Education: Quiet Convention

Two chorus girls shrilled “The Star Spangled Banner” but to most of those gathered in the grand ballroom of Manhattan’s Hotel Pennsylvania one night last week the result was so much meaningless lip motion. With better understanding they watched a female quintet who indicated “rockets’ red glare” spelling out “rockets” with their hands, touching two fingers to their lips (“red”), throwing open palms out from widened eyes (“glare”). Thus began New York’s quietest convention in 51 years—the 17th Triennial of the National Association of the Deaf, which has not met in Manhattan since its first convention in 1883.

Few delegates could read lips, and none could do so from a distance. In packed, tomb-still conference rooms delegates addressed each other with their hands, arms, heads.* Messages of greeting from President Roosevelt and Governor Lehman were spoken for the audience (hearers), wigwagged for the “optience” (seers). Senator Copeland and Mayor LaGuardia had the novel experience of addressing a crowd which neither heard nor heeded them but kept its eyes glued on a man who gave a running interpretation in manual alphabet-sign language.

Some 1,100 persons from the U. S., Mexico and Europe attended the convention. Most of them were set apart by inability to speak or hear or both but their chief convention problem was universal—jobs. They were worried by a tendency among employers during Depression to refuse jobs to deaf persons. To refute the commonest excuse offered N. A. D.’s retiring President William Shaub of St Louis last week reported on a 40-State survey which showed that the compensation and liability laws of not a single State discriminate against the deaf.

Declared the Association’s new president. Marcus L. Kenner of New York: “Government positions now closed to us, in the Post Office Department for instance, should be opened where competitive examinations favor us. . . .’

Other delegates last week were eagerly awaiting the results of a current nation-wide survey by the U. S. Office of Education to locate all unemployed deaf persons, find jobs for them in CWA and PWA, check up on the success of deaf persons in various occupations.

Biggest educational advance reported at the convention was the opening of Montana School for the Deaf and Blind at Great Falls. Biggest educational problem was what to do about the sign language. Some educators of the deaf (called “oralists”) are currently trying to discourage its use. They favor lipreading, say the use of sign language leads children to invent undesirable word pictures, hinders their learning the English language. Sign language adherents say that lipreading is an art which not all can master.

Up to argue this question last week rose Dr. Percival Hall, 62, tall, broad-shouldered president of Washington’s Gallaudet College, world’s only institution of higher learning for the deaf. An oralist, he has been teaching the deaf for 40 years. Wigwagged he: “My experience has been that teachers familiar with the manual alphabet and with the sign language are able to check most of the harmful ideas among deaf children.” Declaring for continued use of the sign language in deaf-school chapel services, he went on: “The appeal that can be made to the older boys and girls in this way is more important than the largely imagined injury to the learning of the English language.”

Between conference sessions Association members found time for plenty of fun and action. They held bridge, golf, chess tournaments. They went to Roerich Museum to inspect the First International Exhibition of Fine & Applied Arts by Deaf Artists. And by the time, at week’s end, 300 banqueters were raising their hands to render “Auld Lang Syne,” it was reported that six men and six women who had met at the convention were now engaged to be married.

*By manual alphabet words of any written language are spelled out letter by letter. The sign language consists solely of pictorial gestures. All educated deaf-mutes use both in combination, employing the slow manual alphabet only for words and ideas impossible to picture.