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49
which, presumably, must have been within their hearing range
all the time, but which at first did not interest them. So I am disinclined
to make a definite pronouncement until a child has had a
few terms in the baby-room.
With regard to the common education of the deaf and the partially
deaf, in theory I am against mixing the two categories for
the following reasons:—
The methods of teaching a child who already has acquired
limited language through hearing, and one who has no idea that
spoken language even exists, are utterly different. In the first case
more vocabulary must be added to what exists already, faulty speech
must be corrected, and lip reading of words already known must
be taught. In the second case, every word must be acquired
slowly and laboriously by lip reading, and all speech must be built
up, sound by sound, from the beginning, by the Help of feeling
and sight, while every language form must be presented, over and
over again, and the progress is very slow.
To the first, the communication of thought by spoken language
is already a reality and a common-place (though its construction
may be faulty), to the second it is non-existent until
education begins.
It is an advantage for the intelligent deaf to have the oral
atmosphere and the stimulus of mixing with the partially deaf,
but the latter ought themselves to have the stimulus of the companionship
of the hearing, not the deaf.
Here, in spite of all this, we find in actual fact that, by keeping
the children separated in class, while the instruction is given, but
allowing them to mix freely in out-of-class activities, the deaf
benefit enormously, and the partially deaf do not seem to suffer.
This would not be the case in a residential school, where the children
did not spend the greater part of their lives in a normal home
environment.
Of course, in Walthamstow, the older children, both deaf and
partially deaf, have lessons in domestic science, dressmaking,
woodwork, and metal work, with hearing children in a large Secondary
School, so that they are not segregated in a deaf world.
This is a great spur to good speech and lip reading, and to normal
behaviour.
The best for which we can hope is a compromise, or the lesser
evil. If bv separating the deaf from the partially deaf, the numbers
would be too small to make workable units, and the deaf therefore
had to go to a residential school and the partially deaf to a normal
one, the damage both to mental and to emotional development
would be immeasurably greater than that caused by educating
them together."