When mentally equipped, all blind students should be sent to college,
and urged to fit themselves as teachers. In every college and university
blind men should occupy chairs in history, English, economics, and
mathematics. I know two blind men in this state well qualified to teach
any of these subjects, who are forced to accept inferior positions,
because educators generally fail to realize that blindness is no bar to
mental attainment, and that the ability to teach does not depend upon
the ability to see with the eyes. This will be better understood when
the coeducation of blind and seeing children becomes more general--God
speed the day! As music teachers, concert players, leaders of orchestra,
or masters of the violin and 'cello, the blind should have an even
chance of success, but their inability to read music at sight, or watch
the director's baton often deprives them of positions which their quick
ear and well trained memory would enable them to fill with profit to
themselves and satisfaction to the public.
And so in all the professions. I know a man who, before he lost his
eyesight, was considered an eminent lawyer, but now his associates
regard him pityingly, and his clients take their business elsewhere.
When the light went out of the eyes of this brilliant man, it did not
take his brain as well. He is fitted to be a consulting lawyer or court
pleader, and could occupy a chair in a college of law. Surely, there is
something radically wrong when these conditions exist! Surely the public
needs to open its eyes, and polish its glasses in order to see more
clearly that there is a mental blindness, more pitiful, more
far-reaching in its consequences, than physical blindness, however hard
or uncomfortable the latter condition may be. Some one facetiously
suggested that I call this lecture "bringing light to the seeing," and,
in a sense, this is what I am trying to do. But the light is carried by
a kindly hand, and the hand is the index to a heart in which there is no
bitterness, no malice, no distrust--a heart brimming over with love,
with hope, with confidence, and with a belief that the public _will_ see
the light, and, seeing it, and reading my message in its beams, will
pass it on to others, adding to it as it goes, until it floods every
corner of our vast state, and result in untold good for my people. And
let me tell you how this light may be disseminated--let me apportion
your share in this labor of love, this highest form of social service,
this movement of re-education now sweeping over the land.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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