Mary Gray Morrison

“ The teachers say they are asked the strangest questions every day: Why they do not teach the children to sing; whether they use raised letters; whether their work is not easy, as it must certainly require but little education to teach such benighted minds. But everything was outdone by the prominent member of a board of education who, after expressing his amazement as he passed from grade to grade of the school, asked, "How long is it before they begin to hear?" ”

“ Many of the little ones are poor, and are clothed mainly by the teachers and friends of the school, and when one of them appears in a new dress all of her fellow-pupils rejoice with her.
After they leave the school, which many do to engage in some employment, they are proud to keep up their proficiency, and encouraging and curious things are heard of them. One is a teacher in a Sunday-school; one is vigorously pursuing her studies in a branch of the Society for Home Culture; another practices her piano-lesson an hour a day; one boy is a promising student of wood-engraving ”

“ Even if some of the pupils of the Horace Man School, and the similar institution in Northampton, should never be able to hold protracted conversations upon all subjects, there are many sentences with which they will always be able to gladden the hearts of their parents and friends.
As some one has wisely said, it would be well worth sustaining the system if the child only learned to say "Father, mother, I love you." For the parents feel the happiness of hearing one word pronounced by the lips of their children ”

“ One girl, in particular, spoke with such a pleasant inflection and so much animation, that the visitor said, "She must be a semi-mute, surely?" "No," the teacher answered; "all of my pupils were born deaf." Of two who seemed a little backward, she said: "They are not strong children, and their articulation is not so good as the others; but it is a great advantage to them to be able to understand what is said to them, even if they never speak very well." She further stated that all the usual studies of the upper grammar-school classes were pursued by her own. ”

“ Every gesture is vigilantly suppressed as soon as the written or spoken word can be used in its place, but in the youngest class these signs are naturally most used. An animated group the eleven pupils make, several of them mere babies of four and five years. They ask very personal questions about the visitor, which the teacher readily interprets if she sees fit. There are some inquiries concerning the age of the stranger, for instance, or innocent comments on the size of his feet, or the shape of his hat, which she may think best to ignore. ”

“ As one passes from the youngest to the oldest class, the progress is very marked. In some of the rooms the pupils only say separate words, in others a few sentences; but in the last a surprise awaits every one. There sits a class of nine pupils from about thirteen to sixteen years old, who, at the low-toned request of their teacher, rise, come forward to nearer seats, and recite the answers clearly and correctly to the questions of an ordinary geography lesson. ”

“ When we remember that most of these pupils have never heard a sound, and do not know what it is, that they have no communication with the world except by pantomime, and then remember that the end aimed at is to make them speak the English language, so that any one can understand them, and that they must learn to read from the movements of his lips whatever a hearing person chooses to say to them, the tremendous toil will be faintly realized. ”

“ THERE is a schoolhouse in a convenient little by-street in Boston, which is visited weekly by scholars and scientists, specialists of renown and commonplace fathers and mothers, philanthropists and seekers after the curious, and from its doors not one turns away without being surprised and touched. ”

“ From the time in the last century when the first government institutions for the deaf and dumb were founded simultaneously in Germany and France, the methods of instruction have been different in those usually antagonistic countries. ”

“ Separate instances have been known in all time, where devoted men and women have given a lifetime to this work, and counted it well spent. We do not know the impulse which led the Spanish monk, Pedro de Ponce, in Leon, to the wonderful toil and patience which must have been required before his four deaf-mutes talked with men in the sixteenth century, but we hardly doubt that it began in the affliction of some one dear to him ”

“ There are always two classes of children in schools of this kind, the congenital mutes who have never heard, and a large number who were not born deaf but became so in different stages of their age and development, either by disease or accident. ”