Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/72

 case it is well, not only for the word deaf and word-blind, but for all children, that the school doctor has begun his investigations, and is making a tour, as it were, of the brain. The geography of the earth is pretty well known, the geography of the brain is in its infancy; still, the explorers have come at last. They are at the door of the school. They try to understand the growing brain, the energizing brain of school children. And as one by one its secrets begin to be yielded up, a new spirit of tolerance begins to enter the modern class room. It is born from observations made possible, sometimes by disease, but nearly always by some kind of sorrow, defect, or failure. It is sometimes an infectious disease caught in childhood—that strikes one note or another of the nervous system mute, or breaks (as in the case of Helen Keller) many strings. But in any case it is nearly always failure and disaster of some kind that lays bare new secrets of nerve mechanism. So tragedy is brightened by the fact that the greatest sufferers help many. Their trembling hands bear a gift. It is they who, more than others, explain the faults and failures of the well endowed.

One of the most crying needs to-day is the need for a school for the study of the abnormal. A school