MENTALLY DEFECTIVE.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXX, Issue 5508, 2 December 1929, Page 4

MENTALLY DEFECTIVE.

. 900,000 IN SCHOOLS. POSITION IN UNITED STATES. According to a national survey conducted by Dr. T. H. Haines for the National Committee foi' Mental Hygiene, there were, in 1924, more than 900,000 mentally handicapped children in the United States between the ages of 7 and 15 years whose public education was being seriously neglected. These figures were based on a survey which showed nearly 1,100,000 children who were mental defectives or bordering mental defectives of grammar school age. Only approximately 70,000 of these children were then being trained in special classes or in State training schools, says Edgar A. Doll, Director of Research, in an article published by the United States Bureau of Education.

“More than 900,000 were presumably in school receiving a type of education of no benefit to themselves or to society,” he continues, “as these children do not succeed under the traditional type of school education they cluter the regular classroom, causing serious teaching problems. And because they fail to receive a type of education from which they can profit they become behaviour problems, truants delinquents and perhaps as adults, serious criminals. “It is necessary to face these facts as a serious problem in public education, which is more serious in rural districts than in cities because of the scattered population and because of the larger problems of school finance. Many municipal districts have made excellent headway in meeting the problem of providing State mental clinics and State supervisors of special education with marked success. “Consolidation of schools in rural areas and modern transportation facilities for rural school children overcome the most serious difficulty in dealing with subnormal children in rural school systems, namely, the difficulty of organising special classes in sparsely settled districts. Recent improvements in standards of teaching personnel increase the possibility of obtaining professionally qualified teachers for the rural special classes.