Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/490

 470 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

cooking, the domestic work of the house, the manufacture of clothing and shoes, carpentering, road-making and grading, lum- bering, quarrying, brick-making, building, the care of the lower- grade and the younger inmates — these and kindred occupations absorb, as yet, all the available trained labor, and, in fact, there is not nearly as much of such labor available, in most institutions as now organized, as could be profitably utilized.

The education given in the schools is usually of a very prac- tical nature. For many of the pupils it begins with the simplest habits of life ; it goes on through the kindergarten, the primary school, and manual training of all kinds, until it ends in the workshop, the farm, or the domestic department. Since the general acceptance of the theory of permanent care the training school has taken on a new meaning. Just as the normal child is, or should be, trained in the common school for the duties and responsibilities of citizenship in the great world, so the abnormal or feeble-minded child is trained in this special school for the duties and the pleasures of life in the little world to which he belongs. The training involves the whole being to a much greater extent than does that of the common school. The phys- ical, mental, and emotional natures must be cultured simultane- ously. The base of the educative work is physiological. The education is by doing. Dormant capacities must be wakened. Weak faculties of all kinds, not only the mental faculties of memory, judgment, and will, but sight, smell and taste, hearing and feeling, must be developed and strengthened by systematic exercise.

The institution inmates are usually divided into educables, industrials, and custodials. The two former differ chiefly in age, and the classes grade into each other as the child grows into the stature of the man. The custodial class includes all who are not susceptible of the higher training. These again are divided from the others by grades that are sometimes almost imperceptible. Being natural divisions, they have no hard and fast lines between them, and inmates classed as custodials often improve until they are fit for transfer to a higher grade.

What has been said above plainly indicates the future of the