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 CHAPTER II

DEFECTS AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES

OTHING is more strange and touching than is the part played by the defective child in the history of education. Long ago the feeble minded as well as the insane were treated sternly. It seems that people felt they were to blame in some way for their misfortunes. Even among those who did not blame them, there were many who thought that the feeble minded are a burden. A burden of course they are. But through an impluse [sic] that some call unreasonable the most forlorn found helpers, and then it was found that even the very defective can be of great use, and not only in small, but in great ways. Many processes, so rapid that they cannot be observed in the well endowed, are slowed down as it were in the feeble minded. And so these in a sense became benefactors of the race.

The first real teachers of the feeble minded were physiologists. Not of course that they were all medical men. Some were priests like Itard, and 34