CHAPTER XVI
QUESTION OF THE CHARITY CONNECTION OF SCHOOLS
Institutions Sometimes Regarded as Educational: Sometimes as Charitable
In considering the relation of the state to its schools for the deaf, the question is raised as to the way they are regarded by the state, and in what scheme of classification they have been assigned. We find that with many of the states the institutions are held to be charitable, and the further question is presented as to whether this is proper and just.
In times past this has been the usual classification, but of late years an increasing number of states have made a change and now regard the institutions as merely educational. It would be difficult to say with precision to what scheme of classification the schools in the several states should be ascribed; and in quite a number the lines shade off one into the other. From what has been said in the preceding chapters and also from certain legislative classification, it would seem that the schools in the following states are regarded largely, if not entirely, as educational: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and West Virginia. In about half of the states, however, the institutions continue to be regarded as charitable to a greater or less extent from their connection with charity boards or from some other classification. Some are recognized as educational, but at the same time not held altogether free from the charitable touch.[507]
Charity in Connection with Schools for the Deaf
Considerable difficulty at the outset rests with the word charity. In its best sense, it is the finest word in our language, and from its springs flow all benevolence, material and spiritual: when looked upon scientifically much of the repugnance and prejudice felt toward it is lost, and it becomes the touchstone for the remedy of human ills. In one sense, education is most surely and deeply charitable, whether or not it is held to be but the equipment of the state for its self-preservation. This has long been accepted, and so unanimously have the states undertaken the instruction of their children that its very discussion is now unknown.
But popularly conceived, charity is still something doled out and granted by the giver as a matter of grace, and to the recipient are carried associations that do not comport with independence and manliness of character. Besides, education has long ceased to be thought of as charitable, and only such institutions as are for the education of the deaf and blind are left with the undesirable signification of the word. In addition, the state maintains institutions for certain of its classes, as the insane, the feeble-minded and the infirm, which as a rule are in no sense educational from our standpoint, and other institutions of a reformatory, corrective or punitive character, and with them have to be classed the institutions for the deaf, all being known as the state's "charitable institutions," or "state institutions;" while the public rarely makes discrimination, or notes the distinctions involved.
The chief trouble, then, in classifying the schools for the deaf as charitable is this connection of the word charity, and the grouping of the deaf with certain other parts of the state's population which other children do not have to share. The deaf are thus differentiated from children who have no defect of sense, and the education of the one is thus education, and of the other charity. Schools in which the deaf are educated would thus seem not to be given their just status. They are misrepresented by being aligned, on the one hand, with people of defective or diseased minds, and on the other, with the state's delinquent and criminal classes. The deaf thus become wards of the state, and constitute one of its dependent classes. They are "inmates" of an "eleemosynary" institution, and the fact that it is all for education is lost sight of.[508]
But, we are told, the treatment of deaf children should rest upon an altogether different basis, and they should, even in appearance, receive an education as a right and as nothing else. Education as the paramount privilege of American children is so deeply established in American institutions and character that it would seem to be a principle to be applied to all the children of the state. Admission into schools for the deaf has become more and more like that in the regular schools.[509] The schools are open, as a general rule, only to those able and fitted to be educated, and the mentally and physically disqualified are often rejected. When a child has completed the prescribed number of years of attendance, he can be provided for no longer, and at vacation time in nearly all schools he must depart. The schools, as we are to see, have become free to all, while compulsory education laws have also been made to apply. Hence if schools for the deaf are educational, they can be regarded as charitable only to the extent that all schools are so considered; they should not be looked upon in a different light, and the public should be as fully alive to their claims.[510]