nt twist of mental powers, or to lack of
ability to meet life's demands--these sins of youth will be less in
evidence when education is fitted to life's full responsibilities of
choice instead of being side-tracked in narrow lines of scholarly
acquirement alone.

Meanwhile, for the parents whose children number one or more of the
handicapped there is the comfort of securing for such all that science
and special arts of teaching and institutional provision can give to
make the life of those who can never grow up at least comfortable and
free from exploitation by evil influences. That some of the noblest
and best of men and women are giving their lives in wise and loving
ministration to these least among the children of men is proof of the
overmastering power of human sympathy. Meanwhile, again, we are
finding out that the more discriminating observation of children and
their more truly scientific rating will take many children from the
lists of the "backward" and the "difficult" and even the supposed
feeble-minded into the ranks of the educable toward full normality.

=Special Rooms in Public Schools.=--The special rooms in the schools
and the special schools in the school system and the school nurses and
school doctors and the visiting teacher, with her power of making
connection between the home and the school and playground, all show
that we are coming to a point where every child will have a better
chance for having his mental and moral as well as his physical
diagnosis correctly made. And such a diagnosis we have already learned
often shows that no congenital doom marks the child labelled
"different," but rather some curable bad condition in his life that
needs only wisdom and economic power to correct. The "Observation
Cards" to which allusion has been made as helping toward discovery of
the specially gifted may also, if used with discriminating judgment,
show that many whom we thought lagged behind their mates from native
disability can be made to keep up with the procession if they are
rightly fed, have enough sleep, get a chance at fresh air, and are not
made the victims of industrial exploitation.

The new gospel of environmental change in the interest of better
physical, mental, and vocational opportunities for all, includes not
only the better care of all incompetent for self-control,
self-support, and self-direction, it also is coming to include a far
more searching investigation of the causes of degenera