Differentiated Courses
As soon as a defective child is discovered, it is advantageous for him and for the other pupils in the school that he be given some form of special training. In most cases it is more than useless to try to give him the ordinary school courses. He cannot learn to read well enough to enable him to get information from books. He can, on the other hand, acquire some of the simple arts of self-support. It would be better for all concerned to give up the effort to teach such a child reading.
The major objection to a program of this type is that it is sometimes extremely difficult and, in the early years, often quite impossible to decide whether the child is really defective or is merely slow in development. Some children come to their normal powers slowly, but ultimately reach a level of intellectual and physical efficiency so high that they are not to be classed with the defectives. One hesitates, therefore, to give up the teaching of reading in the case of a particular child until all possibility of his development is past. It is better to err on the side of too great training than to despair at too early a date.