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What Can Teachers Of Normal Children Learn From The Teachers Of Defectives?

Creator: Martin W. Barr (author)
Date: December 1903
Publication: Journal of Psycho-Asthenics
Source: Available at selected libraries

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There are others in the schools who are not of these types, yet are differ-ent from normal children; nervous under compulsion, easily confused in ordi-nary recitation and unable to keep up with the others. The backward children just on the borderline who may easily be precipitated into defect by mismanagement. Examinations will do it. or a multiplicity of studies. For these, as for the others we have been considering, the panacea is found in making haste slowly. Let us have fewer books and more music -- both vocal and instrumental -- more hand-work and physical exercises, remembering that hurry and worry are the two enemies of culture, and culture is what is most necessary to the period of immature growth. Knowledge is gained practically through growing experiences, and knowledge gained thus first-hand, is best for them now; facts relating to people and events they may glean later, or dispense with altogether. We cannot grasp everything in a limited time and if something must be dropped out, or left behind, let it be the system rather than the child.

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Give the children time to grow as nature intends without getting over early solemnized into ill-conditioned men and women. It is a recognized fact that the longer the period of maturity is deferred, the later will be the period of decay, and the stronger and healthier will be the characteristics transmitted to later generations.

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Overcrowded school courses and exciting examinations, nerve-strain and push -- the making haste to grow, has much to do therefore with the propaga-tion of poor stock, and the consequent retarding of race-culture. This press-ure of the strenuous life is a feature which a teacher in the public schools must hopelessly combat, while the teacher of defectives, dealing with a perpetual childhood, feels that she has time and opportunity to instill manli-ness into her boys and womanliness into her girls, without fear of their be coming premature "grown-ups" under her hand. In this, as in many things, methods and environment contribute to ameliorate her arduous task and to aid her in the study of the points we have enumerated. She has every opportunity of studying the child, his habits, temperament, and early history, aided by the diagnosis of physicians, and the records of former instructors, which are all open to her. Not only that, but if resident in a training school, where all engaged in the work live more or less with the children and with one another, much is gained by interchange. In dormitory and dining-rooms, school-rooms, work-shops, and play-grounds, the child is known; in his training, moral, industrial, intellectual and physical, many are concerned and all are interested, so that her opportunities are greater than are those whose conditions are more circumscribed. This, a seeming paradox is nevertheless true-that is compared with teachers in public schools, whose opportunities for study and approach are too often bounded by school-room walls. The appointment of medical inspectors, now becoming general, will naturally aid these in gaining an insight into family history of pupils and the influences of heredity upon habit and temperament if they have access to records. But to acquire facility in detecting signs of deterioration or of defect as well as a knowledge of the different grades of imbecility and the limit of capacity in each, requires inter-course with defectives in mass and conference with experts in training.

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A few weeks thus employed will be an open sesame to many, enabling them to see more clearly how to avoid nerve-strain in themselves and their pupils and thus to maintain an atmosphere most conducive to progress.

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The student of psychology studying for an examination would find an ounce of such practice worth a pound of theory.

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