must believe, with Dr. Stanley Hall, that "will is muscle habit." Habit takes its rise in imitation. The particular weakness or inability of the child, whether it is concerned with deficiencies or anomalies of motion or locomotion, or whether it is concerned with the deficiencies of the organs of special sense, is taken separately for the purpose of stimulating the organ to perfect functioning, at the same time the functioning promotes the growth and development of the organ. The training of the muscular system by means of games, gymnastics, and manual training, given perhaps for the specific purpose of developing force, at the same time accelerates brain action, first by sending to the brain an increased supply of blood, second by stimulating the organs of digestion, assimilation and elimination, and third, by securing such coördination of eye, muscle, and sense of touch, as we know to promote the complexity of the brain tissue, particularly in the centers controlling the parts named, and has to offer a class of exercise whose specific aim is to develop the power of imitation. The child must be attentive; he must inhibit certain ideas and hold to the one; he must watch the leader in order to know what to do; the exercise attracts his sight, impresses his brain, contracts the muscles first with difficulty, perhaps, but afterwards with increasing ease. The development of imitation will promote quickness and precision of movement. The actual changes in the brain tissues due to this exercise are easily appreciated, and of course this means greater mental power in the child. We have Dr. Harris as authority for the statement that imitation develops into habits, customs, morals, that is, the will side of the human mind, and on the other it develops into perception, memory, ideas and insights, which is the intellectual side of the human mind. But every exercise must be physical and psychical. Every exercise must stimulate the organ to perfect, all-round functioning. Pestalozzi says: “Whatever the child does gladly, whatever awakens his powers and enables him to say I can, all this he wills. But this will is not aroused by words, it is aroused only by a complete culture which gives feelings and powers." The teacher must know the actual physical condition of the child each day. She must be able to interpret the white, drawn look around the mouth of the fatigued child. She must know what to do to relieve the tension indicated by the overworked frontal muscles. The child who seems tired out when it first appears in the morning must be made the subject of her careful consideration. The irritable child, ready to strike and fight, must be explained either from his home or his physical condition. Was he whipped for his awkwardness, stubbornness, or so-called carelessness? Was he working later than usual? Was he subject to unusual experiences? It has been said that the treatment of mentally defective children in the public schools and the treatment of the average normal boy or girl differ in no essential particular. It is a difference of degree, not of kind. We do not have any new methods for teaching reading: we use a combination of all good methods, sentence, word and phonic; we have no new device for develop ing the sense of quantity or of quality: we weigh measure, compare, reckon; we have only such means as are open to all for the training of childhood. Like the teacher of the normal child we go back to Locke for his philosophy. "Nothing can enter the mind except thru the senses; to Comenius we go for a sequence in training-senses, memory, intellect; to Rousseau we go to realize again and again the supreme importance of knowing the child, and his development which is to come, if at all, thru his experience with things, things, things; to Pestalozzi we go to learn that our aim is not that the child should know what he does not know but that he should behave as he does not behave, and the road to right action is right feeling." And again he says: "I have proved that it is not regular work that stops the development of so many poor children but the turmoil and irregularity of their lives, the privations they endure, the excesses they indulge in when opportunity offers; the wild rebellious passions so seldom restrained; and the hopelessness to which they are so often the prey." To Froebel we go for his philosophy of the unity of all life, even encumbered as it often is by disease, defect, ignorance and crime. From these, the master teachers, we learn to look from the defective mind to the cause of it-the defective eye, the defective ears, the poor control, will explain much and indicate more; instead of nagging and scolding the child for seemingly careless work we seek causes for it in the badly nourished anaemic body, the victim perhaps of our modern slavery-child labor-and likely as not the inheritor of such nervous instability as comes from the parent, who may be the slave of some intoxicant, or the victim of that sad and miserable poverty which undermines the power and usefulness of men. In general it is true that mental life of greatest reach and possibility is directly dependent on physical efficiency; so our treatment of the mentally defective child must begin in a complete diagnosis of his case. It must proceed along those lines which nature unimpeded takes with the average human infant. We have to do with the "misfit" in the schools, the child out of tune, the child isolated by his inabilities and often by his teacher. It is ours to fit the school to him; to restore the harmony; to socialize him and make him feel with his more fortunate brothers the unity of all life. The problem of after-care and preventive measures.-One of the most serious social problems we have to face is the problem of the after-care of the special class children. We should take into these classes those children only who are educable to a degree that promises ability for self-support when it becomes necessary for the child to earn his own living. The experience of those engaged in work with the defective classes is that even the most promising of these children have social and ethical defects in addition to the mental defect from which they suffer. They are likely to be coarse and rough or all too gentle. They violate all rules of morality. They are irritable, perhaps cruel and destructive. We know how hard it is for these children to stick to one thing. We know how much encouragement and boosting they need. Yet with these facts at hand we are today turning children out of our special classes who must enter the fierce competition of our industrial life. Have you ever stopped to consider what becomes of them? Is it not safe to say that most of the girls become women of the street and a large majority of the boys get into reform schools and state prisons? If you will consult the reports of the State Custodial House for Feeble-Minded Women in Newark, N. Y., you will find statistics which are startling of the burden that these women have put upon the social body. While the investigation into the mental ability of the boys in the Elmira Reformatory showed that many of them were mentally defective, so far as I know nothing is being done in this country toward the supervision of these children after their school life is finished. These are some of the questions we must face. Does our duty to this child and to society end when we give him his discharge from school? Have we any right to turn into the industrial world a worker who cannot succeed? Shall we stand back and see a boy sent to a reform school when we know that which has never been formed cannot be reformed? Do we need legislation which will secure to these children a life free from the stress and stain and final misery to which we now condemn them? As well as working to secure to these children of today their right to education and a life of happy useful industry, we must also look ahead to the generations to come and do what can be done to insure for them a strong healthy organism ready and fit to do the world's work. This can be insured by making more general the knowledge we now have of nervous diseases and disorder. By means of popular lectures given by recognized authorities the general public can be informed on such subjects as the preventable causes of mental deficiency. By the organization of free clinics for nervous disorders, similar to the one maintained by the Cornell Medical College in New York City, and the one made possible in Baltimore by the Phipps Foundation, we can prevent somewhat the number of morbidly nervous persons and in this way insure a stronger and saner race to carry on the work of this nation. These two sets of problems must be met wherever the ungraded-class idea is to take root. Our work is "double-headed." We look to the enriching of the individual life. We develop to its greatest efficiency the soul of the child, whose mental ability is blurred yet who must meet the world. But we stop short of the greatest privilege unless we advocate and actively support whatever makes for the integrity of the race stock. THE EDUCATION OF THE BLIND CHILD WITH THE MISS ALMEDA C. ADAMS, CLEVELAND, OHIO* I am deeply sensible of the honor conferred upon me in being invited to address this representative body of teachers. I come to you in behalf of the dwellers in the shadow, and I hope that what I say shall not have been spoken in vain. It seems to me that the education of the special child, as you have taken it up, presents this great difficulty: that the problems of the physically defective and those of the mentally and morally defective are not, and never can be, the same. Neither does the fact that a child is a victim of a physical defect involve any abnormal condition of the mind or morals. This problem is radically unlike the problems of the feeble-minded and incorrigible child. It were indeed presumptuous for me to dare to add one to the many definitions of education which have been given, but I venture to say for my purpose that education in its broadest sense is the highest development, along natural lines, of all the God-given powers-physical, mental, and spiritual. By natural lines, we mean those lines determined by the native endowment of the individual. The problem of the education of the blind child is, therefore, exactly like that of all other children-of his seeing comrade, save that the peculiar thing to be taken into consideration in his case is the loss of vision. The fact that this problem has been so slow of solution is largely due to your own overestimate of this limitation, an estimate which arises from the fact that you are apt to give too great a prominence to the place that sight holds in the senses. Vision is not, as our seeing friends sometimes seem to think, the only sense. The child goes away for a day's outing, and when he comes back he is asked to describe minutely what he saw, but nothing is asked of him as to what he touched. Would it not be well for us to ask ourselves to what degree of refinement of perception the child would attain if we were to devote the same effort to the cultivation of the senses of hearing and touch as we do to the sight? The problem, then, of the blind child is peculiar simply in the fact that the child is blind. Suppose he doesn't see? Suppose you subtract one sense from five, even though that sense be the greatest, the result is not zero. This takes no account of intuition, the sixth sense, which must ever remain our *Miss Almeda C. Adams, who made the following eloquent address in response to an impromptu call, has been blind since infancy. She was educated in the public schools, and later in a state institution. After graduation she won a scholarship in the New England Conservatory of Music for securing 1,000 subscribers for The Ladies' Home Journal. Her admission to the Conservatory was questioned because of her lack of sight. She accepted admission conditionally, agreeing to leave at the end of six months if not successful in her work. She graduated with a standing in all subjects above the majority of her class. Later she studied under private instructors in New York City. Miss Adams has taught vocal music in a state school for the blind, also in a normal school for seeing pupils, and is now conducting a studio for seeing students of vocal music. She is also the teacher of a large chorus class of seeing girls.-EDITOR. highest source of knowledge, because thru that sense alone we may behold the invisible, and stand face to face with God. The blind child, then, can do everything that the seeing child can do. I would not for one moment have you imagine that I undervalue or minimize in any measure the great gift of sight. But I do not think that the eye is the only organ by which light may reach the soul. Now, as you know, in the education of sightless children, the great institutions have done a noble work, and I will not minimize it; but that they work under many and great disadvantages it is impossible to deny. By this system the child is for years kept from that natural home and community life which is the natural need of every child. This is during that entire formative period between the years of seven and twenty-one years of age when the parents should care for the child. Under those conditions a daughter grows to be a stranger to her own mother. At the time when the perplexities of life come upon her, she has no one to carry them to. But most of all the children segregated in these schools are a distinct and peculiar class entirely separate from the seeing world in which they must spend the rest of their lives. As Professor Earl Barnes said yesterday, they get the blind habit, and when that blind habit is once fastened upon them, it is almost impossible to break it. And I wish to say right here that I have never heard anyone discuss the problems of the blind with such clear comprehension as that shown by Professor Barnes in his address of yesterday. We have to admit certain tricks of manner and thought which seem to be the natural result of blindness. Why? Let the psychologist answer. In a special school, it is very difficult to lead a child to realize the gravity of these mannerisms, or put forth the proper effort to overcome them, whereas, in a seeing school, they all disappear. Very much has been said here about the danger and mistake of institutionalizing education, by which I judge they meant the individualizing of it. I heard a woman not long ago say that, in her judgment, children were so much better cared for by the state than in homes, they ought to be cared for by the state. I think she is greatly mistaken. In a state school, it is absolutely impossible for the teachers to study the children. There are never enough teachers to man the state schools and so long as our state institutions are in the grasp of political machines, they may not always be manned by the best and wisest. To the city of Chicago belongs the honor of the initiative in the admission of sightlesss children to the public schools. In 1900, thirty-seven Chicago schools were opened to blind children. The supervisor of this work is Mr. John B. Curtiss, himself without sight. I have not the honor of his acquaintance, but he seems to be a man of large common-sense. Every school has a special teacher whose business it is to teach the point reading and writing, by the use of maps and other special apparatus, and also to study the peculiarities of the children, and to help them by every means in their power. At first they |