Something for the Deaf

At any other time, the sight of children playing in his father's garden might have seemed a happy one to young Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet of Hartford, Conn. But on one particular day in 1814, it was not. Among the children was nine-year-old Alice Cogswell--the little deaf girl from next door who could neither speak nor write. As he watched her trying so hard to keep up, 26-year-old Thomas Gallaudet began to think: perhaps he could teach her.

Improvising his methods as he went along, Gallaudet did teach Alice, and her physician father was so grateful that he decided Gallaudet should teach other Alices too. Though the deaf in those days were considered all but hopeless, Dr. Cogswell managed to scrape together about $2,000 from friends, even persuaded the Connecticut legislature to make the first state appropriation in the country for a humane institution. By 1817, he and Gallaudet had enough to open a school--the first school for the deaf in the U.S.

Sign for Light. Last week, near the original site of the school, a few miles from its present one, 400 Connecticut citizens gathered for a special ceremony. There was a speech by Lieut. Governor Allen and a letter from President Eisenhower, and each was translated into sign language for the deaf in the audience. Finally, six-year-old Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet III marched up to help unveil a symbolic statue of a girl supported by a pair of stone hands making the sign for "light." The ceremony was in honor of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and the co-founders of his school "to express the gratitude of the deaf of the nation."

In his own lifetime, Gallaudet received little gratitude. A slender, sickly man, he graduated from Yale and the Andover Theological Seminary, but bad health seemed destined to thwart him in everything he tried. He was tormented by doubt ("I am languid, and cold, and slothful ... I am much, very much, too indolent"), and tortured by such weakness that he never dared take over a parish. It was not until he started teaching Alice Cogswell that he knew what his career was really to be.

To prepare himself for his job as principal of the new school, Gallaudet set out to study the methods of Europe. In France, he met deaf Laurent Clerc, a teacher at the Royal School for Deaf-Mutes. Gallaudet persuaded Clerc to come back with him to America as the first member of his new faculty. On the long voyage home, Gallaudet taught Clerc English, and Clerc taught his new colleague more about the deaf.

Spreading Mission. With Clerc's help, Gallaudet ran the school for 13 years. Miming and gesturing and speaking with his hands, he taught six hours a day. He handled all the school's correspondence, greeted all its visitors, befriended every one of his pupils. Gradually, the school's reputation began to grow. President Monroe came to visit; so did such foreign notables as Charles Dickens. Clerc himself gave a special demonstration before the House of Representatives, later went to start the new Pennsylvania School for the Deaf. Other Gallaudet-trained teachers, including his sons, also spread his mission --to new schools in New York, Kentucky, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

Today, with 275 pupils, the American School for the Deaf in West Hartford carries on Gallaudet's work. But in spite of hearing aids and microphones, teaching the deaf is still a slow and laborious process. There are still too few teachers and too few schools. The work that Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet began, says the American School's Principal Edmund Boatner, is still far from accomplished: "It does seem too bad to see how often a deaf child is left out in the cold."

Report Card

P: At Johns Hopkins University, President Detlev Bronk announced that he is dissolving the 23-year-old Walter Hines Page School of International Relations, headed since 1938 by Owen Lattimore. The decision, said Bronk, had nothing to do with the school's director; it is simply one of a series of steps "taken at the university to simplify its academic structure." Director Lattimore, on leave of absence and under indictment for perjury in the congressional investigation of the Institute of Pacific Relations, will keep his old title of "lecturer" with full pay. P: In Troy, N.Y., State Supreme Court Justice Donald S. Taylor gave a green light to New York City's efforts to weed out Communists from its schools. In a case brought by six teachers who had been fired or suspended for refusing to tell the board of education whether they are or ever have been members of the Communist Party, the court ruled that the board has every right to ask such questions and to discipline those who do not answer.

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