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136
Annual Report of the London County Council, 1911.
it is now becoming fashionable to term it. The increase is mainly in doubtful school cases and in invalids.
The numbers of children returned under the four chief classes are tending to remain stationary from
year to year, as shown in the diagram.
Figure 11.—London, 1903-11. Showing annual classification of children examined foi admission to Special Schools.

* Some of the hard of hearing and myopes in this table are also included under E. S. or invalids. The total
number examined was 8,228.
For many years lunatics and idiots have been distinguished, lunacy being a disorder of the mind
in one who had previously been in full possession of his senses, while idiocy is a state of mental
incapacity present from birth or from an early age.
Imbecility, a lesser degree of mental defect, was first recognised officially by the Idiots Act of
1886.
The establishment and control of schools under the Education Act of 1870 revealed a number of
children unable to profit by the education offered to them. A committee of the Charity Organisation
Society in 1876-7 recommended the foundation of special schools for imbeciles, while another committee
of the same society in 1890-2 estimated that 1 per cent, of the children examined in the inquiry they
set on foot were in need of special care and training. The first English day schools for the mentally
defective were opened in Leicester and London in 1892, and were modelled to a large extent on the
German special schools which had been in operation since 1867. The interest aroused by these schools
and by the reports of committees of various societies led up to the special Departmental Committee
on Defective and Epileptic Children, who reported in 1897 "that children exist who, on the one hand,
are too feeble-minded to be properly taught in ordinary elementary schools by ordinary methods, and
on the other hand, are not so feeble-minded as to be imbecile or idiotic." These, they pointed out,
needed special educational treatment. The outcome of the labour of this committee was the adoptive
Elementary Education (Defective and Epileptic Children) Act, 1899, under which children are at present
admitted to special schools.
The interest in the questions of national physique arising from the revelations of the South
African War and the reports of the Committees on Physical Education (Scotland) and on National