Mental and Moral Deficiency in a High-School Girl

Lillian1 was first brought to the Psychological Clinic by her two aunts because of backwardness in school and social non-conformity. She was an unusually attractive girl, nineteen years of age, with good color, regular girlish features and a naive manner which always impressed people favorably. She was attending a Philadelphia high school, nominally doing second-year work, but in reality doing nothing. At the age of four years she had entered kindergarten and had spent two years there; she had repeated every grammar grade. The aunts claimed that even then she had been promoted at their request rather than because of the merit of her work. In the grades she had found arithmetic especially difficult; in the high school English composition and French gave her trouble. Her school program had been gradually reduced until it included only English composition, French, drawing and domestic science. When asked what troubled her in French she said it was sentence structure and verb endings; she could not remember whether or not she had had any irregular verbs. She kept bringing in the phrase "sentence structure" in a parrot-like manner, evidently having no conception of its meaning. As she could not follow a recipe except under the closest supervision she had made no headway in domestic science. She enjoyed school, however, and drudged away at her lessons. She realized that she