“The pupils should learn meanings or synonyms of unfamiliar words before such words are signed.
“(4) Teacher gives a word, and requires pupils to exemplify it in a sentence, e.g. ‘sows,’ ‘He sows the seed.’
“(5) Let them give as many sentences as they can think of in the same form.
“Occurrences, incidents, objects, pictures, reading-books, newspaper cuttings and correspondence should all be used.”
The “pure” oral method, as before noticed, came with a bound into popularity in the early seventies. Since then it has had everything in its favour, but the results have been by no means entirely satisfactory, and there is a marked The best system. tendency among advocates of this method to withdraw from the extreme position formerly held. Opinion has gradually veered round till they have come to seek for some sort of via media that shall embrace the good points of both methods. Some now suggest the “dual method”—that those pupils who show no aptitude for oral training shall be taught exclusively by the manual method and the rest by the oral only. While this is a concession which is positively amazing when compared with the title of the booklet containing utterances of the Abbé Tarra, president of the Milan conference in 1880—“The Pure Oral Method the Best for All Deaf Children”!—yet we believe that in no case should the instruction be given by the oral method alone, and that the best system is the “combined.” That the combined system is detrimental to lip-reading has not much more than a fraction of truth in it, for if the command of language is better the pupils can supply the lacunae in their lip-reading from their better knowledge of English. It is found that they have constantly to guess words and letters from the context. Teach all by and through finger-spelling, reading, writing and signing where necessary to explain the English, and teach those in whose case it is worth it by articulation and lip-reading as well. Signs should be used less and less in class work, and English more and more exclusively as the pupil progresses—English in any and every form. A proportion of teachers should be themselves deaf, as in America. They are in perfect understanding and sympathy with their pupils, which is not always the case with hearing teachers. Statistics which we collected in London showed the following results of the education of 403 deaf pupils after they had left school:—
| Manual. | Combined. | Oral. | |
| Quite satisfactory result | 65% | 51% | 20% |
| Moderate success | 29% | 41% | 35% |
| Unsatisfactory result | 5% | 7% | 44% |
That the combined system should show to slightly less advantage than the exclusively manual method is what we might perhaps expect, for the time given to oral instruction means time taken from teaching language speedily, the manual method being, we believe, the best of all for this. But it may be worth while to lose a little in command of language for the sake of gaining another means of expressing that language. Hence we advocate the combined system, regarding speech as merely a means of expressing English, as writing and finger-spelling are, and a good sentence written or finger-spelled as being preferable to a poorer one which is spoken, no matter how distinct the speech may be. It is no answer to point to a few isolated cases where the oral method is considered to have succeeded, for one success does not counterbalance a failure if by another method you would have had two successes; and, moreover, these oral successes would have been still greater successes—we are taking language in any form as our criterion—had the teacher fully known and judiciously used the manual method as well as the oral.
The exclusive use of the oral method leads, generally speaking, to comparative failure, for the following, among other, reasons:—(1) It is a slow way of teaching English, the learning to speak the elements of sound taking months at least, and seldom being fully mastered for years. The “word method,” by the way, starts at once with words without taking their component phonetic elements separately; but it has yet to be proved that any quicker progress is made by this means of teaching speech than by the other. (2) Lip-reading is, to the deaf, sign-reading with the disadvantage of being both microscopic and partially hidden. The deaf hear nothing, they only partly see tiny movements of the vocal organs. Finger-spelling, writing, signing, are incomparably more visible, while 130 words a minute can be attained by finger-spelling, and read at that speed. (3) The signs—as they are to the deaf—made by the vocal organs are entirely arbitrary, and have not even a fraction of the redeeming feature of naturalness which oralists demand in ordinary gestures. (4) Circumstances, such as light, position of the speaker, &c., must be favourable for the lip-reading to approach certainty. (5) Styles of speech vary, and it is a constant experience that even pupils who comparatively easily read their teacher’s lips, to whose style of utterance they are accustomed, fail to read other people’s lips. (6) There is a great similarity between certain sounds as seen on the lips, e.g. between t and d, f and v, p and b, s and z, k and g. Which is meant has usually to be guessed from the context, and this requires a certain amount of knowledge of language, which is the very thing that is needed to be imparted. (7) The deliberate avoidance by the teacher of the pupil’s own language—signs—as an aid to teaching him English. If a hearing boy does not understand the meaning of a French word he looks it up in the dictionary and finds its English equivalent. If the deaf boy does not understand a word in English, the simplest, quickest, best way to explain it is, in most cases, to sign it. (8) The distaste of the pupil for the method. This is common. (9) The mechanical nature of the method. There is nothing to rouse his interest nor to appeal to his imagination in it. (10) The temptation to the teacher to use very simple phrases, owing to the difficulty the pupil has in reading others from his lips. Consequently the pupil comparatively seldom learns advanced language.
Other means of educating the deaf in addition to the oral should have a fair trial in modern conditions for the same length of time that the oral method has been in operation. To consider pupils taught manually in oral schools fair criteria of what can be done by the manual method or combined system, when those pupils have confessedly been relegated to the manual class because of “dulness” (as in the case of the C divisions in Denmark and Dresden), is obviously unfair. This division, moreover, assumes that the “pure” oral method is the best for the brightest pupils. The comparing of oral pupils privately taught by a tutor to themselves with manual pupils from an institution crippled and hampered by need of funds, where they had to take their chance in a class of twelve, and the comparison of oral pupils of twelve years’ standing with combined system pupils of four years’, are also obviously unfair. Reference may be made on this subject to Heidsiek’s remarkable articles on the question of education, which appeared in the American Annals of the Deaf from April 1899 to January 1900.
The opinions of the deaf themselves as to the relative merits of the methods of teaching also demand particular attention. The ignoring of their expressed sentiments by those in authority is remarkable. In the case of school children it might fairly be argued that they are too young to know what is good for them, but with the adult deaf who have had to learn the value of their education by bitter experience in the battle of life it is otherwise. In Germany, the home of the “pure” oral method, 800 deaf petitioned the emperor against that method. In 1903 no fewer than 2671 of the adult deaf of Great Britain and Ireland who had passed through the schools signed a petition in favour of the combined system. The figures are remarkable, for children under sixteen were excluded, those who had not been educated in schools for the deaf were excluded, and the education of the deaf has only lately been made compulsory, while many thousands who live scattered about the country in isolation probably never even heard of the petition, and so could not sign it. In America an overwhelming majority favour the combined system, and it is in America that by far the best results of education are to be seen. At the World’s Congress of the Deaf at St Louis in 1904 the combined system was upheld, as it was at Liége. From France, Germany, Norway and Sweden, Finland, Italy, Russia, everywhere in fact where they are educated, the deaf crowd upon us with expressions of their emphatic conviction, repeated again and again, that the combined system is what meets their needs best and brings most happiness into their lives. The majority of deaf in every known country which is in favour of this means of education is so great that we venture to say that in no other section of the community could there be shown such an overwhelming preponderance of opinion on one side of any question which affects its well-being. In the case of the rare exceptions, the pupil has almost always been brought up in the strictest ignorance of the manual method, which he has been sedulously taught to regard as clumsy and objectionable.