Character of the Child.—The view that the child possesses all the vices and all the peculiarities of the criminal is as erroneous as the opinion that the criminal, owing to the arrest of mental development, remains for ever a child, and that he is one in nature with the savage who, unaffected by conditions of time or place, preserves unchanged the type of humanity in the childhood of our race. As yet no proof has ever been supplied of the hypothesis, that concealed within the child’s nature lies the tendency to do evil. But it is an incontestible fact that the child entirely lacks power to withdraw itself from harmful influences, and that if criminal inclinations are artificially implanted in the child, they will infallibly develop if no counteracting influences come into play. The child is a virgin soil, which will in due course bring forth good fruit or bad fruit according to the nature of the tillage; at birth the child is qualitatively and quantitatively incomplete; but all the faculties are there in embryo, and ready for their further development. The smaller the circle of ideas, the stronger will be the influence, the greater will be the effect, of any new idea that enters this circle. In the child, above all, the circle of ideas is so small, that every new idea will constitute a quite appreciable fraction of all the ideas that already exist.
Limits of Educability.—Education is able to develop the useful capacities and qualities of human beings, and to repress those capacities and qualities that are useless and harmful; but it is beyond the power of education to develop qualities and capacities of which the germs do not previously exist in the child. Even the best education is incompetent to improve a character which is congenitally altogether bad, or to do anything for a child whose character, though congenitally good, has been completely corrupted by evil influences.
Unfortunately, science is not yet sufficiently advanced to enable us to determine with absolute certainty which children are educable. As long as our knowledge of this matter remains defective, society must undertake the fruitless education of such children.
Educability depends, first of all, upon the inherited dispositions of the brain; when the deviations from the average in this respect are considerable, we have to do with a diseased brain. According to the kind and the degree of the deviation, we distinguish several groups of mental abnormality occurring in childhood, namely:
(a) Morbid psychical (psychopathic) constitutions.
(b) Congenital feeble-mindedness (debility).
(c) Fully developed and well-marked mental disorders.
In the first group we find a number of morbid changes far less severe in character than those comprising groups (b) and (c); these are commonly curable, provided only treatment is begun in early childhood. It is absolutely essential that such cases should be cured if possible: for unless this is effected, in most cases (and especially when they belong to the poorer classes of society) the males become habitual vagrants, whilst the females adopt a life of prostitution. Numerous inquiries have established the fact that a strikingly large proportion of tramps and other vagabonds were from childhood upwards of a psychopathic constitution.
The number of those exhibiting mental abnormality has notably increased in recent times, but this increase does not affect those suffering from true insanity. Many of those who in adult life exhibit symptoms of mental abnormality do so as a result of the psychopathic constitution, and in many such cases the troubles of adult life might have been prevented by judicious measures during childhood. In cases belonging to group (b), comprising persons suffering from congenital feeble-mindedness, the possibility of education depends entirely upon the degree of mental debility. In cases belonging to group (c) education is impossible. The question of ineducability is of importance, above all, in relation to the possibilities of a coercive reformatory education. The possibility that attempts at education may prove altogether fruitless must never be lost sight of; for although it is an established fact that mentally abnormal children usually need a coercive reformatory education, in the case of children whose mental abnormality exceeds certain limits, even such an education is impracticable. In these cases also the rule applies, that the prospects of success are greater the earlier the matter is taken in hand.