Fifty-third annual report of the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children, Elwyn, Delaware County, 1904-1905.

  • Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Fifty-third annual report of the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children, Elwyn, Delaware County, 1904-1905. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    pied during the day in the the manual and industrial sections, and while some have access to the library, the younger and duller children distributed into groups, are entertained each by a teacher during the interval before evening prayers and dismissal. The noon-day classes in singing give opportunity to those in all divisions capable of improvement in that direction. The Sunday schools, 9 in number, give moral and religious instruction to all the pupils of the training department, while the brighter children from the custodial and asylum buildings are permitted to join them in the afternoon service of song. The daily custodial classes, 3 in number, provide simple kindergarten occupations for the incapables, and knitting, basketry, and chair caning for the brighter class, who are largely of the moral imbecile type. The classes in the training department have during the year undergone a gradual transformation and weeding out, either by withdrawals, or transferrence to custodial buildings, or to apprenticeship in the manual and industrial divisions. This transferrence, effected mainly during the spring and summer, has already had good result. Our young apprentices entering with zest and interest upon occupations, toward which their attention had been directed, show from the very start a considerable aptitude, and attest to the practical character of the training they have received in the schools. Those of low- grade, and the duller ones of middle-grade, who have been impelled to and practiced in acts of attention and concentration, are ready in a measure to resolve these into settled habit, in a daily routine of service in garden, house, or asylum duties. The brighter middle-grade pupils, and those of high-grade, who were capable of development on more abstract, and consequently more intellectual lines in the studj' of books, music, drawing, and modelling, and in a daily practice in either sewing, color work, wood-carving, and construction, have been enabled to enter intelligently into the various trades for which printing office, sewing rooms and clothes closets, shoe and tailor shops, store and bakery, carpenter and paint shops, pro- vide. Others still engaged in this preparation will probably follow shortly in their wake, so that before the close of the year
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