Library Collections: Document: Full Text

Fortunately, public sentiment in this country does not yet demand, as it does in Germany, either that "every respectable man or child shall sleep between two feather-beds, summer and winter," or that all deaf mutes who are taught at all should be taught to speak, though their speech be wearisome and disagreeable ; but we should be pleased to see our institutions follow, in this respect, the example of the Royal Institution at Paris, by forming classes of those who are only partially deaf, who have retained some degree of the power of articulation, or who by uncommon docility show a facility in its acquisition. We admit, however, that the adoption of this plan would be attended with grave inconveniences. The members of such a class in any one institution would be of very various degrees of proficiency in their other studies, and should therefore belong at the same time to other classes. Hence, their instruction in articulation should only be an extra lesson, given out of the usual school hours. This would interfere with their instruction in a mechanical trade, a great object in all our institutions. Moreover, such a step would increase, for the favored individuals, the expense of instruction, which would either demand an additional appropriation from the legislature for the benefit of a selected few, or else the means must be found by subtracting part of. the allowance from the fund for the education of the rest. In either case, the distinction would be invidious, and it would not always be easy to decide, whether the cases of particular individuals fell within or without any possible rule that might be adopted in making a selection. This difficulty, it is true, would not be experienced in the case of the pupils who pay for instruction but these are few in number, and seldom able to meet extraordinary expense.

We may further remark, that teachers of articulation are obliged to begin while the organs of speech are still pliable, and thus to receive pupils at a much earlier age than our institutions find expedient or advantageous. It would appear, by Mr. Mann's account, that they begin before their pupils are conscious that they exhale and inhale air; and we know, that they receive pupils at the ages of six or seven, while our own institutions do not, except in rare cases, receive any under the age of ten, and some institutions not till twelve. As six or seven years are the utmost allowed for pupils supported by legislative beneficence, and some States allow but four, it is evident, that pupils admitted at so early an age as is necessary to successful instruction in articulation must leave just when they have reached the most favorable period for mental improvement, for the learning of trades, and for the formation of moral character. Though the second point may be sufficiently cared for by their own friends, yet the cases are very few in which pupils, who leave an institution at twelve or thirteen, will possess as much accurate knowledge, or as correct and well established moral principles, as those who leave it, after an equal term of instruction, at the age of sixteen or eighteen.

On the whole, we see no present prospect, that the teaching of articulation will he introduced into our institutions at all; and that exercises in it will ever be made general, we cannot believe. Our own experience, and the still more costly experience of the Parisian school, loudly admonish us not to abandon a system which we have practised, or seen practised, for a quarter of a century, and which has been found to answer all the reasonable expectations formed from it, -- to adopt a system which we believe to be founded on an erroneous philosophy, and the results of which, judging from all the evidence before us, we believe to have been, on an average at least, less favorable than the results attained under our own plan.