The School and the Family-Welfare Agency

Abstract

Family influence and training are fundamental to the child's adjustment in school; maladjustment is transferred from the home to the school easily and naturally. The child promptly reflects difficulties of his home situation in his school attitudes and work, and teachers have learned to recognize manifestations of maladjustment in children. The difficulties manifested in school may be roughly classified under the headings: (i) truancy and tardiness, (2) cutting recitation periods, (3) failure in scholastic attainment, and (4) behavior problems. To meet these problems, the school has set up its own machinery, but teachers and administrators are ever mindful of the child as a product of the home and place a large share of the responsibility for his adjustment on his parents. Reports on the child's progress and attitudes are forwarded by the school to the home at regular intervals. The teacher notifies the parent by note or telephone when a child is out of step with the group. If the irregularity is of more than minor proportions, the parent is requested to come to the school office for conference, or the school may go to the home in the person of the attendance officer or the visiting teacher. Whatever the method of contact, the school recognizes, and to a certain extent has always recognized, the home as the strongest factor in the problem of the child's adjustment in the school. Certainly, the victim of a maladjusted home cannot reasonably be expected to make adjustment readily in school. The rapid increase in the number of maladjusted homes during the period of the economic depression has brought about a steady increase in the number of maladjusted children in the schools. An abnormal strain is thus placed on the school's equipment for the treatment of these problems-and at a time, unfortunately, when the school is in its weakest position to meet the strain. The same factors in the economic order which have caused the herding of families into