CHAPTER VI
THE HANDICAPPED CHILD
Educators have only recently realized the existence of large numbers of pupils within the schools who are unequal to the routine class-work because of mental defects. It was one of our settlement residents, a teacher in a Henry Street school, who first startled us into serious consideration of these children. In the year 1899 she brought to us from time to time reports of a colleague, Elizabeth Farrell, whose attention was fixed upon the “poor things” unable to keep up with the grade. She had, our resident declared, “ideas” about them. We sought acquaintance with her, and we felt it a privilege to learn to know the noble enthusiasm of this young woman for those pupils who, to teachers, must always seem the least hopeful.
The Board of Education permitted her to form the first class for ungraded pupils, in School Number 1, in 1900, and the settlement gladly helped develop her theory of separate classes and special instruction for the defectives, not alone for their sakes, but to relieve the normal classes which their presence retarded. We provided equipment not yet on the School Board’s requisition list, obtained permission for her to attend children’s clinics, secured treatment for the children, and, finally, and not least important, made every effort to interest members of the School Board and the public generally in this class of children.
The plan included the provision of a luncheon. For this we purchased tables, paper napkins, and dishes. The children brought from home bread and butter, and a penny for a glass of milk, and an alert principal made practical the cooking lessons given to the older girls in the school by having them prepare the main dish of the pupils’ luncheon—incidentally the first to be provided in the grade schools. Occasionally the approval of the families would be expressed in extra donations, and in the beginning this sometimes took the form of a bottle of beer. Every day one pupil was permitted to invite an adult member of his family to the luncheon, which led naturally to an exchange of visits between members of the family and the teacher.
Among the pupils in this first class was Tony, a Neapolitan, impossible in the grade class because of emotional outbursts called “bad temper,” and an incorrigible truant. When defects of vision were corrected the outbursts became less frequent, and manual work disclosed a latent power of application and stimulated a willingness to attend school. Tony is now a bricklayer, a member of the union in good standing, and last spring he and his father bought a house in Brooklyn.
Another was Katie. Spinal meningitis when she was very young had left her with imperfect mental powers. Careful examination disclosed impaired control, particularly of the groups of smaller muscles. She has never learned to read, but has developed skill in clay-modeling, and sews and embroiders very well. She makes her clothes and is a cheerful helper to her mother in the work about the house. Last Christmas she sent to the school warm undergarments which she had made, to be given to the children who needed them. Her intelligent father feels that but for the discriminating instruction in the ungraded class her powers would have progressively deteriorated and Katie “would be in darkness.”
The teacher who thus first fixed our attention upon these defective children has long been a member of the settlement family. She has carried us with her in her zeal for them, and we have come to see that it is because the public conscience has been sluggish that means and methods have not been more speedily devised toward an intelligent solution of this serious social problem.