Seventh report of the Home for the Training in Speech of Deaf Children before they are of School Age.

  • Home for the Training in Speech of Deaf Children before they are of School Age (Philadelphia, Pa.)
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Seventh report of the Home for the Training in Speech of Deaf Children before they are of School Age. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    school age, not as infants. The period most important in man’s life is lost. The first six years of our existence are more important for the future thaii any other twenty. It is during that period that ideas are first imbibed and most of our knowledge comes through the eye and not the ear. The first idea the infant in the cradle obtains is from sight, and when lying there helpless and you speak to it, its bright eye flashes upon you with a greater intensity than in after years it hardly ever possesses. They gather by sight from the lips of the mother, or those teaching them, the first ideas in their existence. Malformation in the voice hardly ever exists. Every baby born with a larynx, palate, tongue and who has teeth can talk; if they can make vocal sounds, they can learn to talk. It is rarely that you find a malformation in the organs of speech. Of all the senses given to the race, sight is the most important. As you open your eyes upon the creation, you gather all the ideas you have of objects that surround you. Whether you can hear or not makes no differ- ence with that class of knowledge. It has been tested and proven in this Home, begun first by the two Garrett sisters. The State of Pennsylvania makes now annually an appro- priation of money for its support, and what is the result? Graduates from that school have gone into the common schools of the country, taken their place in the school in every branch of learning and knowledge and stand- ing, many of them, first in their classes. I will have read by the clerk a few of these cases. * * * In a previous speech in Congress on the subject Mr. Grow said : I know a case in my own neighborhood where a child born with hearing was, just as she commenced to talk, attacked by scarlet fever, and when she recovered she was deaf. Her parents knew nothing about the scientific system of teaching such persons to understand and to use spoken lan- guage, but as the child had once spoken and was losing its speech, they continued to talk to it just as though it could hear. To-day that child, now a woman of mature age, can hold a conversation with anybody, and no stranger will know that she is deaf. I have intro- duced many of my friends to her, and after they have held conversation with her I have asked, “Do you know that that lady cannot hear anything?’’ They would not believe this to be the fact until convinced by the lady herself. In the discussion Mr. Shackleford asked: If this money was appropriated, would not the people of Pennsylvania have a monopoly? Mr. Grow.—No, sir; they do not have a cent of it. This money would go to pay the expenses of the persons that come from the different States to be taught. When these teachers return to their respective States where they live, their influence in establishing an approved institution in those States like this is the return for the money paid. This Home in Philadel- phia does not get a cent of the money donated. Mr. Shackleford.—One other question. Is there not a considerable per- centage of the persons teaching the deaf and dumb who believe that this is not a successful method? Mr. Grow.—That was the purport of the letters you got in the last Congress.* Mr. Shackleford.—Most of them are against this method of teaching. Mr. Grow.—I do not know what their opinions are. I know by the experience of this Home itself, and you know by the letters you have just heard read, that this method is a success. I have seen the children talking across the table at their meals, the same as any other children, and yet you have letters saying that it would be impossible to teach articulate language * These are the letters which killed the bill.