But as well as the difficulties attendant on teaching in special-schools, there are some very real advantages.  Foremost, perhaps, is the opportunity it affords of knowing and understanding each child in a way that is not possible when the class consists of sixty children.  Very closely allied with this, is the great advantage of freedom in the preparation of syllabuses, in the choice of subject matter and the manner of teaching it.  Time-tables must be approved by the proper authorities, and the superintendents and inspectors must be satisfied as to the character of a teacher’s work, but, when those conditions are fulfilled, originality on the part of teachers is welcomed, and completely happy relations between teacher and children are possible.  It can be readily understood that with a class numbering twenty-five, each child can take a much larger and much more active share in the work, can be free to express his own views, ask his own questions and work out his own ideas in a way impossible with a class of sixty.  When, in addition, it is remembered that the teacher is free to frame her plans of work according to the actual needs of the children, as shown to her through discussions and questions, the reason why the work attracts women in spite of its obvious difficulties is apparent.

The real thought and care spent by the education authorities on these schools must have struck every one who has worked in them.  If we compare what is now done for these deficient children with what was done some fifteen years ago, the stage of progress at which we have arrived is nothing short of wonderful.  Yet every one must also be convinced that things are not well, so long as the supply of children for these special schools continues to grow; those who work in them can see two ways in which that supply might be checked.  Teachers in mentally defective schools continually mourn the sad fact that the children under their care have been guarded from wrong, and guided to right along happy paths of busy interest until they are sixteen, only to be turned adrift into the world at an age when, more than ever before in their lives, they need a kindly and wise influence “to strengthen or control.”  For want of some further plan of continued supervision, the patient work of years is too often rendered nugatory, and the child slips back into the very slough from which the school had hoped to save it.  It must be remembered that the defect in many children in these mentally defective schools shows itself as a lack of self-control, a want of mental balance, a missing sense of moral values, an incapacity for concentration—­the very characteristics which render their unhappy possessors the easiest prey to the evil-minded.  Teachers who know both the good to which the child can attain when properly safe-guarded, and also the evil into which it will too probably fall when left alone, are very anxious to see some step taken which will ensure that every child who needs continued control shall have it.[1]