The Language Sense

There seems to be a sense of language, just as there is a sense of music, acute to a degree in certain individuals and dulled to a state wherein only the commonest and most oft-repeated words produce a sensation in others. Between these two extremes there is a wide range, just as wide among the hearing as among the deaf, although this· fact is not so apparent to people interested in the deaf, perhaps.

Teachers of the deaf often know too little and think too little about so-called "normal children," and so fail to learn many lessons which would aid them in dealing with the children under their care. The chances are that the hearing children in whom they are personally interested, relatives and friends, represent one class in society only, and that a cultured class. Obviously, it would be unfair to compare the deaf children in any public institution or school with these. Many teachers of the deaf, it is true, have had experience in hearing public schools, but too often five years' experience in a public school means five consecutive repetitions of exactly the same sort of work taught to five successive classes of the same average age with but little allowance made for individual differences of any kind.

The differences which exist among hearing children concerning aptitude in the use of language and ability to comprehend it are perfectly astounding. This is not another way of saying that some children are good scholars and some children dull ones, neither is it equivalent to saying that some are bright and some are dull. Intellectual capacity is not the subject under discussion.

The writer has in mind a boy of thirteen. He was sound in mind and body, above the average of his classmates in arithmetic, and below them in everything else. He could talk about affairs at home and at school in which he had had a share, but language which appealed in the smallest degree to the imagination seemed to be incomprehensible to him. He could not learn his lessons, because he could neither read a passage and remember the ideas which it contained, nor could he learn it verbatim. The geography lessons in the school which he attended were most carefully developed with the class one day and then on the following day given back by the children in their own words, first orally and afterward in writing. That boy could neither take in the lesson nor give it back. A few disjointed sentences were all he could produce in a half hour's time. It was very difficult to convey moral instruction to him. He was the most troublesome pupil in the school, and the teacher made all the usual appeals to his honor, his conscience, and his pride while trying to make him improve his conduct. These appeals seemed literally to fall upon deaf ears. Upon one occasion she talked to him for a long time, using such language as she ordinarily used to his class, telling him how a man who behaved among men as he behaved among children would have no friends, explaining to him how the usefulness of the school depended upon the conduct of each of its pupils, and warning him of the fate which awaits bad boys who grow to be bad men. Every teacher in the land knows what she said, every teacher has said the same thing herself a hundred times to incorrigible children. She wound up by saying, "Now, do you see why you must behave yourself?" No answer. "Don't you see that a bad boy will make a bad man, and that a bad man will never be liked and can never get along in the world?" "I don't know what you mean," he answered. "I ain't a man and I don't want to get along in the world; I'm going to stay here." He spoke the actual truth; he had not understood what she had said, although it was entirely within the comprehension of an ordinary boy of seven, as the writer has since demonstrated by actual...