Psychopathology and Education of the Brain-Injured Child

One feels a certain sympathy with the ten-year-old boy who was asked to find the absurdity in the following statement: "A policeman fired two shots at a man, the first one killed him, but the second didn't hurt him." The boy replied that policemen are supposed to protect people and not to kill them. This answer was taken as evidence of "brain damage" and is quoted in a chapter by Laura Lehtinen in a second volume of Alfred Strauss' work on The Brain-Injured Child." The authors attempt to make out a ease for attributing educational difficulties in certain children of normal intelligence to organic abnormality in the brain. They use the term "brain-injury" in a very loose way to cover almost any structural abnormality. The clinical evidence of such brain-injury ls often very slight in the cases they quote. Also they seem to subscribe to the view that there is a clear-cut difference between what they term "exogenous (brain-injured)" and "endogenous (familial)" retarded children, and to ignore the fact that such distinctions break down in practice. The work by Crome (1954)* has shown that in gross mental defect severe structural abnormality of the brain is the rule. It is probable, however, that in educationally-retarded children, such structural abnormality is the exception rather than the rule. Strauss and Kephart go to the opposite extreme from Bowlby (1952).f Whilst he over-emphasises the role of a limited aspect of the environment in producing delay in the development of the child Uund, they place undue stress, without supporting evidence, on alleged abnormalities affecting particularly the perceptual role of the brain. The perceptual difficulties revealed by the special tests described by the authors are shared by many normal children and by the general run of mental defectives. All teaching should be based on an appreciation of the wide variation in the needs of different children. The existence of these individual differences is, however, not evidence of "brain-injury.'