Crime -- United States; Criminals -- United States
In any event, it is at once informing and encouraging to note that the
school authorities of New York City have called check on the near mania of
the period to attach negatively overdrawn advalorem tags to such children;
and then, when so tagged, practically to dump them into the social
discard, there to hate themselves, each other, and everybody.
For one, cardinal thing, the named school authorities rightly hold that
the humane burden is upon New York City's teaching staff to dig out and
decide upon ways and means better than those which make social pariahs of
unfolding lads and lassies.
The same authorities further hold rightly that the benefits accruing to
such children through mixing with the better-equipped mass is, in itself,
a consideration not to be lightly brushed aside. And once more, that
mental backwardness is in appreciable measure chargeable to false methods
of educative approach and attack.
Gentlemen who lie awake o'nights devising bizarre means by which alleged
criminal "morons" can best be cheated of that which the school authorities
of the City of New York insist New York's mentally backward children shall
have, will do well to follow the effects of the edict of those
authorities. Certainly that edict won't visit arresting embargo upon the
normal mass of children, and must prove a boon to approximately ten
thousand children who don't just measure to arbitrarily-spaced mental
tape; tape which is not, and can not be, out of the hand of the Almighty,
and tape which can not measure to fully unfolded years.
As applies to either prison or public school instruction, the crucial
points are: (1) Technical marks of stigmata are much too frequently and
much too loosely attached to budding youth, the inevitable effect of which
is to depress and discourage them, particularly out of the gibes of
unthinking comrades. (2) More often than not, the marks initiate in the
fallible brains of those tricked into overdetermination, through
predisposition amounting to near obsession to make the technical case. (3)
The marks, as arrived at under present conception of rational "follow-up"
processes, do not carry to comprehensive measures. (4) The scholastic or
reform curriculum that is not pregnant with influences fundamentally
germane to the mental, moral and physical uplift of the last unit of the
mass, is either falsely prescribed or prosecuted.
Because of his reasoning faculty, the child, more quickly than any other
youngling of the animal kingdom, unfolds by imitation to good suggestion
and good example. Hence, if solely because segregated-group treatment
practically cold-blankets those two, capital influences, as exerted by the
mass upon the individual, it should be relegated to the domain where
veiled minds are wedded either to fantasies, or to the useless function.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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