Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 1/Dumb mouths
Page:Once a Week Jul - Dec 1859.pdf/147 Page:Once a Week Jul - Dec 1859.pdf/148 is a place to which after sailing many many days a ship comes. Here is the ship’s track on the map. The men and women there dress according to this pattern which I show. The skies the people see are so and so. Their fields are thus and thus. Their houses are built in this style. In that land the tea we use is got. The fact of tea being the leaf of a plant, prepared after such and such a fashion, can form no difficulty which you cannot easily conceive removed by reference to plants within reach.”
“Analogy, then,” we observe, satisfied with our light, “is your main dependence. You show how the things and persons they know resemble or differ from those you desire to teach them about. Now, what do you do with all these children when they grow up?”
“Oh, as to that,” he adds, in a changed voice, as if dismounted from his hobby, which was evidently the schoolwork, “they are fit for most of the common handicraft employments by which men make a living. It is sometimes difficult to get one apprenticed, undoubtedly; but a fair proportion of them afterwards do well, and support themselves creditably.”
“Deaf persons are very eccentric, are they not?” we inquire.
“As how?” he asks.
“I have heard very curious stories of them,” we reply, “as to their inquisitiveness, and odd ways they take to gratify it. I have been told, too, that they prefer their condition, and would rather not be made to hear.”
“Ask one of them,” observes our Mentor.
The question is written—“Whether would you be made able to hear or remain deaf?” In a moment the boy underlines the words—able to hear.
“The fact is,” the master proceeds improving the subject, “that deaf human beings are very similar to others, liking what people commonly like, and disliking what is commonly thought irksome. Now and then odd tastes may show themselves, but whatever is odd—whatever departs from the common standard by which we regulate preferences and aversions—is exceptional. If a deaf person prefers deafness, his case, to say the least of it, is singular. I never knew or heard of an instance of the kind, and can more easily imagine a mistake as to the spirit (for deaf persons are not devoid of drollery), in which a preference of the sort was expressed, than gravely accept your statement that in a deaf person taste so manifested itself as a fact to be reasoned from.”
“What number of persons now in all England may be deaf and dumb?”
“Speaking in round numbers, ten thousand.”
Surely a class of schools which essays to put into ten thousand poor dumb mouths an available substitute for the speech we with reason prize so much, constitutes a section of England’s educational apparatus deserving proper recognition.
May its work prosper!