PAPERS AND DISCUSSIONS

PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL, WASHINGTON, D. C.

[STENOGRAPHICALLY REPORTED]

We have arrived at an important and critical period in the history of the department. This department originated with the teachers of the deaf. The blind and feeble-minded had no part in the original plan; they were brought in as a concession. For many years teachers of the deaf had felt an isolation, and they had a feeling that they wanted to come into affiliation with other teachers of the country that they might gain something of value from them. But when, on their first application to the officials of the National Educational Association, they found that they could not be received as a department for the deaf, because all other special classes would ask to be likewise set off, others were included with us, and we were labeled with the name, "Deaf and Dumb, Blind, and Feeble-Minded." Thus we were constituted of incongruous elements, with little in common. Teachers of the deaf did not like these associations, nor did teachers of the other classes. They did not wish to be known as defectives, or classified by a defect. A number of names were proposed for the department, but none seemed to satisfy. Finally, at the Detroit meeting last summer, a committee was appointed consisting of the executive officers of the department, to reorganize the department and to make effort to have its name changed. This committee acted and it adopted the following platform:

1. The name of the department shall be: " "Department of Special EducationRelating to Children Demanding Special Means of Instruction."

2. The object of the department shall be to bring persons engaged in the education of children requiring special methods of instruction into contact and affiliation with teachers in general for the interchange of ideas for mutual benefit.

3. All communications shall be non-technical in character for the purpose of securing an interchange of ideas between those engaged in general and those engaged in special education.

4. To secure from specialists papers of general interest for presentation to the general convention or its sections.

5. To secure from prominent educators the presentation of papers before this department.

6. All matters to be presented at any meeting shall be approved in advance by the executive committee.

At a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Association yesterday, the request for the change of the name of the department was presented,

and it gives me pleasure to announce that the request was granted by unanimous vote. So we are now and will hereafter be known as the "Department of Special Education."

The special idea of the department is to secure an interchange of ideas. Heretofore our papers have been technical. Teachers of the deaf have written addressing themselves to teachers of the deaf, and the teachers of the blind to teachers of the blind, etc. But teachers of the deaf and blind and feeble-minded have their own conventions for all this. At this moment the teachers of the blind are having a convention, and our vicepresident is now absent in attendance at that convention.

Now, we do not want at our meeting papers that may be presented by special teachers at their own conventions. The first object of the department is that our members may attend the meetings of other departments.

There is one special point on which we can all come together. A large number of pupils are in the public schools who have defective sight. or hearing, or are backward. The number having defective hearing probably outnumbers the total deaf-mute population. These pupils are not deaf enough for special schools. What is done with them, or for them? They are drifting along in the public schools, and teachers do not know what to do with them. Now cannot we, who teach the totally deaf, give you information who are teaching the partially deaf? And the teachers of the blind and of the feeble-minded, can they not help teachers who have children in their schools who are partially blind, or who are backward? This department should give special attention to these pupils.

The basal idea of this department is the interchanging of ideas between specialists and ordinary teachers. So when we listen we want men, not specialists like ourselves, but some great, broad men to come to look down upon our little fields, like Dr. Butler, and Dr. Harris, whom we have with us today. It used to be that schools for the deaf were shut off from all affiliation with other schools, but now we are graduating our pupils into the public schools. Columbia College, New York, has the distinction of having graduated the first congenital deaf student. And now, at the last commencement, Harvard University graduates three deaf men. These men received their preparatory training at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf, Boston, and the Clarke School for the Deaf, Northampton. We are progressing in these matters, and the line of progress is for affiliation between special schools and their work with the ordinary educational system. There is no limit to which the blind cannot aspire, and it is beginning to be so with the deaf, and with the deaf-blind, as witness the case of Helen Keller, both deaf and blind, and yet now successfully pursuing a college course among the hearing and seeing.

RESPONSES TO THE ADDRESS OF WELCOME AT THE

OPENING SESSION

DR. WM. T. HARRIS, UNITED STATES COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION

[STENOGRAPHICALLY REPORTED]

It seems to me that this meeting will be considered an epoch, not only to the teachers of the deaf, of the blind, and of the feeble-minded, but to teachers of all other classes of children. I enter heartily into Dr. Bell's plan by which mutual benefit will result to special and general teachers alike. The special teacher focuses his mind on special difficulties; then invents methods and devices by which the difficulties are removed; then he gives papers relating to these devices and general teachers learn for their own uses.

There are various defects over which we must lift our pupils; if they are not attended to, the children become morose and disheartened. What a stream of reforms will come in the methods of special education thru the meetings of this department and thru hearing your papers! A visit to a School for the Feeble-Minded in Lincoln, that I once made, was worth more to me than much that was gained from normal study of normal children. The will power is a necessary factor in developing the intellect, and the feeble-minded child is especially lacking in will power. He is trained upon the line of his lack. Control of the will is the first step; this taken, other steps may be taken in education.

The German poet gives answer to the query, what makes life worth living? "Life is worth living if you can only do something by which you make others better." This body, by specializing, will systematize the matter of lifting defective children over the thresholds of difficulty. Then by detailing their methods to general teachers, they multiply twentyfold, and more, the great benefits they confer.

PROF. A. H. KELLEY, BOSTON, MASS.

[STENOGRAPHICALLY REPORTED]

I remember with what delight I listened to Dr. Bell at the Horace Mann School, where the product of the work is the same as in our fields in a different way. I am asked to speak of Helen Keller, but about all that could be said of her has been said by Dr. Bell in speaking of her and of the three young deaf graduates of Harvard. The work being done by special classes is in line with what you are proposing in this department. In my district in Boston I have one of these special classes, and we have adopted the name of your department. We have in fact three of these classes. Why not more? It is exceedingly difficult to secure just the right kind of teachers to lift these children over the threshold of

difficulty of which Dr. Harris speaks. Our method is to visit-with the teacher-the homes of parents. I picked up little Harry S., nine or ten years of age, ragged and out at the toes. I turned him over to one of our bright, sympathetic teachers. I took her to his home and found a younger brother even more defective. We took Harry and the little brother away from home, to Waverly, where they are being cared for and trained. But these children, when in the same classes with other children, are the stumbling-blocks of the class. We must develop the motor power of the brain before the other powers. A boy as long as his teacher sat by could do anything he was asked, but without the teacher he would do nothing. We brought in the manual-training bench, the saw, the plane, etc. At once the boy was happy. Something was brought into his life that meant happiness.

I believe this is one of the grandest movements that has been started, and Dr. Bell's name will be handed down as one who has done much to bring into these darkened lives light and new power and new life. Dr. Bell has asked the question if we have statistics as to the proportion of pupils that have defective powers. To a certain extent they have been collected, but not to such an extent as to give definite facts. But the start has been made. With sixty pupils in a room, in order to do good work they ought to be pretty much alike. If we could only get classes down to normal size, the work could be more specialized. We have made request of teachers that they send us names of all pupils considered as defective. Upon these cases being investigated, some are found not seriously defective; others are segregated. What effect has such an inquiry upon parents, I am asked? We get around that by adopting the name "special school," "special teacher," the latter specially qualified, avoiding the name "feeble-minded" in any connection.

LESSONS TO BE LEARNED BY THE GENERAL TEACHER FROM TEACHING LANGUAGE TO THE DEAF

F. W. BOOTH, MT. AIRY, PHILADELPHIA, PA.

It is a well-understood fact that principles are discovered, or are most easily apprehended, in cases of their extreme application; for it is then they stand out in bold relief, unconfused and unincumbered, and the mind readily conceives them and accepts them as fundamental, persistent, and essential. Again, it is well understood that the conditions of health, for securing it or preserving it, are best made known thru the study of various conditions and degrees of illness. Thus the student of medicine attends the medical college, not so much to study books and to receive instruction from able preceptors, but because he there finds in the clinics, the laboratories, and the dissecting rooms diseases, disorders, maimings,

and deformities centered and massed, and he gains in brief time in their study, and the study of remedial and corrective agents applied, knowledge and skill that he could not by any possibility gain elsewhere and in other ways in a lifetime.

But what of the science of education, and what of the schools where this science is taught? There are normal schools and colleges, and normal institutes and associations, small and large, in countless number, but in them all, without exception, the center of their work and study is the normal child. But as the normal person in full health would be but a poor subject for a medical clinic for purposes of study or demonstration, it would seem that the normal child cannot be the best material, or sufficient material at least, for the normal school for purposes of experimental study and practice. When we consider that the normal child acquires much the larger part of his knowledge without the aid or art of the teacher, and that this self-acquired knowledge is a potent and necessarily a variable factor as entering into all formal and directed study, it ceases to be remarkable that the old pedagogical problems continue so persistently with us unsolved, and that solutions offered from time to time prove so inconclusive and generally unacceptable.

There is scarcely an educational theory that may be conceived that cannot be exploited and proven with the normal child as its subject, for, learning so much without teaching, he naturally learns much thru teaching, regardless of the method employed; so all methods are equally proven or are equally unproven in the considerable progress made. There are too many teaching forces involved in the development of the normal child to make possible the clear tracing of any one of them thru its successive stages to its ultimate and invariable effect; hence the very slow advancement in all the centuries in educational science. We educate in larger numbers and in more subjects than they did a thousand years ago, but it may well be questioned if we educate to better knowledge and larger power than when the ancient philosophers and scholars held sway.

But if the normal child, the child who follows teaching easily upon almost any line it may take, is not proper, or the best, material for experimental study, the question forces itself, where can proper or better material be found? In algebra we solve problems by process of elimination, by ridding the equation of one factor after another until it is brought to its simplest terms and thus to the condition of easy solution. May we not do this in education — eliminate factors, one and another of the learning factors, from our problems, thereby rendering them simpler and easier for our study and solution? With the normal child this is impossible, for with him we may not eliminate or shut off from operation any important learning power or teaching influence. Nature is nature, and she will not be balked or far diverted by the pigmy devices and tem