also a young science—all conclusions and no data, so that the applied sociologist is "like a blind man in a dark cellar looking for a black cat that is not there." In the school, in the matter of dealing with the problem child, we are in the prescientific stage; we handle emergencies as they arise. These emergencies within the school group cluster around behavior in the following categories: disorder, rebellion, truancy, theft, sex, matters of dress and fashion. Until the advent of the visiting teacher no one tackled these problems in the modern spirit of social case work. The visiting teacher has contributed a new element. In her work we see the first step toward socialization of the school. The most valuable contribution that we could make at the present time would be a survey that would answer the practical question: What do teachers now do in the following conditions? For example, what do you do when a child steals in school, when you discover a sex irregularity, when a child begins to play truant, when an adolescent desires to leave an apparently unfit home? Until such a survey is made for the entire country we have no way of knowing how the individual child fares. We have, all of us, collected examples of what we may consider serious mistakes. In the matter of theft, we see the hasty setting up of a tribunal in the teacher's room, or the office of the principal. There is an informal court, no summons, long questioning with scant regard for rules of evidence, charges, and incriminations as the child is placed in the rôle of defendant. Following denial there is cross-examination, often intimidation, and the use of threats and force. One little girl was asked if she stole a necklace. In her answer we find illustrated the uselessness of this method: "No, I did not take it, but really, if I was the kind of girl who would do that kind of thing, I wouldn't be the kind of girl who would tell you about it now." In the modern juvenile court we strive to escape such an unnatural, unchildlike proceeding. There is no pressure, no tenseness, no anxiety. Everything is considered first that has bearing on the welfare of the child, her physical condition, her mental age, emotional make-up, family background, and social situation. The offense is not the core of the inquiry. The child is not placed on the defensive. There is much patience and continued hearings until the child tells her story freely and with a sense of relief. Take sex; here unlimited damage is done by unskilled treatment. Recently, in a large rural school, a girl of fourteen was accused of a sex offense and taken to court. Not the slightest evidence was found that the girl was delinquent. Her medical examination was negative. After the court hearing, the girl was reluctantly accepted back into the school. A week later a probation officer found her sitting alone by the radiator in the vice-principal's office. The girl attended no classes, and ate her lunch in isolation as a precaution, the viceprincipal explained, against having the rest of the pupils contaminated by venereal disease. Another girl of thirteen in a different school was found by the court to have committed a sex offense and was sent to relatives in a distant city. After a year and a half of good conduct, the girl having successfully kept all the terms of her probation, it was sought to re-enter her in school, and she was promptly rejected. Too often the whole procedure of the school in handling delinquency problems is wrong, archaic, based on methods discarded ten years ago by all good juvenile courts. When the school attempts to handle its behavior problems it. must do so in the light of the best modern social treatment. Grotesque misunderstandings frequently arise when the teacher is blameless. For example, there was a little boy who refused to go to school because he was tardy. When his mother pressed him for the reason he was frightened, he told her that his teacher had said she would put him into the furnace if he was late again. The indignant mother hurried to the school. The teacher could recall no such horrible threat. When the small boy was summoned, he said: "Well, she said if I was late again, she would drop me from the register." In addition to making a survey of what teachers actually do in conduct disorders, it would be extremely valuable if we could collect evidence of what is done in our best schools. In listing the blind, stupid, and ignorant things that are done we forget, or overlook, the splendid constructive things. It would be useful to collect the experience of certain outstanding school contributions and make them available to teachers and social workers throughout the country. The experience of visiting teachers in communities remote from social agencies, the inspiring tale of work done for the adolescent girls of Pocatello, Idaho, by a visiting teacher who created interest in sewing by having an exhibit of garments made of sugar and flour sacks, and turned a whole class of backward, troublesome girls whom no one wanted into a group of busy, happy students; the work of the Denver junior high school, of Smiley Blanton in Minneapolis, and Elizabeth Woods in Los Angeles should be known more widely. It is this concrete record of achievement in difficult situations that the average teacher needs so much. Generally speaking, what should be the outline map for a set of minimum standards for dealing with the problem child in the school? This question should be given consideration by some hard-working joint committee of educators and social workers. The details must come from experience. Such minimum standards undoubtedly should include: first, a social investigation of each individual case made by a qualified social worker; second, medical and psychological examinations; third, protection of the child, during the investigation and pending treatment, from any trace of penal procedure. No warrants for truancy, no ignorant questioning, no threats, no expulsions or punishment, no treatment of any kind until one can know with reasonable certainty that it will not do more harm than good, or at least until a diagnosis has been made and a plan of action agreed upon by those competent to decide. This would do away with so-called سلام school "discipline" of a revenge-taking sort, that discipline based upon the exasperation of an incompetent teacher confronted by the emergency of a troublesome child. That this pause between the emergency and its frenzied removal will be exceedingly difficult we all know. But the trial-and-error method of common sense is destroying children. It must give way to scientific method. Someone has said, "We are all experts in the field of common sense that is why we make so many mistakes." Mark Twain's view of the situation recognizes at least that it is something beyond the power of the individual teacher to solve: "Nothing is easier than to control a small boy. All that it is necessary to do is to call out the militia." Fourth, use should be made of existing social agencies. Cases should be registered with the social exchange, if there is one, and referred to the adequate agency. That is to say, the school itself should not do child placing (find places as mother's helper for girls, nor arrange for boarding homes) unless there is absolutely no responsible agency in the community. Many an adroit girl has freed herself from the restraints of home by telling tales of abuse or misconduct of stepfather, or parent. The sympathetic inexperienced teacher is horrified by these stories-but no less horrified when she finds the girl has made them up. If they are true they need court action; in any case no child should be removed from home without a legal proceeding to determine guardianship. And what is true of child placing is true of hospital care, unmarried mother work, problems of poverty and sex misconduct; each must receive the attention of the group or agency qualified to deal with it. Fifth, special attention should be given to the point of view of the child of foreign parents. So much lasting harm is done when the school contributes to the weakening of home life, the breaking down of old-world ideals. For example, one school had trouble with Russian truants. The parents kept the children home deliberately. Court hearings and fines did not convince the parents that they wished their children to attend school. By chance the teacher gave a Russian boy Pilgrim's Progress for home reading. Shortly afterward both parents appeared, bringing all their children, and said to the teacher: "We did not know that you taught our children about God in your school. We want you to keep our children." The school should make contact with foreign community thought and feeling. Sixth, special attention should be given the child of school age in industry. He should not be penalized because he wishes to work, and at fifteen has absorbed all the academic study he can take in. This is perhaps the most complex adjustment the school must face. It is instructive to note the marked mechanical ability of some delinquent children. A recent study by Mabel Jessup under the supervision of Br 9. C. Fisher, of the Southern-Branch of the University of this; 138 delinquent psychologist of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court, shot California and clinical Van boys, from twelve seventeen years of age, were studied in Juvenile Hall 4 Their mean Intelligence Quotient was 84.5 per cent. They were given the Stenquist mechanical assembly test which, aethport (about-to be published to the Journal of Poltuquency) like family tests dexterity, accurate perception, and the ability to make judgments. The results were compared with those of students of the New York public schools, non-delinquent boys of corresponding age (Table I). In these tests of mechanical ability the juvenile court boys did better, age for age; hence we may conclude that the delinquent boys exceeded the non-delinquent boys in success in the mechanical tests, although they were inferior to them in Intelligence Quotient: It is evident that the delinquent boys possess a type of capacity not reflected in the ordinary intelligence test upon which school classifications are so extensively based. This capacity or aptitude has social value which at present we penalize. The child of energetic nature of a manual, rather than verbal, sort is out of place in the ordinary schoolroom. He tends to revolt from irritation, and the strain of his failure sweeps away his margin of safety. He becomes a delinquent. There is need for a revaluation of our goals within the school itself. Someone must find a social use for the emergency and capacity of the delinquent boy, for the charm, frankness, ability to please, and to "get along" of the delinquent girl. The visiting teacher, that fortunate, skilled union of teacher and social worker, controlled by the school but working with the tools of modern social work, representing the most social aspects of both groups, without (we hope) the limiting viewpoint of either, is the most promising person on the social horizon today. But let us not be content with a label. We cannot take an untrained teacher or social worker "who just knows she can do the work," pin the sign "Visiting Teacher" upon her, and await results. In this field only the real article need apply. Many of us have sympathy with the old colored mammy who raised her children so successfully that she was asked: "How does it happen that you have the best behaved children in town?" "Well, you see I ain't had no education: so I jest naturally had to use my brains." We sympathize with this type of parent, or teacher-but their day is passing. THE CASE FOR THE MENTALLY RETARDED Charles Scott Berry, Professor of Educational Psychology, University لاف Experience has shown that not less than 2 per cent of the pupils enrolled in the elementary grades of our public schools are retarded mentally to such an extent that they cannot, in justice to themselves and to others, be educated wholly in the regular grades. Special classes have been formed in the public schools of our large cities to provide not only for the mentally retarded, but also for the blind, the deaf, the crippled, and other types of handicapped children. But the difference in the attitude of school officials toward the special classes for the mentally retarded as compared with their attitude toward special classes for other types of handicapped children is marked. They seem to feel that the primary purpose of forming special classes for the mentally handicapped is to get them out of the regular grades where they have been interfering with the progress of the normal child. Yet this argument is seldom advanced as the primary cause for the formation of special classes for the blind or deaf, although these children are more of a handicap to the progress of normal children than the mentally retarded. The true reason for this difference in attitude seems to be that school officials have grave doubts as to whether the mentally retarded child is worth educating. But there are certain more specific reasons why the same enthusiasm is not shown for the education of the mentally retarded that is manifest when it comes to the education of the blind, deaf, and crippled. In the first place, so much has been said about the high correlation between mental retardation and delinquency that many feel it is a waste of money to provide an expensive education for individuals who are destined to become a menace to society. In the second place, since the intelligence quotient seems to remain constant or decrease, and since these mentally retarded children have demonstrated their incapacity by repeated failure in the regular grades, many cannot see why we should spend still more money on their education when they are going to turn out to be an economic burden to society no matter what may be done for them in special classes. In the third place, the eugenists have said so much about the deterioration of the race through the rapid increase of the mentally retarded that many feel to spend more money on their education is simply to increase the probability that they will marry and propagate their kind. For those who hold this view, the special class is just a makeshift to provide for the mentally retarded until |