The borderland of deafness : a paper read at the meeting of the Union of Teachers on the Pure Oral System on Tuesday the 1st November 1904.

  • Barnes, F. G.
Date:
1[1904]
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The borderland of deafness : a paper read at the meeting of the Union of Teachers on the Pure Oral System on Tuesday the 1st November 1904. 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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    - \ ■■ THE BORDERLAND OF DEAFNESS. A paper read at the meeting of the Union of Teachers on the Pure Oral System on Tuesday the ist of Nov. igof by F. G. Barnes. Any child “too deaf to be taught in a class of hearing children in an elementary school” comes legally within the scope of the Deaf Act of 1893 and is required to attend a certified Deaf School. Addressing as I do this evening a gathering of experts who are all well acquainted with the conditions which obtain in our Schools and Institutions, and who know the various degrees of deafness and dumbness possessed by our pupils, I need not labour the point of the wide divergence shown by individual children—all what I call “legally” deaf. It is not within the scope of this evening’s paper to attempt to deal with all these sub-sections among children, but while I propose to devote myself specially to those on the Borderland—i.e. those who possess hearing power in so large a degree as to be almost fit to be educated in an ordinary class through the natural channel, the ear, and some of whom in fact might be styled very hard of hearing rather than deaf., I cannot help taking the opportunity of expressing the very de- cided opinions I hold on the want of proper classification among our children. Up to the present we have almost been compelled by force of circum- stance to attempt to deal with every child who came into our schools by one method of Instruction, to put them all through the same curriculum, and work our classes as “wholes,” whereas, from the fact that these classes contained children belonging to nearly all the sub-sections above referred to it was a physical impossibility to do justice to the individual child by such means. The best we could hope was to do as much as possible for the average child in the class, leave the dull ones behind, and keep the bright ones back a little—trusting that this unsatisfactory state of things might be remedied when the next time of rearranging the classes came round. But it is now recognized that there are some among our Deaf pupils who are so mentally deficient as to be unable to proceed on ordinary lines or receive any benefit from one rigid method of instruction. The establishment of my own school at Homerton, the first of its kind in this country, proves that this