The parents are the ones most interested in this matter, and it is through their efforts alone that improvement can be brought about. In Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Washington, Oregon, Texas, Missouri, and California, free public oral day schools have been established. This movement has reached its highest development in Wisconsin and Michigan. In Wisconsin there are twenty-four such schools scattered throughout the state, and in Michigan fourteen. New schools are opened by the Board of Education under prescribed conditions upon the request of a certain number of parents of deaf children. Such a law should be on the statute books of every state, and will be when the parents of deaf children organize and demand it. XX THE DEAF CHILD AT FIVE YEARS OF AGE When the little child that has been deaf from infancy is five years of age, he should be placed in a _purely oral school_ for the deaf, if such a thing is possible. The child who has become deaf by illness or accident after speech has been acquired, should be placed under experienced instruction by the speech method _at once_. To quote once more from my little book of suggestions to physicians: "If the proper school for the little hearing child of five did not happen to exist in his immediate neighborhood, no one would think of insisting upon the necessity of sending the little one away to a distant boarding school. But that is what must be done in the case of the little deaf child, if precious and irrecoverable years are not to be lost. It is often a difficult matter to persuade a mother to sacrifice her own personal happiness and comfort in having the little child with her, and to look far enough into the future to see that a true and unselfish love for the child requires her to entrust him to the care of others during those early and crucial years." XXI SCHOOLS FOR THE HEARING AND PRIVATE GOVERNESSES If no oral day or boarding school is available near at hand, the mother should have the far-sighted love that is unselfish, and the courage to part with her little five-year-old child during the months of the school year, and place him in some one of the distant schools where he can live and be taught in a purely oral environment. There are two alternatives to this, each of which is sometimes attempted, but both are undesirable. First the mother not infrequently attempts to have her child educated in the schools for hearing children. This is very unsatisfactory and even dangerous, for if persisted in it results in wholly inadequate progress, uneven development, bad speech, irretrievable loss of time, and often in a complete nervous breakdown. This may not come for some years, but the nervous system, once undermined by the excessive strain of trying to keep up under impossible conditions, can never be fully repaired. Here is what a _partially_ deaf woman writes of her experience as a child: