Let me illustrate, if I can. Take the matter of buying and selling, for instance. A hearing child wants to go to the store and buy five cents' worth of candy. Think how much language he uses in talking about it! He says: "Mother, I want five cents to go to the store and buy some candy. Will you give me five cents? May I go to the store? Please let me go. If I am good, may I go?" When he gets to the store he says: "I will have one stick of that, and one stick of that, and a cent's worth of this," etc., and when he comes out he says: "I bought some candy. I like to trade at that store. The woman gives good measure"; and when asked, "Who sold it to you?" he says, "Oh, the woman herself." Now look back, if you please, and observe the amount of language used in connection with this one very simple transaction. See the different moods and tenses, and the different constructions introduced. If an uneducated deaf child wanted to go to the store and buy some candy, he would hold up five fingers to his mother, put his hand to his mouth to indicate candy, and then make some sign for store, perhaps a gesture to represent the act of paying; and after he had been to the store and bought his candy, he would go through just the same pantomime to indicate the finished action as he used to indicate his unaccomplished wish, for he can not distinguish between time past and time to come by natural pantomime.
If this illustration seems tedious in its details, it must be pardoned, for its object is to make the average man see the great gulf which exists between the deaf child who knows how to buy some candy and the hearing child who knows how to buy it and talk about it, to express his desire for it, and to relate the facts concerning the purchase. There is but one bridge for this gulf, the bridge of language, and all the teachers of the deaf in this or any other country are at work building this bridge. They differ in their tools and in their methods of building, but their aim is always the same. Language, be it spoken or written, is what the deaf child must have if he is to understand the world about him as his hearing brother understands it, and all the discussion of the educators of the deaf to-day is as to how it can best be given to him.
The builders who have this task to accomplish work in two ways. Some—and they are among the oldest and the wisest of the master builders—lay their foundation and make the base of their structure of a material different from the bridge itself, while others use but one material from deepest-driven pile to topmost guard-rail. Each party of workers claims that its structure is the stronger and furnishes an easier highway whereby the deaf may pass from the isolation of their wordless state to companionship with the hearing, speaking world.
