Integrating the Blind

As she went through her paces as the leading lady of the fathers' night show at Chicago's Bell Elementary School, nine-year-old Penny Golden had all the aplomb of a veteran trouper. Playing one of the wives of a sheik, she never missed a cue or muffed a line. But the most remarkable thing about her performance was the fact that no stranger in the audience could have guessed that Penny Golden is totally blind.

In a sense. Penny symbolizes the success of a heartening movement in the education of the blind. A few cities like Chicago have for years tried to integrate blind children into regular classes, but most states have relied on special residential schools, where the blind live and learn only among their own kind. Then, in the 1940s, hundreds of premature infants, though saved by incubators, were stricken with retrolental fibroplasia and blindness because of an overexposure to oxygen. As these children grew to school age, the integration movement finally got going in earnest. Today, scores of cities across the U.S. are now giving sightless children a full chance at a normal schooling.

Hop, Skip, Jump. With minor local variations, the basic program is the same in all cities practicing integration. In Detroit, for instance, the school system sends out special counselors to help parents with their new blind babies. At three or four, the children go to a preprimary school, where they learn to run, hop, skip, play at sand tables and even fingerpaint. Later, they learn to read and write in Braille and to use a typewriter. By the sixth or seventh grade, they are ready to take their place in normal classes.

In Boston, integration often starts earlier. But along with special classes in Braille, the. children are introduced to their schools before the term begins. They learn their way around the halls, how to get to the washrooms and use the playground equipment. Though they spend part of each day in a home room that is equipped with Braille books and typewriters, they can take almost all of their schools' regular courses. In Dallas, which began its program in 1951, the blind start their school careers under specially trained teachers, are gradually weaned away until they can join their sighted classmates fulltime.

Double Boon. In Chicago, a first-grader may spend one-third of his time doing regular work, an eighth-grader three-fourths. But from kindergarten to high school, each blind child has an older "buddy" who reads to him when Braille texts are not available and serves as his guide and friend. As the years pass, the blind child becomes more and more independent--and the sighted children must be cautioned against being too protective. Says Ethel May Wright, supervisor of Chicago's program: "The blind children don't want to be different. By the time they get to high school, you wouldn't know they were blind."

In general, they also do well with their studies: they have been valedictorians, class presidents and successful college students. Meanwhile, they learn to get over such "blindisms" as the habit of poking at their eyes, of sprawling in their seats (because they cannot see how sloppy they look), and walking with their heads bent low. But integration has not been a boon to the blind alone. "It works both ways," says First-Grade Teacher Wilba Bourgeois of New Orleans' Thomas Jefferson School: "It teaches the sighted to be kind and patient. It also challenges them. When they see a blind child who can read and spell, they know that they should be able to do so too."

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