The real thought and care spent by the education authorities on these
schools must have struck every one who has worked in them. If we
compare what is now done for these deficient children with what was
done some fifteen years ago, the stage of progress at which we have
arrived is nothing short of wonderful. Yet every one must also be
convinced that things are not well, so long as the supply of children
for these special schools continues to grow; those who work in them
can see two ways in which that supply might be checked. Teachers in
mentally defective schools continually mourn the sad fact that the
children under their care have been guarded from wrong, and guided to
right along happy paths of busy interest until they are sixteen, only
to be turned adrift into the world at an age when, more than ever
before in their lives, they need a kindly and wise influence "to
strengthen or control." For want of some further plan of continued
supervision, the patient work of years is too often rendered nugatory,
and the child slips back into the very slough from which the school
had hoped to save it. It must be remembered that the defect in many
children in these mentally defective schools shows itself as a lack
of self-control, a want of mental balance, a missing sense of moral
values, an incapacity for concentration--the very characteristics
which render their unhappy possessors the easiest prey to the
evil-minded. Teachers who know both the good to which the child can
attain when properly safe-guarded, and also the evil into which it
will too probably fall when left alone, are very anxious to see some
step taken which will ensure that every child who needs continued
control shall have it.[1]

Teachers in physically defective schools can also see the need for
prevention of defect rather than its mere alleviation. The more usual
forms of defect are missing limbs, tuberculous troubles (notably in