Some parents are a little injudicious in the feeding of children. I know farmers' children who won't drink milk. The parents do not insist and see that they do drink milk. I do not know that fatness is a sign of nutrition.

The mental level mentioned is, I think, a very important matter in connection with all children. If that could be taken it certainly would assist educators in determining just what a child can do and what he cannot do. No use trying to teach a six year old child the things a nine year old child should do, and if we get a mental level of the child-any of these children -it certainly would simplify the educator's work and prevent a good deal of repetition.

In regard to a follow up system, I personally feel we should have some system of following up the children who leave the institution. Many of these have good homes and are well cared for. Other children leave us and we would like to follow them up a little better than we do at present. The follow-up system, so far as we are concerned, would be a very wise provision. One girl was allowed to be married, by her father, after being out of the institution about ninety days. Another girl who left the institution has just been returned to us with an illegitimate child.

Member Butler: For my own information, I would like to ask if a feebleminded person ever becomes a normal minded person with the training that they get in an institution. never heard anything said about that.

I have

Superintendent Mogridge: I think not. I have never known of a definitely feebleminded person becoming normal. I do not think it is necessary to elaborate on that. There are some conditions under which it is not dangerous for a feebleminded person to be at liberty and might not transmit its deficiency, but once feebleminded, always feebleminded, perhaps not in the same degree. Many can be educated so they become useful.

Superintendent Voldeng: The paper covers a large territory. I want to congratulate the reader on the admirable way in which he has handled his subject. A paper of this kind is rather difficult to discuss. I had hoped that the subject would be treated very largely from the viewpoint of conditions in our institutions; in other words, I was prepared for a more or less

definite outline of a program adapted more particularly to the institutions for feebleminded.

With our rather limited experience, we have been led to believe that the feebleminded are susceptible of a reasonable degree of pedagogical training. In watching our school work I have noted variable degrees of progress among children ranging from the third to the eighth grades. With very few exceptions the pedagogical limit will be reached at some stage in the grades and that all efforts to carry the work beyond the grades will prove undesirable and fruitless.

The paper makes reference to cures among the feebleminded-I do not know just what the author means by cure in this instance. Personally I believe such application to be misleading and that the term improvement would express our ideas more accurately. The feebleminded individual is susceptible of a certain amount of improvement, both pedagogically and socially. The brain of the feebleminded I take it has been endowel with a certain degree of 1etentive capacity, beyond which, efforts at further improvement will prove futile. There is a qualitative as well as quantitative, change in the mentality of the feebleminded individual from that of the normal faculties are rather over-developed than under-developed, such a condition rather intensifies the mental unbalance.

My attention has recently been called to the following incident: A young lady about fifteen years of age, who suc cessfully passed her seventh grade last year and is now doing eighth grade work, unbeknown to the institution, entered a contest for a prize offered for the best letter by one of the county papers of the state. To my surprise, she carried off the first prize. The contest, as I understand it, was limited to children in the public schools of the county, including the high schools as well as the grades.

There is a tendency I believe at an effort to over-educate this class pedagogically. I believe it is a waste of time to attempt to carry the education of the feebleminded beyond the sixth or seventh grade, book learning among the feebleminded is largely acquired through the medium of imitation. Industrial rather than book learning, should form the basis of all training of the feebleminded.

In conclusion I want to suggest that in my opinion the future happiness and well-being of the feebleminded is closely associated with carefully selected industrial training or in other words, occupational therapy.

Superintendent Kepford: I am sure we all feel under a debt of gratitude to Professor Vasey for this most able and interesting paper. I am having in mind in the discussion, not the feebleminded child at all but the child who comes to the Juvenile Home and is backward or retarded, for one cause or another; and who needs some sort of special equipment or program, so to speak, by which if possible to bring him into what we will call a normal educational relationship. We have many retarded children who have been sent to the home. Two hundred and two children have passed through the doors of the institution. Many of them who are not feebleminded have not been in school or have been in school intermittently and are not in step with the grades in which they would naturally be classified. They may also have a low mental level. That very frequently is the case and yet I think could not be classed as feebleminded or mentally feeble, as Doctor Mogridge sometimes terms it. They are problems, however, to be dealt with by those who are handling the grades and in which these children do not exactly fit.

I remember a boy thirteen years of age, sent in a year ago last month and he knew the meaning of just three words. He could neither read nor write. Of course he went into the primary grade but before the end of the year he had approximated the third grade. The boy is still far from the normal place of classification as to age.

One feature of Professor Vasey's paper, I have observed to be very true that in the schools a great many of the backward and retarded children are mal-nourished. Many of the children coming to us are mal-nourished-actually underfed, not having had the proper kind of food or maybe not very much of it. A letter was received from a mother who has three daughters in the home. This mother deserted the father, he got a divorce, but now they are remarried. This mother wrote telling how happy they are in the new adventure, but she said, "You want to stay right where you are because you get plenty to eat and wear, and we don't have enough to eat." These chil

dren were not properly clothed when they came. The children showed backwardness, were retarded in school and did not do their work well. Now they are plump and in perfect health, and getting along beautifully in school. And so I could tell of several of that type who have come to the Juvenile Home, backward and retarded. They are not feebleminded and it is this I have in mind. From the suggestions of the paper, I take it that what is good for the children on the outside, is good for the children on the inside. The only difficulty is that we cannot move so rapidly because of lack of facilities and equipment.

Member McColl:

That we are mal-nourished is somewhat of a misnomer to me. Visiting nurses inspect the boys and girls in our high school. They reported a sixteen year old girl as mal-nourished. The girl lives with her father and mother. Her father weighs 220 lbs and her mother 160 pounds, both in perfect health. The girl is high in her studies, probably few in school average higher than she does. She is a member of the basket ball team, very athletic and enjoys perfect health, yet the nurse reports that she is suffering from mal-nutrition. I would like to have that explained.

Superintendent Witte: I want to correct the quotation made in justice to my authority. The corrrection is: ninety per cent of the defectives (not backwards), but the actual defectives of a great commonwealth, come from five per cent of the families of the state. That looks toward inheritance. The matter of distinction between defective or the feebleminded, and the backward is about as follows: and I stand open for correction if it is not: The backward child is by nature endowed with the gifts of a normal child; and the capacities, the abilities and the possibilities to develop mentally as a normal child, but is slow and backward in time to this development.

The defective child, on the contrary, has been limited by inheritance or by accident such as disease, perhaps even before birth and while being born by the mother. The limits have been set organically and it never can go beyond that point. It can be brought by training to where nature left it, but it cannot be pushed beyond and any amount of effort or expense incurred endeavoring to push beyond that point, is wasted.

Another point with reference to having retarded and defective children educated in the same group with normal children. It is an injustice to the normal ones to have them educated together. The progress of an army is dependent upon the march of its slowest component, and it is the same way in education, as I take it.

This is such a large and interesting question that a discussion can only be fragmentary, as it were, but I am certainly in favor of having proper means employed in determining those who are backward and defective in order to separate them and give the normal child a square deal. I might also add that the child of exceptional talents, the genius and the neargenius, is also held back by the normal child, and yet we will take our chances on the genius. He will work his own way.

Mr. Vasey: I want to say that I have been exceedingly interested in the discussion that you have brought out; for many of the things mentioned in my paper are not being realized in any community that I know of. It was in my mind to stimulate discussion because that is the only way to make progress. I agree with every remark made in the discussion of the paper; especially Doctor Witte's suggestions, for it is a fact that the educators of the state are not taking into consideration the selection of these children who need special attention. It is desirable and absolutely fundamental, that we discontinue the gathering of all types of children together in one little group and the teaching of them as if they were all alike. That is being done every day in every school in the state, and I do not believe it is fundamentally the most desirable way to do it. My conception of subnormal children as we often designate them is that they differ from normal children only in degree and not in kind. A child that is normal does not differ in kind from a child feebleminded. Their instincts, their emotions, their sentiments, their motivated actions are alike. They respond to the same impulses but their responses differ in degree only, which to me is the important thing. It is also true that children differ more widely in their intelligence than they do in their motor equipment. That is why feebleminded children can often go into some types of a contest and excel normal children. Two children in our department drew prizes in a state contest in art. Many of their mental qualities