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What To Do For The Blind

From: Out Of The Dark
Creator: Helen Keller (author)
Date: 1920
Publisher: Doubleday, Page & Company, New York
Source: Available at selected libraries

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*The World's Work, August, 1907.

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The American people have been liberal in their gifts to the blind. Their attitude has been one of sincere interest and kindly expectation of success. There has been generous provision to educate the children and to surround the aged with comfort. Yet the truth forces itself upon those who study the problem that much remains to be done, that there is some important work which has not been even started in many of our States.

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To begin at the beginning, we have found that much blindness is unnecessary, that perhaps a third of it is the result of disease which can be averted by timely treatment. Then the instruction of parents and friends in the care of blind children needs to be carried to every corner of the country. We have before us a long campaign of education to teach parents that they must encourage sightless children to romp and play and grow strong as their seeing brothers and sisters do. Failure to understand this, and the natural inclination to shield and pamper defective children impose upon the schools the unnecessary burden of straightening crooked backs and deformed limbs and correcting nervous habits, engendered by lack of intelligent discipline at home. The backward condition of the pupils when they enter the schools for the blind accounts in part for the failure of some of our institutions in the work they are intended to do. The failure is due partly to the inadequacy of the schools themselves. Thus we find need of improvement in training from babyhood to adult life; and finally we discover a large class of adult blind persons for whom, as yet, no provision has been made in most American communities.

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The records recently gathered by investigators show that even the educated, industrious blind cannot earn their living without more special assistance than they now receive. They are so severely handicapped throughout life that they cannot shift for themselves. Even after careful training and apprenticeship, they still need help to find their place in the world of workers, a world which often does not believe that they can work. Step by step they must prove their ability. At the present time, thousands of such American men and women are living idle, dependent lives. The cause of their unproductive dependence is the error of not carrying their education far enough, and of not providing them with suitable employment. I can explain the situation by outlining what seems to be the main tendency of the education of the blind in Europe.

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The effort there is to give them trades and handicrafts by means of which they can earn their bread, or part of it. The aim of the best European education is to make each individual self-supporting. The blind require special teaching to enable them to use the senses of hearing and touch in the place of sight, to live and toil in the dark.

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When philanthropists first approach the problem, they expect that education will develop in the blind extraordinary mental capacities. They reason that blind persons, shut out from everyday distractions, will enjoy great concentration of mind, and as a result will be poets, musicians, and thinkers. Such was the dream of Valentin Haüy in France and Dr. S. G. Howe in Boston, and such to-day is the dream of the good Queen of Roumania. But experience taught Haüy and Howe that the poets, the musicians, and the philosophers were not forthcoming. We have to deal with a miscellaneous class of defective persons who are often not only blind, but weak from the very cause that destroyed their sight. From confinement and want of exercise they are often deficient in vitality and dulled in mind. In such conditions of body and mind genius can hardly flourish. It is true that blind men sometimes have the divine spark in them. They have become distinguished in art, in science, in literature. But whatever eminence they have attained has been in spite of their misfortune, and not because of it. The great exceptions cheer and encourage us; but they remain exceptions. The question is, what shall be done with the uninspired majority?

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In Europe it was soon found that the wisest course is not to direct their instruction wholly toward things of the intellect, but provide trades and industries by means of which they can earn a livelihood. The more advanced schools of Europe try to give them an education suited to their common intelligence and their uncommon infirmity, and the work of the schools is supplemented and made practical by societies which help them to put their education to the best use as ordinary, industrious, self-respecting citizens. The vicissitudes of business are so complicated that they easily miss their few chances of sell-support, unless they have special organizations to find positions for them, to advertise their abilities and persuade the community to give the blind musician, or teacher, or broom-maker, or masseur, or whatever he may be, profitable employment. There are such organizations in Europe that use every effort to bring industrial training within the reach of all the blind, and are the channels through which the true end of education and charity for the sightless is achieved.

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