merely relative at best, and to excel in method, to secure the notoriety of fame, to win the preferments the profession offers, and to sit in its chief seats are as sweet to the pedagogue as to the politician. These may not be the worthiest compensations but they are tangible ones which have brought joy to many a teacher and induced many others to do better work in the schoolroom. Men may live for money but they will die for fame.

Finally, "he who teaches is best taught," and the opportunity afforded the teacher to perfect himself in scholarship is no small element in the extrafinancial compensations of his position. The effort to teach develops the power of self-expression, the power to convince, and the ability to think. The teacher who does not daily find his life richer in intellectual attainments while with pride and joy he watches the unfolding of his pupils has wretchedly missed his calling.

In this brief paper I have not attempted to enumerate all of the other compensations of the teacher, but I trust that I have at least indicated that the salary, important as is that feature to all of us, is not the full measure of the schoolmaster's earnings and rewards.

SCHOOLS FOR DEFECTIVES IN CONNECTION WITH
THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

C. G. PEARSE, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, MILWAUKEE, WIS. The generations that have succeeded since the days of our Aryan ancestors have taught us much as to our duty toward the less fortunate members of our society. We have learned, in particular, much as to our duty toward those children-members of our society-who are born without, or who after birth lose, certain of the powers of body or mind by which normal children learn the things which other people know in the same manner that other people learn them.

There is much reason to suppose that in the earlier stages of our history those unfortunates who were born, or in infancy became, blind or deaf or greatly deformed, were got rid of in the easiest way-were exposed upon the mountain or in the forest, or in some other way eliminated from membership in the family and the community to which they promised to be a burden.

Later these unfortunate children were allowed to live and to inhabit the home. They were given scant care and received no suitable teaching. In the homes of the more barbarous peoples they were not infrequently treated with scorn, suffered indignities and cruelties, and led lives of wretchedness. Without thoughtful or kindly teaching, they developed, if at all, only in those lines. which they were able to pursue without aid. If the tormented current of their lives, hemmed in and beaten back from the usual channels of development, did in occasional instances show depth or power, such instances were exceptions, and the result of accident.

The conditions of these children improved with our growing civilization,

and our sense of responsibility toward them grew. From running neglected about the homes, they came to be cared for in physical comfort. Then some effort at teaching them began. Men and women with better vision and a finer spirit of helpfulness came to believe and to teach that for these, too, education might do much; that proper education might help them to overcome in a considerable degree nature's handicap and to develop in large measure those powers and abilities possessed by their normal fellow-men.

The first stage of this special education has been in progress for many years. It has been carried on almost exclusively in state and private institutions. In some of these the purpose of the institution was chiefly educational; in other cases the institution, while giving some attention to education, partook more of the nature of an asylum, where the inmates were more likely to stay permanently.

These institutions-schools at once, and asylums-have done great good. In them have been developed a knowledge of these children, an understanding of their needs and limitations, their desires, their aspirations and their possibilities. In these institutions, too, through intelligent application of educational principles to the various conditions of facts supplied by these children, has grown up the body of educational theory and practice for these various lines of special work. This body of special educational theory and practice is today not only making it possible for these children to receive the benefits of education in a degree far beyond what was possible in the past, but has, I believe, already made it possible to take generally the next forward step in the education of several classes of them, namely, to educate them, at least thru the years of childhood and the earlier years of youth, in day schools connected with the public schools, where they may remain a part of the home circle, members of the community, meeting and growing familiar with normal people and their ways, instead of being segregated in special institutional schools, where they form a class apart, growing each year less familiar with and less able to meet, and be comfortable in the society of, normal people.

Most of the states provide generously in institutions for the children of the state who are blind, deaf, feeble-minded. It is not seen how at present these institutions can be dispensed with. We may never be able to do without them. Probably three out of four classes of mental defectives should, and must always, be cared for in institutions partaking more or less of the nature of asylums. Some blind or deaf children are defective in other ways. Schools for these special classes require special appliances and equipment and specially trained teachers. Some times the number of children of this class is too small to make it practicable to keep up the special school in the home community. For all these, the institution seems at present the alternative.

Parents cling to their children. Normal parents hesitate to send them out from the home circle. Children in possession of all their senses, able to care for and protect themselves in the usual way, are best at home, and parents rightly wish to keep them there. But to children who are unfortunate, who

are in greater or less degree helpless, unable to protect themselves from neglect or cruelty, parents cling with especial tenderness, and such children they are especially unwilling to see taken from the home beyond the reach of mother's ministrations and father's watchful care. For this reason many children are not sent to the state institutions, and grow up without proper education, to become abnormal, unhappy members of society, too often a burden of expense to the home or to the state. The day school, where the child might attend and at the same time remain a member of the home would frequently prevent this.

But where these children, defective in some of the senses, or in some powers of the mind, go from home and become members of an institution, they lose the influence of the family, that fundamental unit of our society. They are separated from the love of father and mother; they do not know the companionship of brothers and sisters. All the sweet experiences of the home are unknown to them. They are deprived of its responsibilities and cares and of its sorrows, which do so much to humanize the soul and develop wholesome character. They become part of a special community with special environment, to which is given special care and protection, and whose members are exempted to a considerable degree from the duties and responsibilities that fall to the lot of the average member of society. In some cases special methods of communication between the members of these institutions exist. All these things tend to shape these children into a class apart.

Year by year while becoming proficient in certain accomplishments and developing in certain directions, they are becoming more and more habituated to life in an institution, more dependent upon it and upon the special conditions, special privileges, special care, and special relief from responsibilities which institutional life begets. This is a condition into which they would not fall if they might remain in their homes, receiving in day schools such special instruction as they require.

Unless we are to develop special varieties of the human species, for whom we must provide special communities of refuge, children of these special classes must be so taught as to reduce or minimize the effect of their abnormality, and draw them toward the normal type of social citizenship. To do this, they must remain in and a part of the community instead of being segregated and kept from contact with it through all their most formative years. After completing their formal education and taking up the work of life, these children will not seek the society of their normal fellows unless they can be comfortable with them-unless they understand them and their ways and their means of communication. If they are to mingle with the society which surrounds them and are to remain a part of it, their abnormal or atypical characteristics growing less and less marked and noticeable, they must grow up in the community, each of them as one of its units; they must not grow up separated from their normal fellow-men, in a special community under special conditions, which every month render them less in touch with their normal fellows, less able to

meet and mingle with, to understand and be understood by them, and more and more dependent for happiness and well being upon the special conditions to which they have grown accustomed. Every year of institutional life is likely to leave them with less knowledge of the natural world and less ability and less desire to mingle with and be happy in it.

Among the earliest schools for defectives in connection with the public schools were the day schools for the deaf. These children can move about with little difficulty and comparative safety; it is easy to gather in almost any good-sized town enough such pupils to form a class. If this class is in connection with a public school, the pupils may at recess and at other times, mix with the other children at their play and on the street, receiving this education, as well as that of the home and the schoolroom.

These day schools use the oral method of instruction with their pupils, the purpose being to teach them the things that other children learn, and at the same time teach them to speak and to understand what is said to them by their teachers and schoolmates as well as by hearing persons, thru reading the lips of those who speak and without the aid of signs. This ability most of them acquire in a good degree by the time they have finished the work laid down for the grades below the high school. They are able to finish this work, too, at an age not very different from the age at which hearing children finish. By the time these pupils have completed the common school work they usually have enough command of language, and of the knowledge conventional among us so that they can either enter upon some business or employment from which deafness does not bar them; or they can go on into the high school or to some other higher school, entering classes and maintaining their places with hearing pupils.

The sign language usually taught in the institutions, either alone or in combination with the oral method is not taught in the day schools. The whole system is directed toward giving the child, while acquiring the elements of knowledge, the power of speech and the power to understand the speech of the hearing people about him.

Recently there has been a strong plea by many teachers in institutional schools for the deaf, for the use of a combined method-a method of instruction that shall give both the sign language and the power of lip reading and speech. They have been joined in this request by many of the educated deaf who maintain that the sign language is easier and quicker for them, and that they prefer it.

Perhaps if these educated deaf had not been taught the sign language and used it for many years in institutions it would not have been easier or quicker. But even if it were, I do not believe it should be used in our day schools; probably not in our institutions. The primary purpose in educating the deaf, as in the case of other atypical classes, ought to be to enable them to live in the community with its normal members, and themselves as nearly normal as may be.

The tendency in the past has been for deaf persons, educated in institutions and taught in the sign language, to return to the institution or to its vicinity, there to form colonies of deaf, living in the neighborhood and intermarrying. Anything which tends to this result is a danger and ought to be counteracted. Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, to whom the deaf and their education owe so much, discussed this danger in a paper on "The Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race," read more than twenty years ago before the American Academy of Sciences. In this paper he showed by voluminous statistics that deafness has a tendency to follow in families; that the number of children. born deaf is increasing in proportion faster than the total number of children born; that the number of deaf children born to deaf parents is increasing faster than the number of deaf children born to the people at large. Everything, then, which can be done to merge the deaf into the body of society at large; to discourage and break up so far as is possible the habit acquired in institutions, of using and thinking in the sign language instead of in English; the habit of, and desire for association with other deaf persons rather than with hearing people; and the practice of intermarriage among the deaf, is a positive gain to the members of this atypical class, and to society at large. Dr. Bell says: "The grand central principle that should guide us then, in our search for preventive measures, should be the retention of the normal environment during the period of education. The natural tendency toward adaptation would then co-operate with instruction to produce accommodation to the permanent conditions of life." He concludes by saying, assuming the necessary skilled instruction for the child, "The school which would most perfectly fulfill the conditions required, would contain only one deaf child."

A great hindrance in the teaching of deaf children has been the fact that they began to learn language and speech when they came to school, several years after normal children acquire these accomplishments. For this reason they are likely to master these arts less perfectly and to be later in getting an elementary education than our normal children. For a few years a departure in Pennsylvania, the School for Training Deaf Children in Speech before they are of School Age, has attracted marked attention. Into this school deaf children are taken for instruction at the age when normal children are learning language and speech at home. Experience here has shown that deaf children may in effect be almost as well grounded in language and speech by the time they reach the usual school age, as are their more fortunate mates who have all their The children may be taken to the school to live, or better, they may attend as day pupils, remaining members of the home. The lessons taught by this school are not unlikely to prove the greatest step forward in the teaching of deaf children that has been taken since oral teaching was established.

senses.

For children of defective vision or entirely blind, the day school in connection with the public schools provides the same opportunity to give these children the skilled instruction, and the special facilities which are necessary