the breakdown of good habits, is fairly common.

Even in the better places children are not outdoors enough. Whenever I commented on the numbers locked in wards or cottages, I'd be told: "Oh, but they do go out in summer." Or, "This is exceptional -- ordinarily they'd be out working." Or, "They're out every fine day." It so happened that it was not raining any day I was visiting training schools and sometimes the weather was pleasantly warm. Apparently the interpretation of a fine day is a narrow one.

Girls are even more confined and repressed than are boys, as a rule. In one institution the girls are kept behind a barbed wire fence, while the boys are free to roam the grounds. At another, the boys have a recreational hall where they can bowl, play pool and table tennis and purchase refreshments. Softball games are engaged in by more than fifty boys at least five evenings a week. But in the school's annual report, the older girls' recreation was dismissed with a single statement: "During the summer months many of the girls who are physically able are taken for walks in the late evening."

If girls are to be prepared to make their way in the world, they must have the opportunity to mingle socially -- under supervision of course -- with the opposite sex. I found that a few of the best state training schools do get their brighter boys and girls together at chaperoned parties or dances. But elsewhere the paths of boys and girls never cross. Perhaps even worse than keeping the two sexes completely segregated is allowing them continually to catch tantalizing glimpses of one another without ever permitting them to meet.