Evening star. [volume], August 12, 1906, Page 9, Image 29

About Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972

Image provided by: Library of Congress, Washington, DC

                
How the Deaf Are Taught
By EUGENE WOOD
RAILROAD trains and trolley cars in a way
do take the place of beasts of prey and
savage enemies in extirpating those
^ among us who do not see well or hear
well, but that they are hardly thorough
is shown by the rapid increase in the number
of those who have to wear glasses and are hard
of hearing, though they are by no means old. Alex
ander Graham Bell, who ought to know if anybody
does, estimates that there are in the United States
more than three hundred thousand persons under
the age of twenty-five who have lost their hearing
since they left school. One
child in every fifteen hundred
is born deaf, and there are in
this country by the latest
census report 111,672 persons
totally deaf.
We are too tender-hearted
now to kill our defective
children, or to let them grow
up uncared for, except as to
their physical needs. But
sending them to institutions
to be educated tends to isolate
the non-hearing children from the hearing ones. It
makes a bond of union out of their common afflic
tion, and so promotes deaf-mute marriages. The
proportion of deaf children among the immediate
descendants is perhaps not so great as might be
expected: one-tenth where one parent is a deaf
mute; one-third where both are deaf; but when the
genealogical research is carried to the fifth genera
tion, as it has been, and one sees the alarming fre
quency on the charts of the black disk that shows
deafness he does not wonder that Alexander Gra
ham Bell should warn us that we are developing a
deaf-mute variety of the human race.
A good many more are born deaf than parents
will admit. About sixty per cent, of the non-hear
ing never have heard. The other forty per cent, can
trace their loss largely to scarlatina, diphtheria, or
some other disease of the throat affecting the neigh
borhood of the tube that leads up into the middle
ear. About every tenth case of congenital deafness
can surely be traced to the marriage of first cousins;
a less proportion to marriages of remoter consan
guinity.
Terrors of Deafness
IT would be sad enough if we thought of those who
lose their hearing as simply becoming separated
from us by an invisible wall of silence. To have the
mind cut off little by little from all that comes to it
by the gateway of the ear, to miss the tones of a
dear voice and all its subtle inflections, and know
that they are gone forever, to be shut out of the
beautiful world of music, to be harassed by the fear
of imminent danger because the cry of warning can
not be heard, to be humiliated by the acknowledg
ment of a personal defect, and so to shrink into one's
self more and more avoiding companionship as a
wounded bird hides itself?to bear this meekly,
cheerfully, calls for the courage of a hero and the
resignation of a saint. But when, as in the cases
of progressive disease of the middle ear, there is
not an eternal silence, but a clanging, clamorous
roar, as of Niagara, in one's ears, day in and day
out, it becomes almost too terrible to think of.
Yet there is a deeper depth, where the sufferers
do not know that they suffer, where they do not
appreciate what they are deprived of, because they
have never heard at all. What makes their case so
sad is that unless the special education of the child
is undertaken at an earlv age indeed the faculties
of the mind, no matter how great they may be?
and they are often potentially very great?are
dwarfed and stunted in their growth.
It is commonly believed that deaf children are
extraordinarily vicious and cruel. Our forefathers
thought them possessed of devils, and there are
naive stories of miraculous healing where the deaf
and-dumb spirit came forth when adjured and the
ears were unstopped and the string of the tongue
loosed so that they spoke. Those born deaf are
morally and intellectually about the same as other
children, Saint Augustine to the contrary notwith
standing. If they seem cruel, it is because they do
not hear the cry of pain from the tortured kitten.
If they have tantrums, it is because they cannot
unpack their souls with words as hearing children
can. They are often spoiled, either because they
are favored more than they should be,
or because they are abused. If they
seem less intelligent, it is because they
miss so much of the education that
the hearing child gets without know
ing it.
The child t>orn deaf is not always
totally devoid of all auditive sense;
but there is some defect in the ap
paratus, so that by and by the nerves
and brain centers give up trying to
hear and lie dormant. I know of the
case of a mechanical engineer, a suc
cessful man, who could not hear a
sound when his education was begun at
the age of three years and two months.
If he had been neglected, he never
would have heard; but the persistent stimulation
of the nerves has made him only partially deaf, and
he speaks with such a slight accent that people who
do not know Spanish think he is a Spaniard, he has
just that odd irregularity of emphasis.
It is not because of any defect in the organs of
speech that the deaf are dumb, but because they
do not know how to speak. Dr. MacKendrick of
the Glasgow University operated upon a man and
replaced his larynx with a hard-rubber voice-box,
in which was a slot to receive a reed from a parlor
organ. There was no variation in pitch except
when he changed the reed, but he could hear, and
so he spoke like his neighbors, with a strong Scotch
accent. This proves, by the way, the point that
the vowels are made not by the vocal cords but by
what Wangemann calls "the hollow spaces of the
voice.".
Cases where hearing children cannot learn to
speak are not uncommon; but they are mentally
defective. The kind cruelty of another age would
have put them out of the way by the time they
were three years old; but the cruel kindness of
modern times prolongs their misery for life in pub
lic institutions, fostering them with more sedulous
care than many a normal child gets who will grow
up to be an income-producing citizen instead of a
helpless burden.
Deaf Were Taught Long Ago
?"PO instruct the non-hearing child that has all the
raw material of a fine mind but has absolutely no
vocabulary, and hence is not a civilized being, is
so modern an achievement that we are likely to
forget that as long ago as A. D. 685, John the Bishop
of Hexham taught a deaf man to pronounce words
and sentences?so the venerable Bede sets it down
in his "Ecclesiastical History." But it was not until
about a hundred years ago that systematic effort
was made to form the minds of the non-hearing.
There are two ways of going about it, and I do
not know of a more acrid quarrel than that which
has been kept up for the last century between the
advocates of the sign language on the one side and
the teachers of articulation on the other. The deaf
naturally express their rudimentary emotions in
pantomime; but to develop and conventionalize
these signs into a language worthy of a moral and
thinking being is a work of which the Abb? de
l'Ep^e gets the credit. Most of us are more or less
familiar with the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, and sup
pose that English words are spelled out on the fingers
by it. But that is the least part of the sign language,
which is not English at all or anything like it.
Chinese characters bear no relation to the spoken
word, and the man of Canton who cannot make
out what the man from Nanking is trying to say
can understand him easily if he writes it down,
because Chinese writing is an arrangement of con
ventionalized pictures, combined to make meanings
agreed upon. For example, one character means,
"sheep," and another char
acter means "words." Com
bine the two, and the resulting
character means, "To exam
ine and judge clearly," prob
ably because the first judicial
processes were invoked to
settle disputes as to the own
ership of flocks. Our own
spoken language went through
this conventionalizing process
ages ago, and is going through
it now; so that when we read
the word "spirits," we have to see the connection
before we know whether the writer means the
apparitions of the dead, the happy or despondent con
dition of a man's mind, distilled alcoholic liquors, or
such diverse substances as ammonia and turpentine.
The advantages of so rudimentary a language are
great. It is easy for one to learn without much
thought. A French-born mute can converse at
once with an American-born mute, and large con
gregations of the non-hearing can be addressed at
once. On the other hand, it is not possible to convey
in it any close reasoning, and, worst of all, it is not
English, so that those who use it find themselves
foreigners among their own kin. More than that,
it is asserted by the articulation teachers that those
who use the sign language are distinctly inferior
mentally to those that have learned to talk, and
they say that autopsies show that the brains of
deaf-mutes who use the sign language have fewer
convolutions and are less highly organized than the
brains of those that can articulate.
At one time the sign-language party in this coun
try had all the best of it; but in such leading schools
as the New York Institution for the Instruction of
the Deaf and Dumb articulation is now taught,
and the sign-language is only tolerated. How they
ever succeeded in getting Orris Benson to speak,
who is blind as well as deaf, is beyond me; but they
have. He is an extremely bright boy. When I saw
the clay model of Grant's Tomb that he had made
solely from the descriptions spelled out to him by
taps on different parts of his hand, something
clutched at my throat?pity and admiration both
at once.
Mimicry Is the Basis
CUPPOSE you were to undertake to teach French
^ to a child whom could see you through the
window but could not hear you for the noise in the
street, how would you go about it? That would be
a simple task as compared with teaching a child
to speak English who not only has never heard but
has absolutely no vocabulary and no conception of
a word.
Children like to play, which in its essence is mim
icry. The teacher begins by tearing off a little bit of
paper, putting it on the back of her hand and puffing
at it. Johnny wants to play that game too. By and
by the teacher blows in a new way. She pops her
lips. So does Johnny. Lighter, still lighter, the ex
plosion of the resisting lips is made, until the first
thing Johnny knows he has made the letter P. He
learns that this pop of the lips has to do with a
black mark in a book and a different mark that she
shows him how to make with a pen and ink, big
letters and little letters. Every child learns print
and writing but Johnny has to learn another
alphabet too, that of visible speech invented by
Alexander Melville Bell, the only set of characters
known that exactly and unchangingly represent
what sounds go into a word, because each character
is a sort of picture of the way of making the sound
it stands for.
Johnny learns another way of blowing. He puts
his tongue tip lightly against his lower front teeth.
That is S. He pouches his mouth and makes Sh.
He presses his upper front teeth on his lower lip,
and blows F. He puts, his tongue be
tween his teeth and makes Th. With
to every one of these blowing sounds he
learns a new letter. It is fine. He is
going to school. He likes to learn.
IBB Bv and by comes a puzzle. The
jK teacher makes her lips pop; but when
B? he does it she shakes her head. No, that
isn't right. She puts his hand on her
\ chin. When she makes her lips pop
\ the bone in the chin jars a little. He
><?: J tries again to see if he can't make his
chin-bone jar. No. Try it again and
again and again. Ah! The teacher
smiles. That's right. He is a smart
boy and likes to do things that please
the teacher. He keeps on repeating
? i' ;