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This guide for parents and teachers is full of practical suggestions in terms of management and teaching techniques. Some general
principles are presented about the care of the retarded child during infancy, followed by a discussion of training the senses, speech, and use of the hand. Finally, the techniques in elementary education are presented with an emphasis on music, rhythm, drawing, painting, and play.
The child to be helped by Miss Loewy's method is generally described as 'the child with a mental defect' in contradistinction to the mentally defective child. This leaves the door wide open to a heterogeneous assemblage of cases, from the 'high grade mongol' to psychogenic retardation, and from the spastic to cases of endocrine dysfunction. Miss Loewy valiantly rejects 'too easy classification' and correctly insists that observation of the individual offers the best clue to special education. But this reviewer failed to detect any principle by which some order could be brought into the various types of retarded children except by applying the author's general denominator of an 'injured connection from the brain' (p. 14). One child, a girl of six called N, who is frequently referred to in the text, seems to this reviewer to represent a 'behavior problem'; without any etiological or psychopathological data, handling this girl's tantrums by isolation, reasoning, or cold baths (fully dressed) is difficult to understand. No doubt Miss Loewy, by experience and devotion to her work, has developed a practical sense for the needs of 'retarded' children, but one misses in this presentation a reflection of that body of knowledge about 'atypical' children which has accumulated here and abroad during the last decades.