Library Collections: Document: Full Text

It is too late to express a conviction that methodical signs cannot be abandoned. This should have been done before the abandonment took place, at least before it took place in the school of Sicard. Were the writer to express a conviction, that there is no such place as Paris, the Parisians would, questionless, remain living entities, in spite of his doubts. So is it in the case. Whoever may withhold his belief from the assertion, the deaf and dumb will, nevertheless, continue to be instructed without the use of methodical signs; as they have been already, for more than two centuries and a half.

The writer cannot help believing, that those who deny the practicability of this, make the denial, because practice has not taught them to modify their schoolroom processes, to meet the new exigency introduced by the change. They would speak with more accuracy, were they to assert the impossibility of discarding methodical signs, and of still continuing to instruct as though methodical signs were still in use. A knight of the twelfth century, divested of his mail, and accoutred as a modern warriour, might be supposed to say, "I cannot dispense with that massive armour. I am convinced that such weapons and such defences are essential to the noble art of war. They can never be laid aside." And why? Because he conceives that he must always do battle, with lance in rest, as a mailed knight should.

If the objectors, along with methodical signs, will abandon the unwise method of verbatim dictation; if they will throw their pupils a little more upon their own resources, and force them to think, as often as they write; if they will start from a point no higher than that at which the pupil is fully competent to begin with them, and be sure never to advance with so impatient speed as to leave him behind; if, finally, they will themselves write a great deal, and make signs comparatively little, before the eyes of their classes in the schoolroom, and in their conversations with individuals out; they will shortly see whether the artificial and mischievous system of methodical signs cannot be abandoned. In view of the comparative labour imposed upon the instructor by the two methods proposed, severally considered, a sluggish man may prefer that which exacts the least thought, which affords him a mechanical means of teaching against time, which involves the necessity of little preparation for his daily task, and of quite as little scrutiny into the actual progress of his pupils. But a wise man, a benevolent man, I might almost say a conscientious man, will choose rather a method, which admits of no such perversion, and one of which it is a characteristic to verify the completeness of its results as it proceeds; in spite of the labour which such a method imposes, and in spite of the time which it exhausts.

In reference to articulation, the writer expresses, as he believes, the opinion of the vast majority of teachers and others, when he says, that, in the cases of those whose organs of speech are flexible, whose voices are agreeable, and whose sense of hearing is not entirely extinct, it seems highly desirable that this accomplishment should be taught. How much more desirable, then, is it, when the individuals, though deaf from an early age, have not become absolutely dumb, but only silent, and when they may yet be easily induced to utter words from memory. To teach such persons to recognize written or printed words, as the same they have been accustomed! to pronounce, only under a different form, is still something of a task, unless they have been made acquainted with alphabetic characters, before losing their hearing. But the power of correct articulation exists, and this it is, which, in ordinary cases, it constitutes the great labour to impart. The class of persons here spoken of, is not so small as is commonly believed. There are ten, at least, out of one hundred and forty pupils now present in the New-York Institution, capable of speaking, several of them fluently, and two or three of the number quite competent to conduct, on their own part, a conversation in words, reading replies on the lips, with the help of an occasional explanatory sign.

The preference of the writer would therefore be for a mixed method, combining, as does that of the Institution at Paris, at the present time, the second and the third of the homogenous methods, and rejecting methodical signs. It is this method, which, in large institutions, will doubtless ultimately prevail. But in a case, in which an instructor is able to confine his whole attention to an individual pupil, or to two or three, apart from a community of deaf-mutes, the first or the third pure method, uncombined with any other, seems rather to be chosen.

A few remarks will be superadded, in reference to that, which has been already mentioned, as constituting, in this art, the peculiar labour of modern times, viz: the perfection of a philosophical method of teaching language. It is now a principle, regarded as fundamental in the art, that deaf-mutes must acquire a knowledge of alphabetic language, by means essentially the same as those, by which ordinary children learn to speak.