All who have anything to do with the school instruction of the deaf may well bear in mind the matured opinion and wise counsel of Professor Samuel Porter, of the National College, the Nestor of American instructors. In this connection, Professor Porter says:
In short, let the gestural signs come in only as a last resort, or, so far as possible, merely as supplementary to words, re-enforcing them in some instances, or employed as a test of the pupil's knowledge of words, but always, so far as possible, falling behind and taking a subordinate place. And let the pupils be required, in what they have to say to their teachers in the schoolroom or elsewhere, to employ the finger-alphabet instead of natural signs to the utmost possible extent, and this by complete sentences and not in a fragmentary way.
JOSEPH C. GORDON, M.A.,
Professor in the National College, Washington, D.C..
The brilliant but wily Sicard, whose "show" pupils were accustomed to honoring drafts at sight in appropriate responses to all sorts of questions, acting upon the motto, Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur, schooled certain pupils in deciphering writing in the air, and was thus prepared, in emergencies at his public exhibitions, to convey intimations of the answers, while supposed to be using "signs" in putting questions.
Quatrieme Circulaire, Paris, 1836, p. 16. Carton's Memoire, 1845, p. 73.