Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/77

 few months many of the children are no longer dull. They begin to troop back to the ordinary schools. A certain number of them turn out to be even clever children. It is strange to think of! From 10 to 20 per cent of all school children would profit by this kind of schooling, a schooling which rewards the teacher so well that the child soon passes beyond it. But there are not yet many towns where this large class of children have been provided for. In most schools they still drag on with the rest—the last in everything, always behind! And few ever know that they too have wings, though they cannot fly. A much more hopeless class (a class which can progress, but very slowly, and of which few can ever go back to the ordinary school) receives attention, while they are often allowed to drift from "spurious" dullness into real and hopeless stupidity.

To come now to the really sub-normal, the genuinely dull and feeble minded. They are happily a much smaller class—not 3 per cent of the whole, yet small as this class is, the type of inferior brain varies in different parts of the country. For example, there is one called the Mongol type. These