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38   What's in a Child's Mind?
     The Washington Post, Sunday, April 2, 1967

     Perfecting the species is among the strongest activities in
contention to be the purpose of human existence.  But research
on human improvement is most difficult to attune to the standards
of established scientific disciplines.  The difficulties are too
numerous and painful to detail.  We need objective measures of
performance, elusive data on the prior history of the subjects and
unattainable supervision of their present and future experience.

     Above all, simple conscience and social outrage put sharp limits
on how far any experiment can go in deviating a child's experience
from the traditions of the group.  Thus, the normal child is the
most elusive of experimental objects.

     A leading journal on research in child development found that it
had published almost no studies on normal children between one and
three years old, compared to almost 200 on newborns and children over
three.

     Yet these are the years of critical transition to communicative
humanity.  Most of our insight on how to rear children is based 
almost entirely on old wives' tales and hardly at all on controlled
scientific observation.

     Outcasts like orphans and prisoners have long furnished much of
the material volunteered for experimental study.  An orphanage in Iowa
provided the material for an experiment 30 years ago on early
childhood experience that makes up in human interest for some of its
overt and unavoidable limitations as rigorous science.

     This has been brought up to date in a recent monograph of the
Society for Research in Child Development, "Adult Status of Children
With Contrasting Life Experiences" by Dr. Harold M. Skeels, now of
the National Institute of Mental Health.

     The experimental and contrast groups consisted of ten girls
and three boys each, inmates of the orphanage at various times.  The
minimal physical needs of the children were met, but owing to
limitations of funds and staff, the orphanage could better be
described as a warehouse.

     The subjects were among a residue of unadopted children generally
classified as "trainable, mentally retarded" and having a recorded IQ
of about 65.

     By chance, the experimental group was transferred to another
state school designed primarily for mentally retarded adolescents.

     There, they received a great deal of individual attention and
encouragement from inmates and staff and showed a surprising degree
of intellectual improvement over a period of about two years.  Eleven
of the 13 were then successfully placed for adoption.

     The contrast group, which was at least roughly equivalent in
expected performance, remained at the orphanage.  Most continued
to deteriorate in IQ scores.  None were adopted and several were
institutionalized more or less permanently.

     Ad adults, the experimental group did surprisingly well by the
standards of schooling they had received (12 years) and income earned
($5000): essentially indistinguishable from the regional norms.  Nine
of the 13 had families: their 28 children showed a mean IQ of 104.

     Members of the contrast group were pathetic examples of social
failure.  And the average per annum for cost of institutionalization
for each was $10,000.  Only one had climbed out of the morass, by
standards of ordinary family life.

     Such poignant data need little elaboration for human and social
significance.

     Judged as an experiment, the Skeels study has many shortcomings,
as he has pointed out.

     My main criticism is that the children who were moved out of the
"experimentals", as if they received some treatment that compensated
for an expected inherent deficit.  On the contrary, the contrast group
of children should have been called experimental.  They were exposed
to unusual deprivation -- the enervating effect of being kept like
things rather than people.

     The 30 points difference in IQ eventually shown by the two groups
may indicate that these children were more than usually sensitive to
their depressing environment -- compared to those who thrived well
enough to be adoptable right away.

     There could be no more dramatic presentation to translate test-
scores into human lives, and especially to show the crucial advantages
of bringing the child over the threshold to the socializing and
educating influences of the intact family and the open community.

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