What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to KnowWright, John Dutton
Science
What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know
Wright, John Dutton
Deaf children
The first efforts should be directed to inducing, or compelling, the
so-called "Combined Schools" for the deaf throughout the United States
to wholly segregate at least a small oral department from the manually
taught pupils. The orally taught pupils should never come in contact
during their school life, either in the shops, dining rooms,
playgrounds, or schoolrooms, with those pupils with whom finger spelling
and signs are employed. All employees, whether superintendents,
teachers, supervisors, teachers of trades, or servants, who have to do
with the orally taught pupils should be _compelled_ to use only speech
and lip reading (and writing, if absolutely necessary) under penalty of
dismissal for failing to do so. Only by means of such segregation, and
the enforcement of speech as a universal medium of communication, can
the appropriations for oral work be made really productive of good
results in what are now called "Combined Schools." This can be done on a
small scale at the beginning, with the little entering beginners. Then
if all beginners are put into this oral department it will gradually
grow at the expense of the manual department, until, after a period of
eight or ten years, the entire school will have become oral.
This is the only method of procedure by which satisfactory results in
speech teaching for practical purposes can be obtained in return for the
generous appropriations that the states make. It has been fully
demonstrated by actual operation in the state of Pennsylvania, where the
largest school for the deaf in the world has in this manner been changed
from a "Combined School" to a pure oral school.
_All_ the deaf children in the State of Massachusetts are now taught
wholly by the oral method. If that polyglot and heterogeneous
population can be so treated, there is no state in the Union where the
same could not be done if there were the desire and the ambition to do
it.
In many states deaf children have been, either by definite statement, or
by tacit understanding, exempted from the enforcement of the compulsory
education law. This is all wrong. They need the protection of that
excellent law even more than the hearing child, and if the law for
compulsory education does not, in fact, apply to them, it should at once
be amended to do so.
XIX
DAY SCHOOLS
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