Mentally defective children / Education Department, Leeds.

  • City of Leeds
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mentally defective children / Education Department, Leeds. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    has yet another side, viz., the reaction of these classes severally to the educational system of the country. Idiots and imbeciles are so defective that they find no place in that system. Feeble-minded children between 7 and 16 are permanently incapable of receiving proper benefit from the instruction given in ordinary schools. Feeble-minded children are further sub-divided into those who have been ascertained to be incapable of receiving benefit or further benefit in Special Schools and those who can be suitably dealt with in such institutions. Thus the legal classi- fication of mentally defective children presents us with a descending series as follows—feeble-minded, educable under special arrangements; feeble-minded, ineducable; imbeciles; and idiots—the classes being also distinguished by their response to the social environment and to the school system. There are three exceptional classes—moral defectives, feeble-minded children who cannot be educated without detriment to other children, and feeble-minded children with regard to whom the Board of Education certify that there are special circumstances rendering notification to the Local Control Authority advisable (usually cases of multiple defect, e.g., blindness and mental defect). In these three classes defect must exist, but they are eccentric to the scale of degree of defect. The Mental Deficiency Acts and the Education Act of Ig21 further direct the ascertainment and disposal of the mentally defective children in their area by the Local Education Authority. Feeble-minded children are to be certified and provision made for them by way of special classes or schools. Feeble-minded children who fail to respond to the instruction thus given, together with imbeciles and idiots and the three exceptional classes referred to above, are to be notified to the Local Control Authority. The Underlying Scale of Degree of Defect Degree of defect is thus the first determining factor in the diagnosis of these various classes of mentally defective children. A scale implies measurement, and some means of measuring the degree of defect had to be found. The means were found in a carefully graded series of intell- gence tests, and the first attempt to place these tests on a sure footing as an instrument of measurement was made by Binet and Simon in the course of their work on mental deficiency amongst Paris children in the early part of the present century. The psychological theory under- lying the tests is usually known as “‘the general theory of intelligence.”’ The main contention of this theory is that each individual possesses power, energy or efficiency of mind in a certain degree, and that the degree makes itself evident more or less in all his mental activities. The view is questioned by those who lay stress on the specific capacities of individuals. We do not all possess the same talents; some are intel- lectual, some imaginative; the qualities of the mathematician are not those of the poet. Within the intellectual field alone individuals differ widely. A child may be forward in one subject and backward in another, and it has been held that the “general intelligence factor’ is purely
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