The Mystic Oral School : an argument in its favor / by Alexander Graham Bell.

  • Bell, Alexander Graham, 1847-1922.
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Mystic Oral School : an argument in its favor / by Alexander Graham Bell. 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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    Bat none of these arguments have been used in support of the recommendation. No fraud has been charged against the school or any of the persons connected with it, no charge of incompetency has been brought against the teachers, no question of economy is involved, and his Excellency, Gov. Cooke, recommends the withdrawal of State aid upon a sin- gle ground alone, namely, that the State of Connecticut does not need two schools for the instruction of its deaf wards. If, at the present time, you had only a single school for the deaf in the State and the proposition was to establish a new school at Mystic, there might be some force in the ob- jection, requiring argument to show necessity. But the fact is you already have two schools for the deaf. Both have long been in existence and in receipt of State aid, and the extinction of one upon such grounds alone would be an arbi- trary act of power without sufficient justification, like the proposition to reduce the surplus population by killing them off! It involves the murder of an existing school, the ex- tinction of the only school for the deaf within the State pur- suing the Oral Method of Instruction. But it has been claimed by some that the Oral Method is also employed in the Hartford School, and that therefore the extinction of the Mystic School would not involve the extinc- tion of the Oral Method within the State. This, however, is incorrect. There are some schools, like the Pennsylvania Institution, Avhich have separate Oral and Manual depart- ments where pupils may be taught by either method as may seem desirable ; but the Hartford School is not one of them. The official statistics, supplied to the Annals by Dr. Job Williams himself, (the Principal of the Hartford School) fail to record a single pupil as taught by the Oral Method. Speech is taught to a large percentage -of pupils, but none are taught wholly or even chiefly by the Oral Method. [See Am.erican Annals of the Deaf iox January, 1897, vol. xlii, p. 42, column B.]