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PUBLISHED IN THE INTERESTS OF BETTER SPEECH

Alexander Graham Bell, Chairman Advisory Committee
Fred De LAND, Editor

THE VOLTA REVIEW does not hold itself responsible for the opinions of its contributors. Courteous, concise
discussions of timely topics are always welcomed, either in the form of letters to the Editor or otherwise. And if
you disapprove of the editorial management of the magazine, do not hesitate to clearly point out its failings. Con-
structive criticism is always serviceable.

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The Outgrowth of Stammering. By Ernest Tompkins, M. E.

The Importance of Practice in Lip-Reading. By Alice N. Trask, with portrait

Applied General Phonetics for Missionaries and Students of Languages. By James Geddes, Jr.,
with set of face diagrams

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THE VOLTA REVIEW

THE SPEECH-READING AND SPEECH MAGAZINE

Published Monthly in the Interests of Better Speech by the Volta Bureau, 35th Street and Volta Place, Washington, D. C.

Volume 19

JANUARY, 1917

Number 1

THE DRIFT OF OPINION AS TO PURE ORAL DEPARTMENTS IN COMBINED SYSTEM SCHOOLS

BY E. S. TILLINGHAST

HE editor of THE VOLTA REVIEW

Tand others interested have requested qualified affirmative are included the ex

that the results of an inquiry conducted by the writer last spring be published. Hence the following article.

In the letter of inquiry, which was addressed to all superintendents or principals of schools for the deaf in the United States and Canada, several questions were asked as to application blanks, as to permanent records kept of physical examinations and the reports of specialists, and as to the kind and amount of extension work attempted. Some valuable information touching these matters was received, but the question of most general interest, and the one to which attention is here confined, was stated thus:

"If you have none, would you arrange a completely segregated pure oral department in your school, if it were possible to secure the necessary funds?"

Fifty-three replies were received to this question, and, including the opinion of the writer, fifty-four schools were represented in the opinions expressed. Among these, the State schools of Washington, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Indiana are not included.

The replies may be briefly summarized

as follows:

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ecutive heads of the schools now generally recognized as pure oral. In the second group of more or less qualified affirmatives are included Superintendents Jones, Tate, Milligan, Rogers, McDermid, and the writer.

This group appear in the main to believe that a segregated primary oral department is essential to broadly successful oral work in a combined system school; but they also believe that after deaf children have had a fair opportunity to acquire fixed habits of speech and speech reading they should enjoy the benefits and pleasure of using the sign language, while continuing under classroom instruction by the oral method.

Ex-Principal Connor, of Georgia, and Superintendent Rothert, of Iowa, reply with a direct negative, the latter adding "Emphatically no!" Superintendent Currier, of New York, replies as follows: "Every child is taught orally for a period of three years. Then such as fail to make proper response are limited to one hour per day for speech work." Superintendent Ray, of North Carolina, replies: "I think not." plies: "I think not." Former Superintendent Walker, of Wisconsin: "I would like to try the experiment. I am not confident of results." And Superintendent Wheeler, of Connecticut: "Possibly for primary departments." Superintendents. Morrison, of Missouri, and Gardner, of

Arkansas, seem to think such a plan would not be practicable in their schools, and that an attempt to apply it would result in more trouble than good.

It is noticeable that practically all replies from the eight or ten persons who have become the executive heads of schools within the last five years are in the affirmative, showing the rapid drift of opinion as the leaders of the older generation retire and younger men take their places.

In the main, those who qualify their answers or reply in the negative are those who have had very long and intimate experience with the deaf. Without exception, those who answer with a qualified affirmative are men who have an excellent working knowledge of, and facility in, the use of the sign language.

While the answers recorded above are very suggestive of the probable lines of development which American schools for the deaf will follow in the next decade, they of course prove nothing as to the real merits of the question. An astonishing percentage of teachers, or perhaps we should use the more distinguishing term, educators, are proverbially sheeplike in their willingness to follow first one group of leaders and then another, who bring forward new theories and "methods" or old methods revamped in attractive guise. The rise and fall of the "five-slate system" very likely will soon furnish a pertinent illustration of this fact. The history of education will afford any number of others. There seems to be little doubt that when the education of the deaf is placed upon a really scientific basis many of our present theories and practises will be sadly upset.

On the whole, however, it appears that Mr. John D. Wright's question, "Eventually why not now?" is quite to the point. The only reply in most cases relates to the difficulties of providing for the immediate and ultimate additional expense involved.

Thus the once quite popular slogan of combined-system advocates, "Any method for results, all methods and wedded to none," now needs to be interpreted or applied rather differently. In primary

instruction, at least, it is generally conceded that the pure oral method does get "results," and the school claiming to use "all methods" must include the pure oral method. To do so it must have a segregated oral department, or else become an entirely pure oral school. There is no other compromise or alternative.

On one point the most rabid oralists and anti-oralists can easily agree: unless speech and speech-reading are developed to the point of habitual automatic response-a means of practical every-day communication-then it is a failure, and pupil, parent, the public, and the poor teacher, all have a right to complain of the vast disparity between the time and effort put forth and the results attained. After years of wrangling and heated pointing out of failures, instead of searching out the exact causes of these failures. both camps seem now to have advanced another step in agreement on the seemingly very simple proposition that a speech environment is necessary to the development of the speech habit.

As indicative of the general drift of opinion, nothing quoted in the present article is more significant than the following from a carefully prepared recent address by Mr. Jay Cooke Howard, President of the National Association of the Deaf. (The italics are ours.)

"Children without residual hearing should be carefully examined as to their capacity for speech and speech-reading. They should be given a thorough trying out along these lines under the most competent and experienced teachers, favored by proper conditions and environment. If able to make satisfactory progress in their education, and at the same time acquire practical speech and speech-reading, they should be kept in a speech environment until the "speech habit" is fired. Those who are unable to make satisfactory progress in their education, or are unable to develop practical speech and speech-reading, should be taught by the manual method."

Coming from the very head and fountain of the most persistent and bitter organized national opposition to oral methods for decades, this indicates very clearly

a dawning light and a better day for the deaf. It is a clear demand for sound oral teaching-oralism under conditions where success is most possible, not almost impossible. It is a clear admission that a great deal of oralism in combined-system schools in the past has been radically wrong, of a time-serving, try-to-pleaseeverybody, and save-money type, discouraging to the teacher, disheartening to pupil and parent, deceptive to the public, and in the ultimate analysis costly to the State, as all wrong conditions in education must be. Of course, bright children have been educated in these schools in spite of, not because of, this wrongly conditioned oralism. Just as hardy patients by thousands doubtless survived the blood-letting doctors of a century ago, who thought nothing of trying to save at sick man's life by depriving him of several pints of his very life blood! But who shall count the weak who fell by the wayside?

It may well be in the new day that the independent educated deaf of Mr. Howard's class and the superintendents who know and love the sign language-its weakness as well as its strength-and the recent generation of deaf who have drunk to the bitter dregs the cup of oral futility under conditions where success was almost impossible shall stand together on common ground with Mr. Wright and

TH

Miss Yale and THE VOLTA REVIEW and the Annals in a universal demand for "Not more speech, but better"; and they shall turn their batteries of wit and reason, the searchlight's tireless scrutiny, and pitiless publicity not upon mere “oralism" upon futile oralism, sham or "pure oralism" or "c. p. oralism," but oralism, whether taught by entirely competent difficulty or under excellent conditions by teachers under conditions of superhuman time-serving, half-educated, half-trained, young teachers, and thus force a readjustment of present standards, a realignment of public opinion, and an irresistible. demand that every deaf child in every State in the Union shall have a fair and square chance to get a pure oral education, if he has the capacity.

This (1917) centennial year of the establishment of the first school for the deaf in the United States, when both the American Convention and the National Association meet at Hartford, and when a very able Committee on Efficiency are to report on the strength and weakness of our present system of educating the deaf, seems a most propitious time for such an agreement upon vital essentials as shall set the pace for an equally marvelous advance in the next hundred years of the education of the deaf as has marked the past century.

A FAIR CHANCE FOR EVERY DEAF CHILD
BY JOHN DUTTON WRIGHT

HE adoption by the Board of Directors of the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf of my resolution in favor of the establishment of a segregated oral department in every school for the deaf, offered at their last meeting and amended by President Lyon, as reported in the December number of THE VOLTA REVIEW by the President, would seem to present a proper opportunity to review and summarize the whole question.

For more than twenty-five years I have maintained in private discourse and in

public utterance that NO DEAF CHILD NEED BE DUMB, and that no deaf child has had a fair chance to acquire the utmost facility in speech and speech-reading of which he is individually capable unless he has been taught, during the early years of his educational life, by the speech method in an exclusively speech atmosphere, without being exposed to the use of the sign language or finger-spelling by any one with whom he comes in contact.

Twenty years ago (January, 1897), in an article in The Century Magazine, I said:

"It is beginning to be realized that all deaf children should at least have a trial under this (the oral) method.

The State of Pennsylvania has taken the matter into its own hands and has passed a law declaring that a State appropriation for the education of the deaf shall not be available unless facilities are provided for giving each pupil a trial under the pure oral method. ..As this is an article on the speech and speech-reading of the deaf, those so-called "combined" schools where only an hour or two a day is devoted to the teaching of speech and speech-reading may be passed with a brief reference. Their results in teaching the congenitally deaf to speak and understand the speech of others are unsatisfactory, for a pupil cannot be expected to acquire those difficult arts with his share, perhaps a tenth or twentieth of an hour a day. One might much better expect to learn to speak Greek fluently by studying it twenty minutes a day and devoting the rest of the time exclusively to writing and reading English. I therefore pass on to the pure oral method, which alone can give the pupil a practical and working knowledge of speech, both uttered and read from the lips."

That was twenty years ago. Today the combined schools devote much more time each day to teaching orally than they did in 1897, but still the average results of their speech teaching with the congenitally deaf are not as good as the average results obtained where no recourse is had to the sign language or finger-spelling. Slowly the conviction has grown in the minds of those in charge of the combined schools that this inequality is due to the lack of a "speech atmosphere" surrounding the pupils during the educational years, and that their efforts to do the best oral work with those pupils who are, in their judgment, fitted for it cannot reach the highest possible success until they are able to supply this speech atmosphere and thus really use the oral method.

In the course of an article entitled "The Necessity of a Speech Environment," published in the Annals of the Deaf March, 1916, I said:

"One cannot learn to swim except in a

water environment. What teacher of the art of flying would attempt to instruct his pupils except in an air environment? . . .

"No one can learn to use and understand speech automatically and uncon– sciously without being wholly plunged into a speech atmosphere wherein the use of speech is a necessity.

"As we cannot learn to swim without swimming, or to fly without flying, or to walk without walking, so we cannot learn to speak without speaking. But the muscular coördinations involved in fluent speech are so complicated and so delicate and so slightly perceptible to consciousness that an immense number of repetitions is required before the actions become reflexive and instantaneous. This is doubly true when it must be done without the aid of the organ of hearing provided by nature for the purpose of assisting us to acquire speech. Even those of us who have been engaged for many years in teaching deaf children to speak and to understand speech do not always realize how many times the organs of speech and speech-reading require to be exercised before anything approaching normal fluency and automatism can be

obtained.

"To have an idea automatically suggest a spoken form, or a spoken form automatically suggest an idea, even in the case of a hearing child, demands many hundreds of repetitions. If a deaf child could see a word as often at the moment when that word's idea was in his mind, or have as many opportunities to use the word when he needed it as the hearing child, he would acquire speech and speech-reading with something approaching the same rapidity. But under the most favorable conditions of environment in a speech atmosphere the deaf child has only a small proportion of the opportunities to speak and to understand speech that are enjoyed by the hearing child. . .

"In the best combined schools the maximum time that any of the pupils are in the class-room in charge of oral teachers is five hours a day, five days a week. Many of them have much less than that. The classes number from eight to twelve. The average is about ten pupils to each

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