Orphanages - And Their Effect On Children
(Editor's note: The following article appeared in the front page of The Atlanta Journal, Aug. 29, 1967. Quotations given are from the book, "Give Your Child A Superior Mind." Copyright, 1966, by Siegfried and Therese Engelmann and published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. ) We begin with the orphanage.
There is a rule of thumb about these institutions — not a nice rule, but a fairly useful one. The more children there are assigned to an adult supervisor, the greater the degree of mental retardation of the children.
The orphanage environment at best is passive. It presents sounds and shapes, but nobody explains what these are.
As a result, institutionalized children do not learn the fundamental assumptions of language. Their IQ may drop five to 10 points a year, and it is not uncommon for the average IQ of children in an institution to be 30 points below normal.
Skeels, Updegraff, Wellman and Williams give a vivid description of institutionalized children, in the late 1930s. "Language and speech were greatly retarded...In fact the urgency for communication seemed to confine itself to situations of extreme discomfort...A phrase or word said by one child would be repeated by several not as a game, not in hilarity, but more as an activity arising from nothing and resulting in nothing.. Strangers and visitors were objects of curiosity and overwhelming attention but the children's reaction would probably have been the same to was figures."
Could we improve the orphanage environment even by making it more active? Skeels and Dye did so in a controversial experiment.
They transferred 1 and 2 year-old orphanage children to a training school for feeble-minded girls. These girls acted as mother substitutes. They cared for the children, talked to them, played with them. Two years later, these children's IQs had increased by 27 points, while the IQs of a similar group of children who remained in the orphanage had dropped 26 points. The children placed with the feeble minded mother substitutes had achieved an over-all gain of 53 IQ points.
This experiment illustrates the important point about an "active" environment. It is only active in terms of a specific child who is at a specific stage of development. It is not active in general.
Feeble-minded mother substitutes can be relatively active in teaching the preschooler. They can teach him basic vocabulary and fundamental concepts.
But they obviously cannot provide an active environment for a child who is ready to learn negative numbers. Conversely, an environment that is geared to teach a 4-year-old negative numbers would not necessarily provide much activity for a 20-month old infant who is wrestling with the concepts "good" and "daddy".
A situation similar to that of the feeble-minded mother substitute is found in the larger family. The number of children is great compared to the number of adults. So each child receives less parental attention.
For the first few years of a child's life, however, he has a kind of mother substitute, and older brother or sister. These are good teachers, up to a point.
The child learns the fundamentals of language and basic concepts, but unfortunately his teacher generally is not well prepared to present more sophisticated concepts. Thus, the child's IQ drops as family size increases.