After allowance for the external causes of backwardness in school one finds that the test of progress in school and the Binet examination not rarely reach two different sides of the nature of unusual children found in juvenile court. Working with these exceptional children, Dr. Kramer observed that school performances were often notably different from ability in the tests. After checking the two tests against each other in examining 59 cases sent to him from the Society for the Care of Delinquent and Dependent Children in Breslau and 59 children at the psychiatric clinic in Berlin, he says regarding the result of this comparison: “For the valuation of the Binet method, it shows us that the first objection which occurs to one, that the method tests only school knowledge, is not correct. On the contrary it was found that we had to do in high degree with that which was independent of what the child had learned in school and with real abilities which the normal child is accustomed to acquire by a certain age uninfluenced by training and instruction.” He emphasizes, however, that to answer practical questions regarding the training of a child, “we must not only examine into the understanding but the total personality must be taken into consideration” (_184_, p. 519). CHAPTER X. BAD SCHOOL ADJUSTMENT AS A CAUSE OF DELINQUENCY The comparison of the Binet and school tests for our group of serious delinquents suggests another important comparison. Many delinquents are found to be apparently wrongly placed in school relative to their intellectual development. They form a group for which not isolation but training is needed, a group notably larger than that which should be sent to institutions for the feeble-minded. This bad adjustment of juvenile delinquents to their school work is not the same problem as backwardness in school. It means attendance in school classes unsuited to the child's mental ability. In a paper before the Minnesota Annual Conference of Charities and Corrections in 1910, I briefly forecasted this problem (_152_). It is now clearly indicated by the records of the group of delinquents at the Glen Lake Farm Training School. This comparison is made in Table XVI. TABLE XVI. SCHOOL POSITIONS OF DELINQUENTS AT GLEN LAKE RELATIVE TO THEIR INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT ────────────────────┬─────────────┬───────────────────────────┬────── School position │ Alike[32] │ Better │Total worse │ │ │ ──────┬──────┬──────┼──────┬──────┼──────┬──────┬──────┬──────┼────── 3 yr. │2 yr. │1 yr. │ │ │1 yr. │2 yr. │3 yr. │4 yr. │ ──────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼────── 1 │ 8 │ 21 │ 21 │ 29 │ 16 │ 4 │ 2 │ 2 │ 104 ──────┴──────┴──────┴──────┴──────┴──────┴──────┴──────┴──────┴──────