John Dutton Wright

“ Sometimes, through a false sense of shame, or through ignorance of the possibilities open to a deaf child, mothers have refused to admit that their children were deaf, or to allow anything to be done for them, until very valuable time has been lost. This is unfair to the child, and very wrong. A mother should have only pity for the deaf child and eagerness to aid him to overcome his handicap so far as possible. ”

“ If circumstances make it impossible to give to the child the best all the time, then he should have the best at the start rather than later. Every effort and every sacrifice that are ever going to be made for the child's sake should be at the beginning of his school training, and not delayed till he is older. The years from five to eight or ten will determine his future success. If he has poor teaching during these early years, even the best teaching later will not be able to make up the loss entirely. ”

“ Even though the child be totally deaf from birth, he can nevertheless be taught to speak and to understand when others speak to him. He can be given the same education that he would be capable of mastering if he could hear. The mother need not be despairing nor heart-broken. A prompt, brave, and intelligent facing of the situation will result in making the child one to be proud of and to lean upon. ”

“ The price of good speech, like the price of liberty, is eternal vigilance. During the school period, teachers and parents should give unremitting attention to demanding of the children, every time they speak, the best enunciation of which they are at that time capable. ”

“ Very much can be done for the little one before he is five to prepare him for the instruction which should be given at that age, but it is possible for the mother to do what is necessary, and even the simplest home conditions are preferable for very little children to the institutional environment. It is impossible, in a school of from one hundred to five hundred pupils, to create a real home environment, such as the very little child should have. It is really a pity that the child of five should have to be placed in the institutional environment as it at present exists. ”

“ The best teachers can seldom, if ever, be induced to teach a single child in its home. Usually these teachers are more or less inferior. But even the best teacher in the world cannot do for a little deaf child in his home what she could accomplish for him in a well-organized and properly conducted school. ”

“ The hearing baby babbles because he gets some pleasure from the sounds, and also because he desires to imitate the sounds of speech he hears around him. He has his attention called constantly to sound. The sense of vibration is not as strong nor as instructive as that of sound, but if the attention of the child is early called to it, a watchfulness for vibration from within himself as well as from without, can be aroused, and a sensitiveness developed that would not have come as early, if at all, without special, directive effort on the part of the mother. ”

“ I wish to make an urgent plea for the energetic efforts of all parents of deaf children to improve the speech-teaching conditions in their respective localities. At present, very far from all that is possible is being done to give deaf children a ready command of spoken English, and a working ability to understand when spoken to. The persons who have the most at stake in this matter, and who should be most active and persistent in demanding from the school authorities and legislatures better facilities for the acquisition of speech by deaf children, are the parents of those children. ”

“ Too many mothers feel that it is useless to write to their children during their first year away from them. They are so sure that no word from them can be understood that they content themselves with sending inquiries to the proper authorities, and an occasional picture postcard to the children themselves, and fail to realize how soon their little boy or girl grasps the fact that the other children have real letters in envelopes, and that these come from home, or how sharp a disappointment it is when day after day goes by and brings them nothing. ”

“ It is not as easy as it might seem to the inexperienced to determine even approximately the situation of a fifteen-months-old baby with respect to its hearing. Our interest here is, of course, in the tests of hearing that do not require special apparatus and special training. In the case of a child less than two years of age we must rely upon merely attracting his attention by various sounds, judging the effect upon him by his expression and actions. We cannot, at that age, establish a system of responses, nor expect him to imitate the sounds he hears. ”

“ The hearing child of eight who has never been in school and cannot read or write has, nevertheless, without conscious effort, mastered the two most important educational tasks in life. He has learned to speak and has acquired the greater part of his working vocabulary. In other words, although he has never been across the threshold of a school, his education is well advanced for his years and mental development.
"The situation of the uninstructed deaf child of eight is very different. ”

“ If, by good luck, the little one has learned to read even a simple primer before becoming deaf, it will be much easier to prevent a loss of speech. For this reading can be made an excuse for frequently using his speech. But when the child cannot read, the mother must depend entirely upon inducing him to talk to her, refusing to give him anything, or grant his request, till he asks for it in good spoken form; showing him pictures, playing games, frolicking with him; doing everything that a mother's love and ingenuity can suggest, to keep him talking all day long. ”

“ It is even possible for the eye to perform the entire task of interpreting speech, and, if the hearing is entirely lacking, the course outlined will result in training the brain to interpret the movements of speech as seen by the eye, as it would have been trained by the same procedure to interpret the sounds of speech had the organ of transmission not been injured. But the idea must be constantly in the mind of the mother that her boy needs to see the spoken word at the very moment when the idea that it represents is in his mind, as often as he would hear it if his hearing were perfect. ”

“ Unfortunately, the idea is prevalent that any one can teach a little child, but that it takes experience to teach the older pupils. This is a disastrous fallacy. Young and inexperienced women are too often quite ready to assume the great responsibility of teaching a little deaf child. They rush in where angels might well fear to tread. Unfortunately, parents, and even school superintendents, are often too ready to permit them to do this dangerous thing. ”

“ Kaleidoscopes and stereoscopes are excellent, but moving pictures are so trying upon the eyes, and the air of the theaters is so bad, that a deaf child whose eyes are his only salvation, and whose health is doubly important, should not even know of their existence till he is seven or eight years old. ”

“ You owe it to your child to make yourself thoroughly intelligent as to the possibilities open to a deaf child. You will not be intelligent till you have personally visited some good purely oral school. ”

“ A very considerable number of schools for the deaf in the United States and Canada still use manual, or silent, methods of instruction, at least in part. But the speech, or oral, method is steadily growing in popularity, and gradually supplanting manual spelling and gestural signs. The time will certainly come when the public will be too intelligent to any longer tolerate the use between teacher and pupil, or between any employee and the pupils, in a school for the deaf, any system of manual communication. ”

“ The deaf baby will learn gradually to associate a meaning with the various sequences of movement of the lips, if a little care is taken to watch his eyes and to speak when they are directed toward the speaker, and to stand in such relation to the light that it falls upon the speaker's face. The speech should be the same as to the hearing child, but it takes a little more care and watchfulness to have the deaf child see the same word or phrase as many times as the hearing child hears it. If it is spoken when the baby is not looking, it does not help. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The habit on his part of looking at the face of a speaker, and the habit on his mother's part of observing his gaze and, when it wanders, of pausing in her talk till he is looking at her again, are two very valuable aids in the language development of the deaf child. In addition to always raising her voice a little in speaking to her baby, the mother should several times a day take him in her lap and sing to him, and talk to him with her lips not far from his ear. ”

“ In cases where, through accident or illness, impairment of hearing has come after the child has begun to talk, the mother should bend all her efforts upon keeping the speech of her child. The younger the child, the more difficult is the task. Without the greatest vigilance and increasing attention, the speech of a little child who has become deaf will fade rapidly away, until it is lost entirely, and must be artificially recreated when he is old enough to grasp the complicated ideas involved in speech teaching to the deaf. ”

“ When it is possible to make the child perceive the sound of the vowels with the unaided voice uttered very near the ear, I believe it to be better, at first, not to interpose any artificial device. But I have found that sometimes, in cases where the sound perception was not at first sufficient to enable the child to distinguish even the most dissimilar vowel sounds, although uttered loudly close to the ear, I could awaken the attention of the child to sound, and stimulate the dormant power by the use of an Acousticon. ”

“ But while you wait for school age to arrive, you lose that close touch with the soul of your child which may be established only in these early years, for you have no adequate means of communication with him—no way to win his confidence. ”

“ It lays up much misery for his future, and in the end proves a serious handicap to one who needs to have as few additional difficulties as possible. Though it may seem hard-hearted, it is really kinder to put him on the same basis as any other child. Make him do everything possible for himself. Insist upon his being independent; dressing himself as soon as he is able, buttoning his own shoes, and performing all the little self-help acts that the wise mother demands of all her children. ”

“ Mothers of deaf children cannot be expected to be trained teachers of the deaf. It would be useless, and, in fact, often unfortunate, to ask them to attempt to teach articulation to their children. Even for them to teach the children to write would usually be undesirable because the greatest gain from the mother's efforts comes from the early establishment of the speech-reading habit and entire dependence upon it. ”

“ Little by little it can be determined whether the child hears all the sounds, and if not, then which, if any, he perceives. A totally deaf child may often deceive the investigator by turning his head at the critical moment, apparently in response to the sound that was [Pg 11] made, while, on the other hand, a child very slightly deaf, or not deaf at all, may completely ignore the sounds made for the purpose of attracting his attention. Therefore, it takes time and repeated tests under varying environments to gradually eliminate possible errors and coincidences. ”

“ In the case of the very slightly deaf child, this visual training is not quite so important as the auricular training, but when there is much deafness it is the more important of the two. The comprehension of much language can be given to the little deaf child by constantly talking just as any mother does to her hearing baby, only being always careful to take a position facing the main source of light, which should come from behind the child. ”