Vocational Psychology: Its Problems and MethodsHollingworth, Harry L. (Harry Levi)
Science
Vocational Psychology: Its Problems and Methods
Hollingworth, Harry L. (Harry Levi)
Psychophysiology
These various scales for measuring general intelligence have been used
chiefly for the purposes of educational diagnosis, in determining the
degree of backwardness of children in the grades, their need for special
educational attention, or the hopelessness of further pedagogical effort
with them. But it is obvious at once that tests of this type are of great
use to an employer in eliminating, from among the candidates for work,
those who are hopelessly mentally defective, feeble-minded, and
irresponsible. There are many sorts of work in which the employment of
feeble-minded persons, unrecognizable as such by their physical traits or
by a casual inspection, not only entails loss and annoyance but may
constitute a positive danger and constant menace to those who rely on the
defective individual. Such work as that of delivery boys, messengers,
domestic servants, nurses, elevator operators, drivers, motormen, etc., may
be cited as instances of work into which the feeble-minded easily slip,
unless there is some standardized means of recognizing them.
The importance of detecting these incompetents and keeping them from work
in which their irresponsibility means economic waste and personal and
social danger is of distinct vocational interest. Studies of cases brought
to the Clearing House for Mental Defectives in New York City show that of
the first two hundred and eighty-one feeble-minded women of child-bearing
age, about two-thirds had been engaged in some form of economic labor in
which their incompetence was distinctly dangerous to those associated with
them. The following table shows how these two hundred and eighty-one
feeble-minded women had been employed:
Living at home and assisting at simple tasks 94
Domestic service (families, bars, hotels, etc.) 67
Engaged in factory operations 21
Living in institutions, reformatories, asylums 20
Prostitutes 30
Laundresses 5
Working in stores, clerking, errands, etc. 5
Nursemaids 9
Odd jobs 6
Married and keeping house 11
Housework, with relatives 13
The investigators originally reporting these data write as follows: "These
defective women had borne eighty-nine illegitimate children, which were
acknowledged and could be somewhat definitely located, and sixteen women
were illegitimately pregnant at the time of their examination at the
Clearing House. Twenty-four of the two hundred and eighty-one had married
and these had borne forty-six legitimate children. The average mental age
of the illegitimate mothers was nine years."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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