View report page

63
The Commissioners think it would be possible also by this single authority to establish such arrangements
as would render the duplication or triplication or conflict of medical certificates impossible. They
recommend observation centres for purposes of scientific study and diagnosis in difficult cases, and that
the education authorities should establish intermediate schools or classes for dull and backward children.
All these are matters upon which reports in similar terms have already been made to the Council or
late School Board.
The Commissioners also recommend that all mentally defective children should be taken from
the care of the Board of Education and placed under the Board of Control. Such proposals would lead
to great difficulties in practice which may be mentioned here. There is no hard and fast line between
the borderlands of normal mental conditions and feeblemindedness, and to say that a doubtful case
must pass under the authority of the Board of Control with all that implies would in very many cases
be a great injustice which would be successfully resisted in the Courts. It is almost impossible to make
anything like a correct diagnosis at early ages ; even in the infant department the diagnosis of feeblemindedness,
if attempted, would be wrong in a large proportion of cases. The proposals of the Commissioners
would lead to a double set of medical officials invading the schools. The school doctors
associated with the sanitary service, and an entirely different set with different training and experience,
e.g., the doctors under the Board of Control associated with lunacy. The same officials could not serve
in a double capacity, on account of the quite different work in other respects required from them. There
would be frequent conflict of opinion and certificates. As has been elsewhere pointed out the tendency
of legislation has been in accordance with the doctrine that any interference on the part of the State,
through the local authority or otherwise, with a child between the ages of 3 and 16 is interference for
the purpose of promoting the development of the child, mental, moral or physical, and that whatever may
be the mental condition of the child, such promotion comes fairly within the scope of education.
SPECIAL SCHOOLS EXAMINATIONS.