What Social Workers Should Demand of

Education

ELLEN TORELLE NAGLER, MADISON, WIS.

T will not be necessary to give an extended review of conditions which indicate why specific demands upon education must be made. Nearly all thoughtful persons are aware of the tragic situation in which society finds itself at the present time, a situation which many observers think almost if not quite hopeless. However, in considering the thesis laid down in the caption of this article, it will be helpful to bear in mind a few facts like the following:

In Wisconsin, the state superintendent of public instruction recently stated, in an interview reported by the press, that "over one-half of the school children are known to be so defective as to be incapable of normal development." A report of the Wisconsin State Board of Health under date of June, 1923, announced the examination of four thousand four hundred children under five years of age. Of these, only six hundred and nineteen, or about one-seventh, were normal; the other six-sevenths suffered from some defect, which if neglected would lead to permanent disability. Another report states that there are from sixteen thousand to eighteen thousand feeble-minded individuals in the state, many of whom are children. Other thousands are insane, psychopathic, epileptic, or otherwise mentally diseased.

Över forty thousand school children are in need of special care and training. For two children making rapid progress in school, there are three who are abnormally slow. Less than forty per cent of the children who enter the first grade continue into the high school and only ten per cent graduate from the high school.

Reports dealing with criminality are not easily interpreted. Over the country at large, only individuals convicted of crimes and misdemeanors and sentenced to prisons and reformatories are counted in the criminal class, and in order to be convicted one must be like the famous Mary with the curl in her forehead either very, very good or very horrid. Not only innocent, but highly altruistic individuals are often found in prison, while many prisoners have been driven to crime by poverty. Balzac wittily expressed the relation between crime and poverty in a formula: "A young man is to crime as a hundred sous is to x." A large percentage of prisoners are known to be mentally defective and are therefore irresponsible. But for the nation at large, more men and women come out of prison every year than graduate from all the colleges.

Another factor worthy of note is the character of amusements demanded by the people. As much money has been spent in recent years in this country on football, baseball, and prize-fighting as would be needed to support all the colleges. There may be some relation between this and the fact that we lead the world in murders and lynchings. The corruption which exists in official places, not only in Washington, but in small communities throughout the country, reveals a shocking lowering of the moral tone of our people, an emergence of the coarser, more brutal qualities at the expense of those which are finer and more distinctly human.

Why are we as a people apparently retrogressing mentally and physically, instead of maintaining past gains or progressing to higher levels? What can be done to arrest the downward trend and initiate a movement toward normal, upward progress in civilization?

Many causes for a retrogression can be seen, all of which may be reduced to two general causes. Of the greatest importance is the lack of appreciation of the value of human life for the production of the immaterial essentials called happiness, beauty, and truth, with a consequent exaggeration of

the desirability of great material possessions. Since the founding of this nation, the mental and physical powers of our people have been placed under the greatest strain to produce huge quantities of material goods or to accumulate their equivalent in money. The lives of men, women, youths and maidens, and of millions of little children have been offered up for gain. The ancient sacrifices to Moloch were a bagaelle in comparison with our sacrifices to the God, Mammon. The community has rated the individual in accordance with his success in achieving money, wealth, or power. Personality, character, and rational living has received only fleeting or disdainful consideration.

As a result of this material ideal, the second great cause of human degeneracy has been permitted to exist, namely ignorance of the real needs of the human body for a balanced normal development. There is today no subject about which the people as a whole are so ill-informed as they are in regard to the structure and development of the human body unless it is the relation between heredity and environment. It is a common experience to hear even persons of note speak about the impossibility of improving human nature because a thistle cannot be turned into a rose nor a vine into a sturdy oak; when what concerns us is not the transformation of one species into another but the highest development possible of the individual within the species. These persons forget or ignore the fact that both thistle and rose are capable of almost infinite improvement, and science has not set any bounds or limits to the possibilities of change in members of the human family.

Ignorance of the human body; ignorance of the conditions which promote normal, healthy growth, and disregard of the conditions which are likely to lead to deformities, disabilities, or disease, are some of the prolific causes of mental and physical degeneration. This ignorance is not confined to the poor and illiterate but exists among the majority of educated and otherwise intelligent individuals including parents and teachers. We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, victims or in

struments of this ignorance. It is only by the merest chance that children, normal at birth, are permitted to grow into adults without encountering serious handicaps in the environment. Given adequate care, many an inglorious Milton might speak instead of remaining mute, and the world be thereby enriched.

Aside from the precepts supplied by doctor or nurse, mothers are too often ill-informed regarding a proper diet for children as shown by the large percentage who are underweight throughout the country. The hygiene of clothing and of proper sanitation in the home are also often foreign subjects. And more important than this, the majority of mothers and teachers possess not the faintest conception of the principles governing mental growth and the development of character and personality. When one considers the delicacy and sensitiveness of the human organism the wonder is not that there are so many defective individuals, but that there are not more! Stimulations which produce no perceptible physical change in the organs or tissues of the body, may yet be sufficient to seriously modify or destroy their function. One nervous shock-like the severe or undeserved punishment of a child-may so seriously affect the health of that child as to mar its entire future. Yet thousands of children are in the power of adults who possess neither sympathy for the helplessness and dependency of childhood, nor knowledge and reverence for the well-nigh unlimited possibilities of child-life. When they are not looked upon as an encumbrance, children are often regarded as a means of material profit and their lives are exploited accordingly. It is said that children in orphan asylums suffer loneliness, lack of sympathy, and love; but conditions in thousands of homes are so wretched that there has developed a movement for taking children away from their parents in order that they may be reared under more favorable circumstances.

Criminologists recognize that the chance to restore the individual criminal to normal life in the community is dependent upon knowledge of the criminal himself, his particu

lar makeup, capabilities, and adaptabilities; alienists admit that cases of mental disease usually are overlooked until the hopeful period of treatment is past; feeblemindedness is ignored until all chance for preventing delinquent careers has been lost. We fail to reclaim delinquents and we fail to prevent delinquency because we have no standard of human wellbeing as we have of horses and cattle. We do not recognize or are not interested in the fine points of members of the human family, and so the highly gifted who might do much for society, together with the normal who could become so much more valuable than they are permitted to be, are lost among the defective and delinquent groups which are more aggressive in their behavior. We forget that idealists, social builders, and saviors are not found among the mentally defective, and so defectives and delinquents are given much care and permitted to multiply freely while the Gandhi's of our communities are imprisoned, and the Savonarola's are burned. It is scarcely surprising that society is in chaos.

These considerations bring us to our second question: What can be done to arrest the downward trend of our people and to initiate a movement which shall secure a normal development of individuals with saner conditions of living?

Past experience demonstrates that the necessary change cannot be accomplished through remedial agencies such as health and social welfare organizations. Health organizations have been active in this country since colonial times and boards of health have functioned in many states during the past fifty years or longer, and yet mental and physical defects are multiplying. The failure of health organizations is not due to lack of financial support, for we pay as much for safeguarding health in this country as we do for schools. The failure is due to the nature of the methods which are employed and which presuppose a public capable of intelligent response to the precepts in hygiene and medicine which are dispensed. But under the prevailing ignorance of life-processes, the contact of agents of the board of health with individuals in the community is too transitory to be effective or