Handicaps of Childhood

by H. Addington Bruce

"Failed on all the new 1911 tests except six digits and suggestion lines (almost passed the central-thought test). In the 1908 scale, passed all the ten-year tests and some higher tests. Binet-Simon age, 1908, 10.8; retardation, fifty-four years; intelligence quotient, .17. According to the 1912 scale, 10.6 years."

Doctor Wallin fittingly comments:

"This man, measured by the automatic standards now in common use, would be hopelessly feeble-minded (an imbecile by the intelligence quotient) and should have been committed to an institution for the feeble-minded long ago. But is there any one who has the temerity, in spite of the Binet 'proof,' to maintain, in view of this man's personal, social, and commercial record, and the record of his family, that he has been a social and mental misfit and an undesirable citizen, and should, therefore, have been restrained from propagation because of mental deficiency (his wife is still less intelligent). No doubt, if a Binet tester had diagnosed this man forty or fifty years ago, he would have had him colonised as a 'mental defective.' It is a safe guess that there are hundreds of thousands like him throughout the country, no more intelligent and equally successful and prudent in the management of their affairs. Had he been a criminal when he was tested, the Binet testers who implicitly follow these standards would have offered 'expert testimony' under oath that he was feeble-minded and unable to distinguish between right and wrong, or unable to choose the right and avoid the wrong."

Truly, feeble-mindedness in an adult or child is not safely to be determined by relying merely on the results of a set of stereotyped mental tests. On the other hand, in deciding as to a child's actual mental state it is far more misleading to depend on unaided observation as a guide. Yet, since the beginning of scientific investigation into the causes of backwardness, cases have continually been coming to light in which teachers and even parents have mistakenly identified curable dullness with incurable feeble-mindedness, and have abandoned all effort at intellectual development. Sometimes, consequently, a condition closely resembling outright idiocy results from sheer neglect, as in one particularly striking case, for knowledge of which I am indebted to Doctor Arthur Holmes of Pennsylvania State College, well known for his work in clinical psychology.

In this case the daughter of a well-to-do professional man failed to show normal growth in infancy and was supposed by her sorrowing father to be weak-minded. Left to her own devices, on the theory that it would be useless to try to mend the work of Providence, she remained until the age of eight in a state of seeming imbecility. She could not read or write, could not speak more than three words, and spent most of her time gibbering in a corner. Then, as good fortune would have it, she came under the observation of an expert investigator of mental conditions and was subjected for a year to careful training. At the end of that time she "could speak in simple sentences, answer ordinary questions intelligently, read in a primer, write a few words, and conduct herself in the manner of a little lady."

In other words, she had been taken in hand in time to save her from a life of incompetency, misery, and mental darkness. Is it not reasonable to infer, in the light of this and similar cases on record, that our institutions for the feeble-minded would be far less crowded than they are to-day had regenerative measures been likewise applied to their inmates in early childhood? Indeed, with Professor Lightner Witmer, dean of American clinical psychologists, I am prepared to affirm:

"I believe that a child may be feeble-minded in one environment—for example, in his own home—and may cease to exhibit feeble-mindedness when placed in a different environment. I also agree with those modern students of insanity who assert that the development of some forms of insanity may be averted by a proper course of discipline and training. Analogously, I contend that because a child of sixteen or twenty presents a hopeless case of feeble-mindedness, this is no evidence that proper treatment instituted at an earlier age might not have determined an entirely different course of development."

Also, as in the case of the criminal alleged to have been "born bad," mental backwardness has again and again been found to depend on comparatively slight physical defects—defects of eye, ear, mouth, nose, throat, teeth—the correction of which often results in a spontaneous and remarkable intellectual awakening.[2] Or the dullness mistaken for feeble-mindedness may be due to a generally weakened physical condition, the result of unhygienic home surroundings, lack of outdoor exercise, poor food, and so forth. Here is a case in point, reported by Professor Witmer. It is the case of a little Philadelphia girl, Fannie, the eight-year-old daughter of Russian-Jewish parents, whose two-room home is thus described by Professor Witmer:

"The living-room had one window, and contained a table, a few chairs, a stove, a lounge, dirty clothes piled in one corner, a barking cur, and many flies. The table was covered with a piece of black oilcloth, and on this were usually to be found pieces of brown bread and glasses of tea. No meals were prepared and the family never sat down to table. Their diet consisted chiefly of bread, tea, and sometimes fish. The bread was always on the table for the flies to crawl over and the children to eat when their hunger drove them to it.