1. The estimation of the progress of the children should be made by the professors themselves, since they know each child well. The professor will always keep in mind that his notes will be checked by the inspector. With regard to instruction, notes will be kept with regard to reading, writing, arithmetic, spelling, according to the methods which we have indicated, and such remarks as "good," "very good," "passable," each signifying absolutely nothing, will be avoided. With regard to the manual work, it goes without saying that the record would have to be made in a somewhat different way.
2. The inspector will examine a certain number of cases chosen haphazard. He must carry out this control with an open mind and without prejudice.
3. He will make use of methods of control of a strictly impersonal nature.
Social Return.—We are surprised to find that abroad there have been published very few particulars concerning the social return of the schools, although they have been in existence for a long time, some of them for forty years. Statistics are rare, without commentaries, and some of them are apparently prejudiced. In order to find out what they are worth, we think it would be necessary to live in the country, and to observe carefully for oneself the work of the schools. The official documents do not teach very much, and one may suspect that every public service which is not supervised in the most intelligent manner, and incited by competition, will slip into routine and empiricism. We demand an inquiry on the two following points: How many defectives are provided with a trade when they leave the special schools? How many defectives are provided with a trade when they do not leave the special schools?
Such an inquiry, we may be certain, has never been seriously undertaken. Here are some statistics. Mme. Fuster, after a stay in Germany, where she visited some Hilfschule and Hilfsclasse (literally, "help-schools" and "help-classes") made a communication to the Société de l'Enfant, from which it appears that in the case of 90 classes for defectives in Berlin, 70 to 75 per cent. of the defective pupils who were there became able to carry on a trade; 25 to 30 per cent. died in the course of study, or returned to their homes, or were sent to medical institutions for idiots.
According to a more recent inquiry, made under the auspices of M. de Gizycki at Berlin, and published in a book by Paul Dubois, 22 per cent. of the children were sent home or to asylums; 11 per cent. were apprenticed; 62 per cent. worked at occupations which required no knowledge and yielded little pay (labourers, crossing-sweepers, ragmen). If we add together these two last groups, we reach a proportion of 73 per cent. of defectives who have been made, or who have become, more or less useful.
We shall quote a last document, to which we attach more importance than to the preceding, for we have full confidence in the author. Dr. Decroly has kindly arranged at our request a few figures relating to the occupational classification of the girls discharged from a special class in Brussels. He states that the class was opened only in 1903, that education in Belgium is not compulsory, that many of the pupils leave the class too soon—all circumstances which explain the smallness of the success. He firmly believes in the educational value of special instruction, provided one does not expect miracles. He has a good critical mind. We cannot publish here the whole table. We shall summarise it thus:
Of three idiots, practically nothing is known; of eight imbeciles, one is employed at home, one unemployed (?), and one is messenger to a shoemaker. One can scarcely expect any real return in the case of imbeciles and idiots, and the merit of Dr. Decroly's statistics lies in the fact of distinguishing between such children and the feeble-minded. Let us speak more fully of the latter. They are thirty in number. Concerning nine there are no particulars. Two have entered a Catholic school, and nothing more is known about them. If we subtract these eleven, there remain nineteen. Some of these are "kept at home," or "occupied at home"; of these there are five. We do not know exactly what they are doing. There are others who "work," but it is not stated whether this is outside, or whether the work deserves to be taken into account. Four belong to this category. There remain the apprentices (tailors, cigarette-makers, sewers, etc.), of whom there are nine. Perhaps the last figure is the only one which deserves to be taken into account. Finally, then, out of nineteen feeble-minded subjects, regarding whom particulars have been supplied, one half, or 50 per cent., have been apprenticed; or more than half, 75 per cent., if we count the defectives who "work." We are not, therefore, very far from the figures collected by Mme. Fuster for the special classes of Berlin, nor from those published by Gizycki.
We do not think enough of the ordinary school, and of the service it renders to the defectives; or, rather, we are too ready to assert that it does nothing for them. Yet, all the defectives who leave it do not turn out badly. There are journalists who try to attract the attention of public bodies by declaring that defectives, left to themselves, inevitably fall into mendicancy and crime. What do they know about it? Absolutely nothing, since no serious inquiry has ever been carried out. Even we, for several years, allowed ourselves to be influenced by such suggestions, until the day when one of these journalists went rather too far. We refer to an alienist who published in a morning paper a series of articles on the defectives. After having estimated their total number at 40,000, he called them "the madmen of to-morrow," truly an excellent title for a sensational article. But, little as one might think it, of all that was written nothing was really proved. Those who think that the defectives are destined to become lunatics are just as much in a dream as those who declare they will become criminals. The fact is that we are in complete ignorance, because one has always recoiled from an inquiry which promised to be as long as it would be troublesome. And it is a disgrace, let us say frankly, that no State has ever undertaken it.
Through the intervention of an inspector, M. Belot, we have inquired of twenty heads of schools what has become of the defectives whom they notified to us two years ago. We have made these inquiries with regard to sixty-six children only. Poor figures, indeed, and we would not give them, but that a little is better than nothing. These sixty-six children may be classified thus: Thirty-five are defective, twenty-six ill-balanced, and three both defective and ill-balanced. Retardation is quite plain in the unstable, amounting to from one to two years; it is very marked in the case of the defectives (one alone has a retardation of two years, the others have a retardation of three, four, six, and even seven years). We give these figures only that it may not be imagined that we are dealing with cases of slight feeble-mindedness with a retardation of one or two years. It is necessary to understand these details in order to form a correct idea of the value of the figures.