Contribution á l'Étude de l'Épidémiologie de la Débilité Mentale.

Abstract

At the end of the second world war, in an attempt to deal with the resulting complex educational problems remaining as an aftermath of that catastrophe, aggravated by an influx of Italian immigrants into the small industrial town LaLouviére, one of the village magistrates, M. R. Roch, persuaded the people to permit the pupils of the primary school to be divided, not according to the quarter in which they resided, but into four groups in accordance with their intellectual aptitudes so that they might receive an education adequate to their ability, a unique enterprise for the time. This unique educational initiative provoked a long and complicated study of the reasons for this necessity which began in 1950 on the children born in 1944. From that moment each promotion of students of the same age was studied collectively and individually by pedagogical, psychological, and sociological methods. In this way knowledge,