Deficiency and Delinquency: An Interpretation of Mental TestingMiner, James Burt
Science
Deficiency and Delinquency: An Interpretation of Mental Testing
Miner, James Burt
Children with mental disabilities; Juvenile delinquents; Mentally ill offenders; Psychological tests
It is interesting to note some of these comparisons. Goddard, for
example, considers it conservative to estimate that 2% of the school
population is “feeble-minded” (_112_, p. 6). In the same publication he
says: “There are between 300,000 and 400,000 feeble-minded persons in
the United States” (p. 582). Since the elementary school enrollment is
about 20,000,000 (_208_), the feeble-minded school children alone on his
first estimate would account for 400,000 feeble-minded in the United
States without allowing for any feeble-minded outside of the ages in the
elementary school.
The report of the British Royal Commission, published in 1908, forms the
starting point for many of the estimates made today. The commission
added together the number of school children which were thought to
require special classes with the number of defectives found in
institutions, prisons and almshouses, or reported by its medical
investigators. The total gave 0.46% of the general population as
“mentally defective persons,” not including certified lunatics. From
this amount should be deducted .06% who were insane but had not been
certified as such, leaving 0.4% mentally deficient. This was not
regarded by the Commission as an estimate, but was the number actually
“enumerated by the medical investigators” in sixteen typical districts
studied in England and Wales with a total population of 2,362,222 (_83_,
VIII, p. 192). Turning to the school children we find that in the areas
investigated there were 436,833 school children of whom 0.79% were found
defective. Since this was an enumeration and not an estimate, the
commission paid no attention to the discrepancy between 0.79% of the
school children and 0.31% of the rest of the population. Tredgold,
moreover, based his estimates of the frequency of the mental deficiency
in England and Wales on the data of the Royal Commission without
attempting to harmonize this discrepancy. This oversight has apparently
been one source of the not uncommon difference between the estimates for
school children and for the general population. One suspects that the
fact that the elementary school population is about a fifth of the
general population, has also mistakenly contributed to this error. The
discrepancy of three to five times as large a frequency of deficiency
among school children as in the general population certainly needs
clearing up.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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