Children at psychiatric risk / edited by E. James Anthony and Cyrille Koupernik.
- Date:
- [1974]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Credit: Children at psychiatric risk / edited by E. James Anthony and Cyrille Koupernik. Source: Wellcome Collection.
52/584 page 24
![24 Theory for a New Field failure at school. There is, of course, a certain amount of overlapping of the two categories. School failure is sometimes the consequence of other psychological difficulties and sometimes the earliest manifestation of psycho- pathology. It is seldom possible to establish a direct relationship between school failure and adult mental disorder. More frequently, school failure is followed by lack of success in the employment field. School achievement, on the other hand, can be closely linked to the child's psychic organization, to the psychic organization of his parents, to the structure of the family relationships, to the social- cultural status of the family, and to the structure of the school. On the elementary school level, success is of course largely a function of the intellectual level of the child; but given an equal intellectual level, success becomes a function of the sociocidtiiral level of the parents. At the time the child begins school his intellectual level also depends on his past history in relation to the sociocultural status of his family. For the child coming from an inferior sociocultural level, the risk is appreciable that his learning to read will be delayed, and when this happens a snowballing of academic difficulties is likely, if no special intervention is made, for the rest of his school years. Even with vigorous intervention the lag is difficult to reduce. These facts have been noted on a large scale in the United States, where the problems raised by the Blacks, the Puerto Ricans, the Mexican-Americans, and other minorities, are particularly dramatic; and they have also been investigated in England [9] and in France [7]. Schools in their present structure function well, or reasonably well, for children of middle- and upper-class families, but they often only exaggerate the handicap of those who come from the lower classes (with the exception of a few gifted and invulnerable indi¬ viduals). Without the teachers' awareness, and usually contrary to their conscious wishes, the school system helps to maintain the social stratification of the society. The preliminary stage in prevention requires that the teachers be made consciously aware of this situation, which would then be followed by a series of interventions within the school, dealing with its organization and the teacher training programs. It is a surprising fact that within the same country with the same uniform educational system there can be both very good and very bad schools [10].](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18021876_0053.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
