Excerpt from What Can the Teacher Do for the Deficient Child?: A Manual for Teachers in Rural and Graded Schools

Does the regular teacher have any responsibility in the problem of mental deficiency?

All students of the subject agree that mental deficiency is one of the greatest of our social problems. They also agree that the problem is so complex and many sided that there is no one simple remedy for it. The doctors alone cannot solve this prob lem; the psychologists alone cannot solve it; state institutions and special class teachers cannot meet the whole situation. Many minds and many hands must combine in lending assistance to the deficient school child/ The regular teacher has a part to play.

Some one asks, Why not exclude all mentally deficient chil dren from the public schools? The answer is, It cannot, at least now, be done. We do not have the legal machinery nor the public Opinion to make it at all practical. There are a few exceptions, when for peculiar reasons a child is an intolerable burden in school, or a positive menace to other children. In such rare cases exclusion is the only measure.

For a long time to come, then, there will be feebleminded children in the rural schools, and in the regular classes of village schools and in many of the regular classes of our city schools. There is no reason for believing or even hoping that all these abnormally backward children will be conveniently excluded from the schools. There is no reason for thinking that they will all be assigned to special state institutions. In the great majority of cases mentally deficient children are destined to be reared in the communities where their normal brothers and sisters are attending school.

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