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While planning for mental health should be a requirement of all responsible education, the progressive type of school has a special responsibility in approximating this goal because in it the personality of the child is encouraged to reveal itself more completely and is, therefore, more accessible to mental hygiene through education. Though most schools gravely acknowledge this responsibility, opportunities for mental hygiene inherent in education have scarcely been tapped. The mental hygiene program usually operates more or less indirectly through teacher-child relationship, discipline, home-school relationship. This paper will discuss a more direct and more specialized use of the educational setting for the purpose of mental health.
'Educational group therapy' utilizes group discussion, so popular among children, as a therapeutic instrument. This was tried for the first time, under the direction of the writer, in 1935.1 The symptom treated was thumb-sucking, manifested by six children in a prekindergarten. Because the results were excellent—all but one child gave up its thumbsucking without substituting other symptoms and without any visible signs of anxiety—the writer proposed that such group therapy be put further to the test by:
1Repeating the experiment with another group of children of approximately the same age for the same symptom.
2Repeating the experiment for another symptom with a group of children of approximately the same age.
3Repeating the experiment for another symptom with a group of older children.
All three tests have been made but only the second is reported here.
In this test of educational group therapy the symptom