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48
Association for Mental Welfare. Out of 1,155 such imbeciles now under supervision,
41 were found to be in more or less regular employment. Thirteen of them were
either helping in a family business or, as an act of kindness on the part of a sympathetic
employer, were engaged in some simple task within their capacity. Theremaining
twenty-eight appeared to be maintaining a place in the labour market on
their merits, and are mainly engaged in heavy unskilled work, such as coal delivery,
portering, washing up in coffee-shops, in factory work at juvenile wages, or assisting
street hawkers. Fifteen of them earn between 10s. and 30s. a week in food and
wages, and thirteen earn 30s. to 35s. or the equivalent.
It should be noted that examples of undoubted imbeciles (with mental ages
of 5 or less) earning even higher wages have, before now, come to notice. For
instance, an imbecile earned high wages on piece work packing shells, having only
one size shells to place in one size containers. Had there been a choice he could
not have done the task. As it was, he converted himself into a machine, and was
impervious to distraction, having a one-track mind. For certain kinds of monotonous
work lack of intelligence may actually be an asset.
Only a very few (6) are in positions really indicating any initiative or intellectual
capacity beyond that of the grade to which they had been allotted. One boy
runs his own pea-nut stall with the help of an imbecile brother, and makes a good
thing of it; a girl is in resident domestic service at 10s. weekly; a glass-blower
earns 30s. weekly, and is reported to go to dances; one lad has charge of a stationer's
barrow; a man has been eight years in a nursery garden; a girl said to be "of
nice appearance," is cooking and cleaning in a coffee shop.
The school record of these low grade wage-earners is of some interest. Omitting
one middle-aged man whose school days were over before the special school era, it
was found that only 4 of the 27 remaining cases had been refused a trial in a special
school. One of these was a badly neglected lad, with a deaf and mentally deficient
mother, who, when certified imbecile at the age of eight, was burdened with congenital
syphilis, severe rickets, impaired vision, double offensive otorrhcea, and
chronic bronchitis; he now earns 12s. weekly at a wharf, and by helping street
newsvendors. Another of the four was a highly neurotic and timid girl seen on
twelve occasions by nine doctors, who frequently endeavoured to secure trials in
school for her. She proved too infantile and unstable ever to become the occupant
of a class-room, and had to be excluded after a short stay so that it is surprising to
find her capable of regular, if rough, work at scrubbing out shops. Of the remaining
two, one was found to have a mental age of barely four when examined for the
first time at 15. He is now earning £1 per week staining wood and his remarkable
mental improvement may be due to the cessation of fits from which he suffered
in childhood; the other boy had a mental age of 31/2 when seen at 9; he had a
definite history of severe head injury in infancy.
Of the 23 children admitted to special schools and excluded, it cannot be said
that the trials given were hasty or inadequate, inasmuch as 1 was excluded at 16, 1
at 15, 6 at 14, 1 at 13, 3 at 12, 5 at 11, 4 at 10, and 2 at 9. In nearly every case, the
child had been seen by many different doctors and the reports had been uniformly
unsatisfactory. Only in 5 cases (2 of these with a history of epilepsy and 1 of head
injury) does there seem to have been a real "jump" in mental condition since
childhood. The great majority are genuine "border-line cases," with intelligence
quotients of 40 to 50. The most interesting point common to all these 23 excluded
children, is that, with one exception, they had made no progress whatever during
their school life. None knew more than his letters, if that; they could not count
their fingers nor add units, nor had they progressed beyond very poor examples of
rudimentary hand-work. After exclusion from school, some, in fact, definitely
improved in conduct and attainments.