Labour and Childhood/Defects and their Consequences

by Margaret McMillan

CHAPTER II

DEFECTS AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES

NOTHING is more strange and touching than is the part played by the defective child in the history of education. Long ago the feeble minded as well as the insane were treated sternly. It seems that people felt they were to blame in some way for their misfortunes. Even among those who did not blame them, there were many who thought that the feeble minded are a burden. A burden of course they are. But through an impluse that some call unreasonable the most forlorn found helpers, and then it was found that even the very defective can be of great use, and not only in small, but in great ways. Many processes, so rapid that they cannot be observed in the well endowed, are slowed down as it were in the feeble minded. And so these in a sense became benefactors of the race.

The first real teachers of the feeble minded were physiologists. Not of course that they were all medical men. Some were priests like Itard, and some were artisans. But the great teachers stand out from all others in that they began their work by studying the physical side of education. A great many of course, such for example as Esquirol and Pinel, who began in Paris the study and treatment of so-called idiots and insane persons, were doctors by profession. In England and Scotland too, doctors took up this new work, and certainly no one disputed their right to do so. For the professional teachers did not want to spend time and talent on children who, as it seemed, could never do them any kind of credit. Even the Scottish dominie, successful as he was, cared mainly for the "boy o' pairts," not for the poor "innocent" who ran about the village. So it came to pass that the school doctor has really come to us via the sad class rooms where the unfortunates of the race were gathered at last.

One of the most original and successful of these teachers was Edouard Séguin—a Frenchman living in America. He was a fully qualified doctor. He seems to have known very well all that was written up to his day—he died about twenty-five years ago, in the early eighties—by the great educationists. He was an admirer too, of Froebel. But it was from his poor scholars themselves that Séguin learned what made it possible for him to become a true pioneer. He received into his school children before whom Pestalozzi, Rousseau, Herbart, and Froebel would have turned away in despair, and the study of their works certainly could not help Séguin to discover what he should do for them. So, even though he was well acquainted with all the educational books of his time he seems to have taken his medical knowledge as the real basis of his work.

In his book, The Child, Normal and Abnormal, there is a photograph of a child whom Séguin received into his school. This child was about nine years old when the photograph was taken. A helpless, almost motionless being. His arm is stiff—the hand and ringers wooden looking; the mouth hangs open (it is left as it was when he last stopped speaking). The eyes are fixed. It would be useless to coax this child's attention by appeals to the higher senses, and Séguin did not attempt anything of the kind. He began the boy's education by doing for him what the ordinary child does without any help. He took the stiff arm and began to move it up and down from the shoulder—then exercised forearm and wrist, and finally invented or rather copied (from the normal child) forty hand exercises. And by dint of all this hard work, carried on at first from without, and quite mechanically, the sleeping brain of the child was awakened, the frozen limbs began to live, to move. Those brain areas where movement is registered having been awakened by such movements, the thrill of life passed to higher levels, and a ray of intelligence began to shine in the vacant eyes.

Here is a portrait of the same child after nine months' education—if education it can be called—that treatment which he received in the first days almost as passively as an almost drowned man receives the attentions of those who are trying to bring him back to life. The face is so changed for the better as to be almost unrecognizable.

Séguin had a great horror of routine, and of falling into mere use and wont. His book, The Child, Normal and Abnormal, is like a living raft, and the reason is, that even though he sat at the feet of many teachers, he returned always to study the child under his own roof, to learn from the little helpless, and perhaps motionless figure of the "abnormal" child, whose pitiful face and form held the key to so many enigmas, whose darkened life was a secret as well as a tragedy. The study of the normal and the abnormal side by side proved very fruitful. When one begins to look into the exercises he gave to his defective scholars one finds, as we have already said, that he was just following the order in which a normal child develops. For example: the healthy infant, as soon as he can make other than reflex movements, begins to move his limbs by lifting the arm from the shoulder. The brain first takes control of the limb as a whole, then it takes control of parts;

1907 image of a brain

Diagram kindly lent by Lee and Raper, trustees

it takes finer and fuller control—all in a definite order. This order can be followed by a glance at any map of the brain where the areas of the motor brain, governing movements of various parts of the body, are shown.

Séguin followed this order, and he gave his reasons. But though brain physiology was not so far advanced in his day as it is in ours, for many years after his death, and even to-day, the natural order of growing control is violated in some infant schools all over the world. Yes, one may even yet find places where little children are forced to try to get control of their fingers in writing small letters long before they have real control of the larger arm and elbow muscles. Reform is slow, not because people have never heard of new methods, but because they do not know the meaning of them. For example: when the exercise, known as "arm-drawing," began to be advocated, there was an extraordinary amount of misunderstanding about the real meaning of it. It was believed to be a new and spurious kind of art! It was believed to be a trick—a fad—and also an entirely "new" order of exercise, never attempted before! Only after years did people begin to see that it was no more a new kind of art than is skipping, no more a new order of exercise than is walking or crawling, that its uses are physiological and that one may, and as a rule must, quickly pass beyond the need for it as the power of control becomes finer and more delicate.

Yet Séguin had gone far to demonstrate all this in his school thirty years ago, and to expound it in his books, L'Idiotie and L'Enfant Normal and Abnormal.

The phrase "a defective person" was once commonly believed to mean an idiot, or a person with no brain-power at all. But it is now known that every human brain is defective more or less, just as every world or planet is "defective." A world may have many fertile places and be very beautiful on the whole, but it is certainly not equally fair and equally fertile in every part. No more is any human brain. It is said that Mozart could not cut his own food, that a certain learned professor never could be trusted to take his own train ticket, and that Darwin lost any faculty for music he had ever possessed.^[1] Some children are defective in ways that make it impossible to take the ordinary school curriculum, and yet they are not necessarily of low mentality, but are sometimes above the average.

For example. In 1906 a little boy of ten was taken into a "Special Class" in Bradford. He was intelligent; his blue eyes had a strange, sad look—a look of resignation and wonder. He seemed to be looking always for a deliverer, but to have lost all hope of finding him, and indeed, twenty years ago, he might have continued to look in vain. He was dumb. He had never spoken; his hearing was good, and all the vocal organs perfect. At the age of five, he was sent to a school for the deaf; but after some years the teacher sent him away, declaring that his hearing was very good, but that, seeing he would never utter one word, he was probably an idiot.

The boy then found himself in a class for the feeble-minded. He soon became a source of great joy and profit to his poor comrades, for he had just the kind of gifts that could make it possible for him to stimulate and interest them. So though he could not be a pupil teacher, he was something very much better. Armed with a piece of chalk, he would stand before the blackboard, and draw donkeys with panniers, horsemen riding upon horses, dogs begging for crusts, and cats, with handsome tails, chasing mice in a barn. The children stood round and looked at him with an attention which even skilled teachers could not perhaps have roused in them, and sometimes the head teacher came to watch the drawing, and even Her Majesty's inspector was known to join the group.

Not Froebel or Herbart, if they had risen from the dead, could have delivered him. The deliverer was at hand in the person of the school doctor.

In 1861 Broca, the Columbus of the brain, discovered that a certain part of the brain was diseased in persons suffering from speech defects—that is to say he discovered a speech centre. But since that time it has become clear that speech involves activity not in one part of the brain, but in many. Thus there is a place where the sound of the spoken word is received, another place where it is stored; then there is an attention centre far away, but in connexion with the storage place, and all these various parts must be active and healthy before a word is heard, stored, and attended to. Now the mechanism being so involved, there may be a breakdown at one point or another. One may be deaf through the ear, or through the memory chamber, or through the higher brain. The "word-deaf" boy, now in question, was not deaf in the ordinary sense; and he was intelligent, so the attention centre was not in fault. It was the storage place that was lacking in his brain. It could not be restored, so another kind of memory must take the place of it. Speech-training was given him through the muscular sense. The child took to the new method joyfully, and learned in a day or two to say such explosive words as "pen" and "penny." He got on fast. His father, who is a cabinet-maker, says he will make a capital workman. When a question is asked him he repeats it noiselessly with his lips before he can understand it; but he has made good progress, and speaks and sings too, though with expressionless tones very like a phonograph.

Then there are not only various kinds of word-deafness; there are at least two kinds of word-blindness. In one of these the storage place for written words is damaged. In the other this storage place is intact, but there is no access between it and the visual path. Such a case often becomes an enigma to all. The word-blind child may be clever, good at hand work, quick and responsive, and perhaps to complete his extraordinariness he is gifted with a splendid visual memory, draws well, has a good memory for numerals, and is good at arithmetic. Dr. Thomas describes one of these children. The teacher, bewildered by the boy's intelligence, yet declared he must have a poor memory, since he could not remember how to make letters! Alas! it was not will power that was wanting. He strove hard to learn to read, but all in vain. His writing to dictation was a puzzle—every word wrong, mere meaningless groups of letters. His teacher did her best for him. He was so quick at arithmetic, and could multiply figures so rapidly on the blackboard, that she was completely puzzled. Has the brain then different storage places for letters and numerals? It appears so. And there are varieties of even this strange defect, for there are children who can learn their letters, but stick (for a good physiological reason) at the combinations of them!

What would have been the treatment of such children long ago? What is the treatment they receive in some places even to-day? No doubt they would have been, no doubt they still are, punished. For punishment is a short cut towards many supposed goals, and the tradition of it has come down, sanctioned by the authority of wise men, who knew no more about the brain than Plato knew about Lake Michigan! "There are all degrees of word blindness," writes Dr. Kerr, "from the ordinary bad speller to the individual who cannot recognize any word." And there are all degrees of word-deaf people, from the person (so common!) who has difficulty in remembering what he has heard to the person who cannot remember spoken words at all in the ordinary way. And the failure of these is not the result of the activity of the old Adam in them, but of weakness and defect. It may be overcome in part—or it may be altogether beyond the power of the victim or his friends to improve matters. In any case it is well, not only for the word deaf and word-blind, but for all children, that the school doctor has begun his investigations, and is making a tour, as it were, of the brain. The geography of the earth is pretty well known, the geography of the brain is in its infancy; still, the explorers have come at last. They are at the door of the school. They try to understand the growing brain, the energizing brain of school children. And as one by one its secrets begin to be yielded up, a new spirit of tolerance begins to enter the modern class room. It is born from observations made possible, sometimes by disease, but nearly always by some kind of sorrow, defect, or failure. It is sometimes an infectious disease caught in childhood—that strikes one note or another of the nervous system mute, or breaks (as in the case of Helen Keller) many strings. But in any case it is nearly always failure and disaster of some kind that lays bare new secrets of nerve mechanism. So tragedy is brightened by the fact that the greatest sufferers help many. Their trembling hands bear a gift. It is they who, more than others, explain the faults and failures of the well endowed.

One of the most crying needs to-day is the need for a school for the study of the abnormal. A school where defects, that may, or may not, constitute mental inferiority can be studied, and where physiological methods of teaching may be put to the test. At the mere mention of such a school some may object, on the ground that it would be a kind of inhumanity to experiment in training. But alas! What have we been doing always, what are we doing now, but experimenting?— and always more or less in the dark. In the new order of school, the experimenting would be done under safer conditions, and with a more definite end in view—that is all. The students would be more or less experts. Abnormal children would be under observation (for the school would be residential). They would not simply have easy lessons— which is only an evasion. Each would have the physical training (exhausting for the teacher as it often is) of which he was in need. Many problems that puzzle the ordinary teacher would, we may hope, be cleared up as the result of the work, for the new knowledge gained would be put within the reach of all schools, and even of every parent.

To-day, even in the best institutions, the doctors of the feeble minded and defective prescribe treatment, and supervise education. But there is no provision made for research work, or the application of the most recent discoveries in the methods of teaching, and this deprives the work of its highest value as well as of its greatest interest.

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We have seen that some people, who are notably defective, are yet very far from being inferior to the average in mental or moral qualities. They are like people, who being rich, have not access to some shops. But of course all "defective" persons do not belong to this class. There is a class of children who are not defective, but are very dull. And there are some who are dull and also defective. In short, every degree of dullness, and every variety of defect, may be found in schools.

To-day the classifying of children is carried out in a rough and ready fashion, but the advent of the school doctor has already had its effect.

Dr. Kerr has drawn a diagram to indicate roughly the variations of mental power in school children to-day.

In the middle are the normal children, probably from 60 to 70 per cent of the whole. To the right are the very bright children, 10 per cent, and a small fraction for the genius. To the left are the dull and backward, and beyond these a much smaller class—the imbecile and idiot class. So difficult is it to draw hard and fast lines, however, that it is impossible to claim on this or any other table that it is really accurate. Moreover, there are many children whom one can hardly place anywhere. For some of these new names have been invented, such as "higher-grade imbecile," "middle-grade imbecile," etc., and for others no name has been invented and no classification attempted.

The schools of 1870 were built for the normal child, and that was quite right, since the normal are the majority. A great mistake was made, however, when it was assumed that all children could be normal if they liked, and that all teachers could force them into the ranks of the majority.

To begin with, let us take the children who certainly might become normal, and are not—those who cannot keep up with the others for causes that might be got rid of. They form a large group. From 15 to 20 per cent of all perhaps, are dull simply through illness or bad conditions of life. A great many of these have a stupid look, and pay no attention to any lesson. A great many suffer from adenoids, and some are dull and backward because they are ill, or in a chronic state of discomfort, strain, or depression because of bad feeding, bad air, want of sleep, and the burden of a life passed under difficult conditions.

In some German cities, such as Mannheim, this section of all the child population is provided for. Intermediate schools are opened for them—schools which are really health centres. There baths are provided, and excellent ventilation. The class rooms are sunny, the classes small. The education of the senses and the motor cortex is carried on vigorously, and deliberate efforts are made to awaken the higher centres of the brain. And this experiment is very successful. Spurious defects soon yield to it. The causes being removed, the effect ceases. In a few months many of the children are no longer dull. They begin to troop back to the ordinary schools. A certain number of them turn out to be even clever children. It is strange to think of! From 10 to 20 per cent of all school children would profit by this kind of schooling, a schooling which rewards the teacher so well that the child soon passes beyond it. But there are not yet many towns where this large class of children have been provided for. In most schools they still drag on with the rest—the last in everything, always behind! And few ever know that they too have wings, though they cannot fly. A much more hopeless class (a class which can progress, but very slowly, and of which few can ever go back to the ordinary school) receives attention, while they are often allowed to drift from "spurious" dullness into real and hopeless stupidity.

To come now to the really sub-normal, the genuinely dull and feeble minded. They are happily a much smaller class—not 3 per cent of the whole,^[2] yet small as this class is, the type of inferior brain varies in different parts of the country. For example, there is one called the Mongol type. These children have fine textured hair and skin, almost almond-shaped eyes, small round heads, and a thick tongue. They are fairly common in London, but are rarely found in the North of England. On the other hand, there is the Cretin type of child, who has "a dry, harsh, yellowish skin, with hard, wiry, coarse hair, very placid, with thick spade-like hands." This type of child is believed by Dr. Kerr to be very much more commonly found in the North than in London. Perhaps the reason may be that exhaustion produces one type of dullard (thus the Mongol children are usually born late in the life of the mother) while lack of natural stimuli may affect the offspring in quite another way. In any case it is pretty certain that within small areas even children vary almost as greatly as do sometimes the seams of a rock. In a single county—the West Riding of Yorkshire—the type of feeble-minded child presents strange contrasts.

Still there are signs which are more or less common to the children belonging to the sad army of the feeble minded. "A highly arched palate, unsymmetrical head, a want of volume about the frontal region, irregularities about the ears (which are sometimes blue, ill-shapen, very large, and standing out from the head) incurved little fingers, webbed fingers, with more than the usual number of fingers," all these are mentioned by Dr. Kerr in his pamphlet on defectives as stigmata which are found very much more often in the feeble minded than in other children. A deeply seamed and ever-frowning forehead, an open mouth, tight nostrils, are also common in them. Every one of these signs tells something about the unseen brain. And yet a great deal is left untold. Some of these children are always surprising their teachers and friends. One has an extraordinary memory for certain things—remembers when trains start or are due, finds things that are lost or remembers things that were done and forgotten long ago by other people. Some take a great interest in certain things, such as horses, or ships, or fire-engines, or in their father's trade. Some can draw better than the child in the ordinary schools. They show you vigorous sketches, of cows, dogs, and parrots, and some (even among the more hopeless cases) can remember a great many airs, and can sing well and even play on instruments. None, so far as I know, have shown the usual amount of inventive power, or have made tools and used them masterfully. Speech offers a great many difficulties for a large number of them. Through their various failings in language we have indeed learned what a wonderful conquest human speech is. More than a hundred years ago doctors were classifying mentally defective children by speech defects. Up to a certain point then, language, or connected speech, and beyond it tool projection, are final tests. They spell victory—the victorious arrival of the voyaging mind at the door of a new life, and that is why the study of the feeble minded leads up at last to the study of the tool projectors!

We have not to anticipate the tool projectors here however, in this chapter on "defects." We have to linger yet a little with the feeble, the unhappy minority. The family history of the seriously defective is very obscure. The parents do not want to lift the dark curtain that hangs over the past, and, in many cases they cannot. But enough is known to make it clear that alcohol—a poison that seems to have a strangely evil effect on the higher brain—is one great cause, if not the great direct^[3] cause of arrested development. Its work once fairly done, there is no going back on the consequences of it. They follow as the night the day.

The burden of supporting the unfit is heavy. Moreover, a certain percentage of all defectives are a constant danger to the people among whom they live. The moral imbecile is often clever enough, and outstrips every one at school. Then one day he may put all he learns to a terrible use. There is reason to think that certain chambers are missing in his otherwise well-built brain. As the teacher cannot create these chambers, it seems vain to bring fine furniture in the shape of good precepts. Perhaps one day doctors and teachers will know what to do. But to-day, the doctor can merely point out why society should protect itself. It is proposed that finger-print registers should be kept of all children who have had to come before a children's court—that is, before a body formed to deal with the crimes or serious offences of the abnormal. The fact that they are known would act it is hoped much as a conscience acts in the normal person.

It is pleasant to turn from these markings and finger prints that betray, to the tools and hand-work that reveals! Pleasanter to know that it is the revelation, not the betrayal, that is common. The betrayal is comparatively very rare. It is a promise and a prophecy, not a betrayal, that is in the work of the average man.

Of course it is not always fairly offered. It may be hindered or withheld for good reasons. Still, it should be there, and one day every educator will look for it; for self-projection in work—even in work of the roughest kind—represents the something that makes man not merely higher than the beasts, but different from the beasts. Long ago he began to use his hand, as no wing, no talon, no paw of an animal, however powerful, was ever used. He found expression through it, and not in one way alone. For though language^[4] and manual work seem to have sprung far apart as representing two very distinct ideals in education, yet there is certainly no ground for this separation from the physical standpoint. Language is not only a projection, but it is a very early and simple one, and was almost certainly at first entirely one with that of the hand. Before words there were sounds, and before sounds gestures. And these gestures were already a preparation for activities whose real meaning was far above their mere immediate end. In short, the impulse that made the human project his hand in tools, and create even language at first through the hand, was no mere development of brute force or brute cunning. It was the impulse of a higher order of energy, preparing for one knows not what future of enfranchised and transformed power. And yet this finer force, overflowing, as it were, in creative work, was conditioned, so far as we may judge, by the health, the fitness, of the striving worker. It was the flower of a lowlier life. It may exist in the sickly; but disease tends to destroy it. It is found in the defective, but not always. It is always manifested by the healthy and normal individual.

Thus it is, for the educators of the normal at least, the central factor and pivot of all training.

Yet it does not show itself at birth or in infancy. It is evolved gradually, and declares itself only when early childhood is fairly past.

The child under seven uses his hand in a hundred different ways, but he does not, as a rule, project it.

But what, then, we may ask at this point, does his activity mean—his almost feverish restlessness, the restlessness that makes even the Jesuit teachers (so anxious nevertheless to influence the young) glad to leave him to his mother; a "self-activity" that Froebel sought to use—what does this condition mean as a preliminary to the first rude efforts to project the hand? We may not linger over such a question, but we must attempt a brief, imperfect answer.

1. "There are," writes Dr. Thomas, "many persons who are physically without the power of registering musical memories, although the ears are perfect. If such people lived in a world where musical memories were the only means of intercourse—in a grand opera world—they would be considered imbeciles."
2. The lowest grade of child, known as the idiotic is, of course, a still smaller group—a decimal fraction per cent of the child community.
3. Very few would deny that the great indirect cause is poverty.
4. In an interesting paper on speech defects, Dr. Thomas points out that all the four memory centres dealing with speech and for the performance of delicate actions are stored in the brain in close proximity to one another. This is true also of the visual sense. But, what is even more significant, these centres are supplied with nourishment through the same artery. "It seems likely," writes Dr. Thomas, "that this community of arterial supply is of enormous importance. The great advantage arising from such automatic increase of blood supply is obvious. The right- or left-handedness of articulate beings may be dependent upon this fact."