steepholm

I read it differently and much more relativistically. The way I see this part of the sentence ("a failure of our present civilization to provide the educational opportunities that would give expression to the more unusual, and perhaps not the less valuable, types of mind"), it's not calling for "defectives" to be allowed to go to school like everyone else, so much as saying that society is set up to cater for one particular sort of mind (which for reasons of numbers we call "normal") rather than another sort of mind (which we have been calling "defective"), and that in order to give the latter group the educational opportunities that suit them, we need to cater to the particular qualities of their minds, rather than see every point at which they differ from the "norm" as a kind of deficit.

Now, maybe I'm wrong in seeing that fairly radical view in this sentence, but if I'm right then I just find it interesting that the writer is nevertheless happy to use "defective" as a term.