Backward and feeble-minded children : clincial studies in the psychology of defectives, with a syllabus for the clinical examination and testing of children / by Edmund Burke Huey.

  • Huey, Edmund Burke, 1870-1913.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Backward and feeble-minded children : clincial studies in the psychology of defectives, with a syllabus for the clinical examination and testing of children / by Edmund Burke Huey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    PREFACE. The public schools receive and partially control, for a time, almost all of the individuals who will later trouble society as delinquents or dependents, or who will be troubled them¬ selves by insanity or other forms of mental disturbance. Usually only the lowest grade of feeble-minded children fail to find their way to school. Except in the case of infrequent offenders, and excepting also persons whose mental disturbance is due to specific kinds of poisoning, these individuals usually show exceptional con¬ duct even in their school period, and they would be taken ac¬ count of as children who need special attention, by anyone trained to and experienced in clinical observation. There is here the possibility of studying in advance the main sources of social danger and of individual misfit and shipwreck. There is equally the possibility of forestalling many of these ills and of taking away in advance the sting and smart from many an unhappy life. Aside from the service to be rendered to normal children and teachers by wise clinical oversight and counsel, the recording of exceptional functionings and facts in the case of these exceptional children, the canvassing of their potentialities, favorable and unfavorable, would be of inestimable service for the intelligent study of society’s ills and for the solution of the problems that these individuals themselves present. Of most immediate need is the provision of special classes for children who need a special pace or course or treatment to enable them to win success at something useful instead of failure at something useless. With this comes the planning