Rural Problems of Today

by Ernest R. Groves

The other report gives the following information:

"Of the 1,087 girls and 1,098 boys examined in the rural schools, 93 of the former and 100 of the latter were below the average mentally, or 8.7 per cent of the whole number.

Of the total school population, 0.9 per cent were mental defectives.

The undue number of one-room rural schools in the county which were of faulty construction, with poor equipment, and with imperfect teaching facilities, were largely responsible for the retardation found in the county.

The average loss of grade by 193 children, as recorded by teachers, was 1.28 years for girls and 1.5 years for boys, a total of 269 school years.

No special classes for the instruction of retarded children were found in any of the rural schools of the county.

In addition to the 214 children who were retarded and exceptionally retarded, three epileptics and two constitutionally inferior children were found among the school children of the county."

These interesting investigations do not, of course, disclose the full amount of mental defectiveness in the localities studied, because they are based on a survey of the children at school and because they especially take up the matter of retardation and feeble-mindedness. It is no uncommon thing in the small rural community to find the more troublesome feeble-minded child withdrawn from the school. The reports suggest that a wider investigation would increase the number of defective children, for the method chosen could hardly be expected to discern all the seriously neurotic children. The information gathered indicates that epilepsy and the neurotic predisposition to insanity need to be investigated as well as amentia,[5] and that the epileptics and neurotics, even among rural children, are more numerous than is usually supposed. Of course an investigation of the adults would still more increase the amount of mental abnormality.

The sociologist is familiar with the social menace of the degenerate family in the country. Most of the members of the families thus far studied have lived in the country or small village. It is reasonable to suppose that on the whole such families find it easier to survive in the country than in the city. The country offers occupation for the high grades during the busy season and yet does not require steady employment all through the year. The social penalties of mental inferiority are not likely to be so oppressive; certainly there is much less danger of coming into collision with the law. Our institutions find from experience that the feeble-minded take kindly to rough, out-door work and from this it is natural to assume that a large number of the feeble-minded, free to choose their environment, prefer the country to the city. They are probably more often handicapped by the competition of city life than by the conditions of life in the rural community.

It is probably true also that the feeble-minded family is more likely to renew its vitality by the mixing in of new, normal blood in the country than in the city. Illegitimacy holds in the problem of rural feeble-mindedness the same position that prostitution occupies in urban amentia. The attractive feeble-minded girl—and of course many of these girls are physically attractive to many men—does not find it difficult in the country to have sex relations with mentally normal men. Indeed it is often not realized that the girl is mentally abnormal, and all too frequently we have a marriage in the country between a woman of unsound mind and a man who is mentally sound. Illegitimacy is, however, the larger problem in rural amentia. The same type of girl that in the country becomes the mother of several children, often by different men, in the city, unless protected, enters prostitution. The city prostitute, because of the sterilizing effects of venereal diseases, is less likely to become the mother of children, but, on the other hand, she scatters about syphilis, which has so much to do with causing mental abnormalities. It may be a matter of opinion which of the two social evils, illegitimacy in the country or prostitution in the city, has the larger influence upon the spread of mental abnormalities, but there can be no doubt that the rural difficulty deserves the attention of all interested in mental hygiene.