Education: Let Them Speak

The young Scotsman who had been a professor at the struggling experimental school in Northampton, Mass, was naturally delighted that his invention had proved such a success. But when he sat down to write his mother the news, he was not thinking of his own fame or fortune. “Now,” wrote Alexander Graham Bell, “we shall have money enough to teach speech to little deaf children.” As a matter of fact, had he not been trying to find an instrument to help such children, he might never have started experimenting with the telephone in the first place.

Today, at Northampton’s Clarke School for The Deaf, a telephone is still called an Alexander. But to the school’s faculty, the invention is not what Bell is primarily remembered for. He was for 51 years teacher, adviser and president of the board. More important, he was, like the school, a pioneer in persuading the U.S. that a child born deaf can be taught to speak rather than have to rely on the language of signs. Founded in 1867, Clarke has the oldest wholly oral program for the deaf in the U.S.

Train the Remnant. Last week, as it began its 88th year, Clarke was already embarked on a centennial fund-raising campaign for $3,000,000. At the head of the campaign was another distinguished former board president and teacher, who met her future husband while she was on the faculty. In spite of the high place to which marriage took her, Mrs. Calvin Coolidge has remained devoted to Clarke. “I never hear a deaf child,” she once wrote, “that my heart does not go out to it. I breathe a prayer that fortune may favor it by bringing it to a school where it may be taught as the children at Clarke School are taught.”

The school’s method is based on the belief that the totally deaf person is almost nonexistent; even those who seem totally deaf to others usually have some slight remnant of hearing. With the help of powerful hearing aids, that remnant can be trained to distinguish speech rhythms. Sign language, Clarke insists, produces only a limited vocabulary. It calls attention to the handicap, keeps the deaf child perpetually a stranger in the world of the hearing.

Balloons & Feathers. The school’s 150 pupils range from 4½ to the late teens. When they enter Clarke, many have never said a word, not even their own names. To get the sound “buh-buh-buh” across, a teacher may place her lips against a balloon, while the pupil places his on the other side. As the sound is repeated, the pupil learns it from the vibrations he feels. The “f” sound can be taught by holding a feather close to the mouth and seeing how it flutters when the consonant is spoken correctly. Puffing at a slip of paper trains the cheek muscles; blowing at a candle flame helps control breathing.

Sometimes pupils draw a blank at particular sounds. But the teaching process goes on every minute of the day. Once a teacher heard a little boy crying “eeeeee” while at play, immediately rushed out to make him repeat the sound again and again. Up until that moment, the boy had never been able to pronounce any word with the “ee” sound in it.

From letters and sounds, the children go on to whole words, master about 30 verbs by the end of their first pre-school year. Then, as their vocabularies mount, they learn to read lips. After that they can take on regular school subjects. But they are constantly encouraged to talk.

At Alexander Graham Bell’s suggestion, Clarke started the first U.S. teacher-training program in oral education for the deaf, now has some 500 alumni all over the world. As for its regular pupils, about half get through high school, 18% through college. But the main thing, says Principal George T. Pratt, who came to Clarke because his own daughter was deaf, is that by learning to talk, all get a chance to share, at least in part, the normal world of the hearing. This, Bell once said, “is one of the greatest achievements in the world.” Adds one Clarke teacher: “It is also one of the greatest satisfactions—watching a deaf child light up like a little Christmas tree when he’s got the thought you’re trying to put over.”