Papers on deaf-mutism / by James Kerr Love.

  • Love, James Kerr, 1858-1942
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Papers on deaf-mutism / by James Kerr Love. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    57/124 page 15
    give him the means of communication with the world around him, to teach him language; and at the same time we have to develop his mind, to discipline it, and make it a fitting instrument for the fulfilment of its destiny. And this is no easy task. Many people have an idea that the power to understand and speak the English language is innate, that we are born with the power, and that it comes to us without trouble and without learning; in fact, that, with a deaf child, all we have to do is to teach him to spell a, b, c, on his fingers, or say them with his tongue, and immediately he will have a command of the choicest classical English. No greater mistake can be made. The English language to a deaf and dumb child is a foreign language, and has to be learned by him in the same way as hearing people learn French or German. When he comes to school, no matter what may be his age, he does not know one single word— father, mother, cat, dog, stone, stick, words of the commonest description, are Greek and Latin to him ; and to educate even the brightest born mute to a ready use of common colloquial English is a task of great difiiculty and the work of many years. A hearing child, in a Board school, will spend years in learning French, and, at the end, find itself unable to understand or be understood by a Frenchman, and no one is surprised, because all can realise the difficulty in their own persons; but a deaf and dumb child, bereft Of two senses, is often expected by parents and others to master the greater difficulties of our language in two or three years or even less. Why, the thing is impossible. Your difficulty is to understand his difficulty, said Dr. Buxton, and no truer words have been spoken on this subject. The mistakes made by deaf-mutes in their efforts at written composition are oftentimes very amusing, as well as very exasperating to the teacher, but not more so than the attempts of foreigners at mastering our tongue. The act of dropping a piece of chalk on the floor was rendered by a class of big boys thus— you floor the chalk— you chalk the floor; you wiped your forehead became you rubbed your brain; you knelt on your pocket-handkerchief was written—you quaker it with your legs. One boy said I am a calf, another I am a cow; and when expostulated with by the teacher, altered it to I am a useful cow. And a prominent member of an Institution Committee was considerably surprised one examination day by a boy writing for him on the black-board you are an ass, the
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3