Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899: Volume LIV, No. 6, April 1899Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899: Volume LIV, No. 6, April 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
Equally useful to the girl in the workroom as to the boy in the shop
is this training of a ready eye, this quick intuition of balance and
proportion, this practice of obedience of hand and arm to brain, until
it becomes automatic. To both, therefore, the value of such
preparation will be incalculable. It is noticeable that boys of this
grade turn out as good workers in the ordinary crafts of shoemaking,
carpentering, and house painting as those of higher grade who,
although capable of grasping more intelligently the details of work,
yet do not bring to it that energy and perseverance of one who finds
in it "this one thing I do." With the imbecile of high grade, able to
accomplish studies equal to about the first intermediate of the public
schools, there is a diffusion of interest; the intelligence broadens
rather than deepens during the school period in natural response to
environment. With greater grasp of numerical values and of letters he
attains proficiency impossible to the lower grades in drawing, in
music, in printing, and in cabinet work. Other industries will
probably be provided for him as the demand increases, for it must be
remembered that this is a class whose needs have been the last to be
recognized in a work begun, as I have before said, for the idiot.
Regarded as queer, unlike other children--unable to keep up--he has,
after an unsuccessful trial at school, been kept at home, in some
cases an aid, in others a tyrant, to those relatives charged with his
care.
Changed conditions of both family and school, fortunately for him,
combine to render this no longer possible, as absence of proper
training is always certain to result in deterioration. The pressure
upon the primary schools in the struggle for higher education leaves
no time to contend with dull, backward children. In the family the
care-takers grow fewer in proportion as the home-makers become
home-winners, and so these feeble ones are a burden instead of an aid
in the ordinary household offices.
The next hope is a training school where, with false hopes fostered by
ignorance and sensationalism, they are entered, and after a few years,
a time all too short for any lasting benefit, a sentimentality equally
stupid withdraws them from that guardianship absolutely essential,
with just that little knowledge which will render them more dangerous
to society, because less recognizable--an evil element perpetuating an
evil growth. Under both conditions these unfortunates have suffered
from that lack of constant care and supervision which should be theirs
from the cradle to the grave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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