The Hays Free Press

When the annual field day games and exercises of the Parker Practice school, Chicago, were taking place a few days ago, a feature that brought unusually long and loud applause from the throng of visitors crowding the school campus was a series of fancy dances and drills given by several classes of boys and girls ranging in age from six to sixteen years.

A close observer might have noticed that as the children went through the various graceful evolutions, in perfect time with the playing of a piano, they kept their eyes turned as much as their wheelings and swayings would permit in the direction of a young woman, who with slight motions of her hand seemed to be directing them in their movements.

The reason for this was not apparent, since those who dance to music usually do not need any such form of guidance.

But when inquiries were made it developed the surprising fact that not one of these children could hear the playing of the piano; that they were, indeed, totally deaf, and depended upon the slight assistance given them by their teacher to go through the different maneuvers with the same precision that would mark the movements of hearing children.

Probably this fact alone would have caused the visitor sufficient wonder, but he would have been considerably more astonished a little later if he had chanced to run across a group of the same children laughing and chatting together as merrily and naturally as if they had never known what it was to be denied the blessed privilege of perfect hearing. Surely the age of miracles must have arrived when the dumb can be made to speak and the deaf to hear with their eyes!

But the women who have brought about these seemingly impossible things do not regard them as either miraculous or especially wonderful. They think it is the most natural thing in the world that little deaf children should be taught to speak and to read the speech of others. They tell you, moreover, that the only way in which such children should be instructed is by the modern oral system, and that the ancient method of signs and finger spelling is quite as much a relic of barbarism as the practise of running a ring through the nose to beautify one's features.

This may sound almost unbelievable to those whose only idea of a deaf person is one who is totally devoid of the power of speech and who must depend upon the sign language to communicate his thoughts to others. Fifty years ago a person would have been looked upon as a dreamer, or worse, if he had insisted that children born deaf could be and should be taught to speak.

Even today the general impression prevails that a person who becomes deaf in infancy must necessarily also be dumb during the whole of his life, and, strangely enough, this lack of power to express one's self in spoken language is ascribed to some defect in the organs of speech. Both of these conclusions are entirely wrong.

It has been demonstrated beyond all doubt that practically every deaf child has perfect organs of speech at birth, and that it is a very rare occurrence when a deaf person remains mute for any other reason save the lack of training which a hearing child receives through its ears.

If you should go to the Parker Practice school any fine morning you would probably see on the broad lawn in front of the school various groups of children at play under the watchful eyes of their teachers. But it is not likely that your attention would be attracted to any particular group because of anything unusual in their manner of addressing their teacher or one another; all are romping, laughing and shouting in the fulness of their childish delight. Yet the chances are that some of these children have never in all their years heard the sound of a voice.

Entering the school you might go from room to room and not discover for quite a while that there was anything different in the manner of instructing the pupils in one from those in another. In some of them, however, you would find the same little tots, who cannot hear, that you passed on the lawn. If their eyes happened