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Annual Report of the London County Council, 1910.
Lip-reading and Articulation.—Mr. Yearsley has been noting the accomplishments of the
children by a method which consists in taking the articulation, lip-reading and general capacity and
assigning to each a value denoted by the terms " Very good " (V.G.), " Good " (G.), " Sufficient " (S.),
or "Insufficient" (I.).

These results apply only to 390 of the scholars (203 boys and 187 girls), as 158 (96 boys and 62
girls) were too young or had been too short a time under instruction to permit of their being judged
with justice to themselves or the system. They have, however, been included in the table as "not
marked." The table classifies the children primarily on a basis of mentality. In order to be quite
fair, the 98 placed under the column "poor, subnormal, or mentally defective," may be left out of
consideration altogether. The remaining 450 of normal mentality are further grouped, according to
the amount of speech which they possessed at the commencement of their education, into those who
started with no speech at all (inclusive of a few children in whom residual speech has been lost by
neglect), those with residual speech, and those with natural speech. 140 of these children were too
young or had been an insufficient time at school to allow of their being marked, leaving 310 scholars
whose progress could be judged fairly accurately by this method of marking.
Taking first the powers of lip-reading of 197 children who had never had any speech, 113, or
57.3 per cent., were "very good" or "good," whilst 84, or 42.6 per cent, were "sufficient" or "insufficient,"
whilst of the 113 who were lucky enough to be left with residual or natural speech, 84,
or 74.3 per cent., were "very good" or "good," and only 29, or 25.6 per cent., were "sufficient" or
"insufficient." This tends to show how much the retention of speech, which means largely the retention
of motor memories of speech, helps in the acquirement of lip-reading, that is to say, in the appreciation
of speech movements in others. It will be noted further that 30 of the no-speech children,
or 15.2 per cent., were "insufficient," that is to say, absolute failures at lip-reading, against 13, or 6.6
per cent., of those who had residual or natural speech. Deaf education is not satisfactory in which at
least a quarter of the scholars in whom speech was originally absent, but who are normal mentally, are
"insufficient" in their knowledge of lip-reading, "insufficient" meaning that they are incapable of
reading other people's lips sufficiently to gather what they are saying.
The teaching of lip-reading is, however, only one part of the aim of deaf education. It has
also to give speech to the dumb, that is to say, it must so teach them articulation as to make their
speech intelligible. If we now take the results of this system of marking we shall see how this
side of the education works out. Of 197 boys and girls who had no speech on admission, only
84, or 42.6 per cent., had articulation which could be marked "very good" or "good," and only
17 of these, or 20.2 per cent. (8.6 per cent, of the whole 197) belonged to the former category. Of
those marked "sufficient" or "insufficient" (and the majority of the former would, probably, be
understood only with difficulty by anyone who was unused to conversing with the deaf), there
were 113, or 57.3 per cent., and of these 60, or 53.09 per cent. (30.4 per cent, of the whole 197), were
"insufficient," that is to say, oral failures—children to whom the present system of deaf education had
failed to give speech.
In strong contrast are the results with the 113 children who had residual or natural speech on
admission. Of these, 107, or 94'6 per cent., were "very good" or "good" (the former, as is seen by
the table, being in excess), whilst only 6, or 5.3 per cent., were "sufficient" and none were "insufficient."
Here the oral system had succeeded in the great majority of its pupils in preserving to them the speech
which they had retained in greater or less degree when they had become deaf. These figures show
that the present system of deaf education does not produce a sufficiently high percentage of successes
under existing conditions. The reasons are to be sought in the conditions under which the teachers
have to work; they are wholly unconnected with the capacity of the teachers themselves. The
teachers are too severely handicapped by the present state of legislation, and classification. They
receive their pupils too late in life to enable them to turn out finished products. The majority
of the children do not commence their education until they are 7, when brain and larynx are
no longer sufficiently plastic. We should begin to educate the deaf child at the age of three, instead
of denying to him the physiological education which his hearing fellow is getting from his earliest
years. In extra-urban districts, there may be difficulties in the way of getting the child at an early
age, but the urban deaf child should not be allowed to suffer. By early education, articulation could