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FREEDOMWAYS                   FOURTH QUARTER 1968

of money from philanthropic and federal sources have gone to support these new programs of compensatory education.
Paralleling this development, there emerged a vast literature on "the education of disadvantaged children"; and its dominant theoretical premise carries a new rationalization for the failure of our schools to educate Negro and other children of the poor. It is commonly held that the substandard academic performance generally found among disadvantaged children is mainly -if not exclusively-a function of negative influences in the environment where they were nurtured. It is said that because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in home and community, these children enter school with deficiencies in auditory and visual perception, retarded language development, poor self-concept, low academic motivation, and seriously limited experiential background. These and other socially-induced "deficits" are said to account for the high incidence of school failures and dropouts among children of the ghetto. 
Thus, the profession is again off the hook. Whereas two decades ago we could point to "these children's" IG's in the 80's, now we say they are "culturally deprived"-and this, let it be noted, carries no derogatory implications about their ancestry.
There is no doubt that a large proportion of the children from the ghetto do enter school less advanced educationally than more privileged children. There is no clear evidence , however, that primary socialization under conditions of poverty and discrimination  precludes effective learning in school. This is the crucial question; and there is considerable evidence that, given appropriate learning experiences, disadvantaged children do, indeed, learn effectively. Illustrative are the following.
Dramatic evidence of the modifiability of human beings is found in the follow-up of about two dozen young orphans who were clinically diagnosed as feeble-minded some three decades ago. About half of them were placed in foster homes, and the others remained in state institutions. The contrast between these two groups when they were adults in the early 1960's should be meaningful to the profession of education.
Among the twelve who remained in the orphanage over a prolonged period of time, one died in adolescence after continued residence in a state institution for the feeble-minded, and five are still wards of the state. Of those no longer wards of the state, only two have married and one of these is divorced. Out of four females in the group, three were sterilized in late adolescence to prevent pro-
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