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Dr. Neil A. Dayton, Superintendent of the Mansfield State Training School in Connecticut, told me his ideas on this subject. "We aid adjustment in the school by letting the girls mingle socially now and then with the boys, at supervised dances and parties. Then, when they go outside on parole they are not overly excited by contacts with the opposite sex.

"In the community we give them careful social-service supervision. The families with whom they are placed are instructed not to let them go out alone. It is a while before we permit them to have boy friends. But over a period of time, our social service workers gradually relax supervision and allow a girl to take over more and more responsibility until she is finally leading a normal social life.

"We have had very little difficulty with our paroled girls. During the last six or seven years there have been three illegitimate babies. As several hundred young women are involved, it would seem to be a better record than has been made by the community in general. Not one girl discharged over the past ten years has been in sex difficulties."

MANY boys and girls have been successfully trained and paroled by the better institutions. If a child's health, personality, work habits, ability to handle money, self-control, self-confidence and, above all, his ability to get along with other people have been built up with about three to five years' training, he can adjust in the community about as well as brighter folk.

Records of the North Jersey Training School for girls show that during the last nineteen years about sixty per cent of all persons admitted have gone out to live success fully in the community. Other good schools have relatively good records. Among a hundred and sixty-two now on parole from the District of Columbia Training School are a manager of a chain store earning fifty-five dollars a week, a supervisor of a group of laundry workers, a cafeteria counter waitress, baker's helper, a maid in a well-to-do home and a hospital kitchen worker with a civil service rating. In Connecticut a boy with low IQ earns forty-five dollars a week and a girl with an even lower IQ earns thirty-five.

Why, then, do so many schools clutch children tight for life? One reason is that they lack facilities for personnel and training the charges. But there is apparently another more shocking reason: the children are useful in the institutions.

"I'm sure over twenty per cent of the high-grades now in state training schools could get out and get along if they weren't so useful," said a state official who asked me not to quote him by name. And many administrators admitted: "We couldn't run the place without the working children."

One southern training school has girls working in its laundry from seven A.M. to seven P.M. The superintendent of a border-state school told me, " I'd have to hire ten men to do the work of the farm boys." Three of the boys he referred to were intelligent enough to run a tractor. Often superintendents' wives are reluctant to let capable houseworkers go. "I like to keep them as long as I can," one woman remarked to me naively.

To give children a real preparation for getting along in the world, they should be moved from one chore to another. In this way they can acquire increasingly difficult skills and the assurance that comes from knowing you can succeed at more than one task. Eventually they can be paroled to take outside jobs.

Social workers are essential for a successful program of parole. Keeping an eye on children placed out, watching their environments, and counseling for a period are almost as important as prior training within the school. Yet more state training schools don't have workers than have them.

No wonder one superintendent talked fearfully to me of parole. He had made a few attempts at placing out boys and girls. They got into trouble or were exploited and had to be taken back. Like other superintendents who have had similar experiences, he now thinks it safer to keep his children locked up, although they are potential assets to the community.

Some of the children who spend their lives behind training school doors that don't open outward should never have been committed in the first place. Feeble-mindedness is a complex matter of mind, personality and social adjustment. The haphazard careless way in which children are committed is shocking. Even a low IQ established by a more or less competent psychologist does not mean that institutionalization is really necessary. Yet some states are satisfied with commitment by a jury trial. Some accept certificates of one or two physicians who may know little or nothing about mental deficiency. In the many institutions where there is no staff psychologist, a brief conversation with the superintendent may be all that determines whether a child is placed in a low-grade or high-grade unit or, indeed, whether he really belongs in the institution at all.

THE psychologist at Southbury Training School in Connecticut, which carefully tests and retests, told me that within sixteen months he had found at least fifteen mistakes in outside diagnoses of mental deficiency. Some children, originally testing low during an emotional disturbance, had recovered and were really dull normals. Surely it would be cheaper in the long run to support good psychological service in all our state training schools than to continue to support people who might be supporting themselves.