This and much more I said. He let me say it all while his eyes were kind upon us.
“It is not possible for your child to live here exactly as she has in your home,” he said when I had finished. “Here she is one of many. She will be individually cared for and watched and taught, it is true, but she cannot behave as though she were the only child. This will mean some loss of freedom to her. This loss you must weigh against the gain. She is safe here. She has companionship. When she learns to fall in with the others in the small routines that are necessary in any big family, she will even enjoy the sense of being with the crowd. She has to learn, you know. But rest assured that she will be taught only those things which she is able to learn and nothing will be forced on her that is beyond her.
“Try to think of what she will be a year from now, five years from now. Try to consider justly whether this place is the right one for her home. Don’t lose a larger value in some small present dissatisfaction.”
I said, “It is so hard because she doesn’t understand why it is all necessary or that it is for her good.”
“None of us really understands why,” he said in his same gentle voice. “You do not understand why you have had to have the child like this at all. You cannot see that there is any good in it anywhere.”
I could not indeed.
“You cannot shield your child from everything,” he went on. “She is a human creature and she must bear her little share, too, of what is common to all human life.”
Much else he said and I sat listening and the child sat content by my side. When he finished I knew that he had done what he meant to do — he had helped me to find strength to think of the child’s larger good.
I stayed with her for only a day because they said it would be better not to stay too long the first time. Then I went away. I shall never forget as long as I live that I had to pull her little arms away from around my neck and that I dared not look back. I knew the matron was holding her fast and I knew I must not see it, lest my courage fail.
Years have passed since that day. I came to live in America, not far from her, and I visit her often. She is used now to my coming and going, and yet even now there is the brief clinging when I leave. “I want to go home,” she whispers again and again. She comes home sometimes, too, and is filled with joy for a few days. But here is the comfort I take nowadays. After she has been at home a week or so, she begins to miss the other home. She inquires after “the girls,” she asks for some toy or musical instrument or record that she left behind. At last almost willingly she goes back again, after making sure that I am coming soon to see her. The long struggle is over. The adjustment has been made. When the wakeful hours come in the night I comfort myself, thinking that if I should die before I wake, as the old childish prayer has it, her life would go on just the same. Much of the money that I have been able to earn has gone into making this security for her. I have a sense of pride that she will be dependent on no one as long as she lives, and whether or not I live I have done all that could be done.
I realize that many parents cannot be so fortunate as I have been in being able to make a child secure. Some of them have come to me with children like mine and have asked me what to do. They have told me that they have little money or that they have other children and what there is must be divided. The helpless child cannot have everything, however the parents’ hearts are torn. They are right, of course. Speaking coldly, if it is possible to do so, the normal children are more useful to society perhaps than the helpless ones.
And yet I wonder if that is so. My helpless child has taught me so much. She has taught me patience, above all else. I come of a family impatient with stupidity and slowness, and I absorbed the family intolerance of minds less quick than our own. Then there was put into my sole keeping this pitiful mind, struggling against I know not what handicap. Could I despise it for what was no fault of its own? That indeed would have been the most cruel injustice. While I tried to find out its slight abilities I was compelled both by love and justice to learn tender and careful patience. It was not always easy. Normal impatience burst forth time and again, to my shame, and it seemed useless to try to teach. But justice reasoned with me thus: “This mind has the right to its fullest development too. It may be very little, but the right is the same as yours, or any other’s. If you refuse it the right to know, in so far as it can know, you do a wrong.”
So by this most sorrowful way I was compelled to tread, I learned respect and reverence for every human mind. It was my child who taught me to understand so clearly that all people are equal in their humanity and that all have the same human rights. None is to be considered less, as a human being, than any other, and each must be given his place and his safety in the world. I might never have learned this in any other way. I might have gone on in the arrogance of my own intolerance for those less able than myself. My child taught me humanity.
My child taught me to know, too, that mind is not all of the human creature. Though she cannot speak to me clearly, there are other ways in which she communicates. She has an extraordinary integrity of character. She seems to sense deception and she will not tolerate it. She is a child of great purity. She will not tolerate habits that are filthy and her sense of dignity is complete. No one may take liberties with her person. Neither will she endure cruelty. If a child in her cottage screams she hurries to see why, and if the child is being struck by another child or if an attendant is too harsh, she cries aloud and goes in search of the housemother. She has been known to push away the offending one. She will not endure injustice. An attendant, laughing, said to me one day, “We have to treat her fairly or she makes more trouble for us.”
What I am trying to say is that there is a whole personality not concerned with the mind, and children mentally deficient often compensate for their lack by other qualities of goodness.
This is a very important fact and it has been so recognized. Psychologists working with mentally retarded children at The Training School in Vineland, New Jersey, have found that while I.Q. may be very low indeed a child actually may function a good deal higher because of his social sense, his feeling of how he ought to behave, his pride, his kindness, his wish to be liked. Acting upon this observation, they developed the Social Maturity Scale, to complement the Binet Scale earlier brought from France and adapted for use in the United States. What is true of the retarded child is also true of the normal one. A high intelligence may be a curse to society, as it has often been, useless it is accompanied by qualities of character which provide social maturity, and the less brilliant child who has these qualities is a better citizen and often achieves more individually than the high intelligence without them.
Today this Vineland Social Maturity Scale is very widely used in the armed forces, in schools and colleges, in aptitude tests, wherever normal individuals are measured. We have to thank the helpless children for teaching us that mere intelligence is not enough.
They have taught us much more. They have taught us how people learn. The minds of retarded children are sane minds, normal except that, being arrested, the processes are slowed. But they learn in the same ways that the normal minds do, repeated many more times. Psychologists, observing the slower processes, have been able to discover, exactly as though in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires new knowledge and new habits. Our educational techniques for normal children have been vastly improved by what the retarded children have taught us.