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THE HANDICAPPED CHILD
The Deaf Child
During 1958 the International Congress on the Modern Educationa
Treatment of Deafness took place in Manchester at which many hundreds
of delegates from all over the world attended. An opportunity was thus
afforded of taking stock of our progress and of new trends in the educational
treatment of the deaf child.
Ascertainment
The first essential in any such programme is early ascertainment. The
results of recent research have shown us the vulnerable groups in which
to look for deaf children. Audiometry in school children by means of the
gramophone and pure tone sweep test audiometer has become routine
now in most of Great Britain. At the same time it should not be looked
upon as an instrument of case-finding of severely deaf children. Case
finding of such children should take place long before the age of compulsory
school attendance. Professor and Mrs. Ewing have suggested a
method of routine screening tests of hearing of all babies by health visitors.
This method while crude does get results though there is evidence to
show that the same results could be obtained by a more selective method
of screening those at known risk.
The audiology clinic plays a most important part in early ascertainment.
By now the example set by such clinics as that at the Royal National,
Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital, London, is well known and it is generally
agreed that an extension of these clinics to all parts of the country is
required. Their aim is the detection of deafness in children at the earliest
possible age and to give subsequent aid to the child and his family in overcoming
the handicap.
Auditory Training
The necessity for auditory training is well recognised and accepted by
all. Beyond this, however, is the great schism—at least in this country
and apparently in the United States as well. There are those who "hold
these truths to be self-evident" —that all deaf children recognised early
enough, fitted with a hearing aid and spoken to according to the recognised
methods of auditory training, will learn to understand and reproduce
spoken language without the necessity of education in a special school.
There are some who will accept virtually no qualification of this assertion.
Others reply that it is wholly false. An objective assessment of the results
of this treatment is an urgent necessity. It is possible that the happiness
and well being of some children is being sacrificed to what may be theory
rather than fact.
Prosthetics
Advances in electronics have been astonishingly rapid in recent years
with the risk of rendering expensive apparatus rapidly out of date. The
cumbersome battery aids are being replaced by transistor aids. The
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