THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF OPHTHALMOLOGY CHILDREN WITH DEFECTIVE VISION BY

THE question of the education of children with defective vision is a problem of some standing. Where are such children to be taught? In schools for the ordinary children with good average sight they see too badly and in schools for the blind they see two well. For, to try and teach the half-blind among the totally blind, the teachers of the blind say is pure punishment. They teach such a child to read with the fingers and the child always prefers to use such sight as he has. Instead of expelling children with defective sight from the schools for the blind these teachers of the blind consented to teach in the ordinary schools even quite blind children. Here is an inverse phenomenon: the college for the blind admits seeing children among its pupils. The explanation is that investigations of children in the college for the blind which were presented some years ago to to the Leningrad Society of Paedology revealed, contrary to all expectation, success in conservation of sight. And so, the feebly-sighted children were transferred from the schools for the sighted to the college for the blind and from the college for the blind to the school for sighted children, and they find in neither place conditions suitable for their education. What are these conditions? For educational institutions as is said in my " Test-types for the determination of the sufficiency of the light resetve in schools ad workshops "-not less than one-third of the normd vision is required, this is the degree of vision necessary for; distinguishing the type corpus, where the height of the letter is 15 rpm. From the time of Cohn this type has been reputed as the least that is ad-missible in the schools. So then, the scholar ought to be completely satisfied for his teaching with vision of 033. But in that case all remaining claims must be strictly accomplished: the lighting must have the due reserve, ' study must be conducted with frequent interruptions, the manuals must not be dirty, in the copy-books the lines must stand out quite clearly. Briefly it is necessary to keep in mind that the work is done by the eye at its maximal effort, without the sight-reserve of two-thirds by children with normal vision. With vision of 02-0 1 we have to employ larger types. In the A.B.C.-books there are such types. But it is impossible to sit continuously at A.B.C.-books. Here one will have to use