CAPE TIMES -
1933, 10 & 21 August
Have a look at the New FORTIPHONE for the Deaf, available in Cape Town, Johannesburg & Durban in 1933. This latest invention for the Deaf promised to arrest progress in Deafness, stop Head Noises and improve Natural Hearing – without any Buzzing, Crackling or Headband.
(CAPE TIMES – 1933, 10 August)
An
interesting experiment in the Education of Partially Deaf Children was taking
place at Mowbray Primary School in 1933. The mentally retarded child presented
a somewhat serious problem in South African Schools. According to DR. ALICE COX there were 32 818 cases in which sub-normality was implied – 2 674 of these
were cases of mental deficiency. About 30 000 children had some or other
disability. The problem of the partially deaf child had been to a very large
extent ignored in the educational system. A teacher in a large class could not
devote an inordinate amount of time to special treatment for individual pupils
and the result was that a child who was hard of hearing simply floundered along
in the wake of the class picking up what he could as best as he could. Slight
deafness was often unrecognized by the teacher. The child would seldom admit to
it, and as he could hear reasonably well at ordinary speaking distance the
teacher never suspected that the pupil was losing half of what he heard in
class. In many cases of partial deafness, the person so afflicted was deaf to
high notes or to low notes only, so that a partially deaf pupil might hear one
teacher perfectly and another not at all, or may hear part of a sentence only. Most
deaf or partially deaf people unconsciously learned to lip-read and some partially
deaf school children got along fairly adequately in ordinary classes by a
mixture of lip-reading and hearing. In spite of this, however, the work of the
pupil who was hard of hearing had invariably fallen behind in the standard of
the normal class, especially in his written work and in his speech. Word
endings were among the first things even the slightly deaf missed, and the
partially deaf child in his written work would probably produce sentences such
as “I finish my wor” yesterday,”… I have four brother,”…. “When I went home I
wash the cup and saucer,”… invariably missing the inflections and causing the
teacher to think that the child is simply stupid. This inability to express
himself became a general handicap to the partially deaf child, increasing as he
grew older. His vocabulary was extremely limited by the fact that he heard only
part of what was going on around him, and without language it was impossible to
think. Language was the only means of bringing thought into being, and the
greater the command of language the greater is the capacity for thought.
THE DIFFERENCE
It is scarcely that many partially deaf children were regarded
as mentally deficient. They differed very importantly from the real mentally
deficient, in that they had the brain to think, but not the means of putting
that brain into action. This problem had for some time been interesting the National
Council for the Deaf, and it approached the school authorities with the request
that some provision should be made in the educational system for partially deaf
children. This request was sympathetically received and in order to experiment
in the matter audiometer tests were made of all the children in local schools.
From these a number of particularly marked cases were selected, and they then
formed two classes at the Mowbray Primary School, where under MISS MARY GILCHRIST they were receiving special instruction in voice production, lip
reading and development of vocabulary. Miss Gilchrist trained at Manchester University as a teacher
of the deaf and taught for some time at the Edinburgh Deaf Institution. She
came out to Natal to teach deaf adults, and from there had come down to conduct
this most interesting experiment at Mowbray.
PROGRESS
Although the classes had only been in existence since the
beginning of August 1933, it was obvious that marked progress had already been
made by the children. All of them were deaf to a greater or less degree, and
when a representative of the CAPE TIMES visited the class Miss Gilchrist
demonstrated this by the simple method of making the pupils stand with their
backs to her and about two yards away. She addressed them in the voice that a
teacher would use in speaking to a class and those who heard what she said were
told to repeat the sentence. Some heard nothing at all, others heard nearly
correctly, and others again produces the most extraordinary garbled versions of
the original sentence. One wondered what extraordinary travesties of fact some
of these children must have made of their daily lessons. Almost every pupil,
except the quite young ones, was obviously suffering in some degree from an
inferiority complex, and this, combined with their defective speech and
difficulty in expressing themselves, produced an effect very closely akin to
real mentally deficiency. The progress they made in three weeks under Miss
Gilchrist’s trained guidance was remarkable. They were given lip-reading tests,
in which Miss Gilchrist used no voice at all, and they understood remarkably
well all that she was saying. Voice-production was another important part of
their training, and already children whose speech had previously been extremely
difficult to understand, were pronouncing words clearly and correctly, and
getting into their speech some of that animation which is so often lacking in
the speech of a deaf or partially deaf person. The junior class received all their lessons from Miss
Gilchrist, while the seniors had their lessons with the rest of the school,
except for the special daily lessons in voice-production and lip-reading. They
were finding already that their special lessons were helping them to follow the
ordinary classes more easily and observers state that there was already a
marked improvement in their attitude towards their lessons.
DIFFICULTIES
Still in the experimental stage, there were numerous
difficulties to be surmounted in the class. Special tuition of this type in a large
Government school was difficult to fit in to the normal curriculum. On the
other hand, there were probably not enough partially deaf children in any one
area to warrant the expense of a special school for them. It is not generally considered
desirable to segregate such children, as it important that they should be
treated as and mix with normal children. This was an exceedingly interesting experiment, for its
success might lead to an extension of such work to cover various types of
abnormality and to the establishment as an ordinary rule of special classes for
sub-normal children in Government schools. This step was believed by many to be the only possible
way of dealing with this large number of sub-normal children in the Union’s
schools at that time. Specialized education which would enable them to absorb
knowledge on an equal footing with their normal fellows would prevent at any
rate a marked proportion from ending their days as “poor whites,” dependent
upon their parents or upon the community for their subsistence. (CAPE TIMES –
1933, 21 August)
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