The first efforts should be directed to inducing, or compelling, the so-called "Combined Schools" for the deaf throughout the United States to wholly segregate at least a small oral department from the manually taught pupils. The orally taught pupils should never come in contact during their school life, either in the shops, dining rooms, playgrounds, or schoolrooms, with those pupils with whom finger spelling and signs are employed. All employees, whether superintendents, teachers, supervisors, teachers of trades, or servants, who have to do with the orally taught pupils should be compelled to use only speech and lip reading (and writing, if absolutely necessary) under penalty of dismissal for failing to do so. Only by means of such segregation, and the enforcement of speech as a universal medium of communication, can the appropriations for oral work be made really productive of good results in what are now called "Combined Schools." This can be done on a small scale at the beginning, with the little entering beginners. Then if all beginners are put into this oral department it will gradually grow at the expense of the manual department, until, after a period of eight or ten years, the entire school will have become oral.
This is the only method of procedure by which satisfactory results in speech teaching for practical purposes can be obtained in return for the generous appropriations that the states make. It has been fully demonstrated by actual operation in the state of Pennsylvania, where the largest school for the deaf in the world has in this manner been changed from a "Combined School" to a pure oral school.
All the deaf children in the State of Massachusetts are now taught wholly by the oral method. If that polyglot and heterogeneous population can be so treated, there is no state in the Union where the same could not be done if there were the desire and the ambition to do it.
In many states deaf children have been, either by definite statement, or by tacit understanding, exempted from the enforcement of the compulsory education law. This is all wrong. They need the protection of that excellent law even more than the hearing child, and if the law for compulsory education does not, in fact, apply to them, it should at once be amended to do so.
XIX
Day Schools
The parents are the ones most interested in this matter, and it is through their efforts alone that improvement can be brought about. In Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Washington, Oregon, Texas, Missouri, and California, free public oral day schools have been established. This movement has reached its highest development in Wisconsin and Michigan. In Wisconsin there are twenty-four such schools scattered throughout the state, and in Michigan fourteen. New schools are opened by the Board of Education under prescribed conditions upon the request of a certain number of parents of deaf children. Such a law should be on the statute books of every state, and will be when the parents of deaf children organize and demand it.