But medical inspection does not confine itself to dealing with
contagious disease. Its aid has been invoked to help the child who is
backward in his school studies. With the recent extensions in the
length of the school term and the increase in the number of years of
schooling demanded of the child, has come a great advance in the
standards of the work required. When the standards were low, the work
was not beyond the capacity of even the weaker children; but with
close grading, fuller courses, higher standards, and constantly more
insistent demands for intellectual attainment, conditions have
changed. Pupils have been unable to keep up with their classes. The
terms "backward," "retarded," and "exceptional," as applied to school
children, have been added to the vocabularies of educators.
School men discovered that the drag-net of compulsory education was
bringing into school hundreds of children who were unable to keep step
with their companions, and because this interfered with the orderly
administration of the school system, they began to ask why the
children were backward.
The school physicians helped to find the answer when they showed that
hundreds of these children were backward simply because of removable
physical defects. And then came the next great forward step, the
realization that children are not dullards through the will of an
inscrutable Providence, but rather through the law of cause and
effect.