A GREAT WORK.

Auckland Star, Volume LIV, Issue 51, 1 March 1923, Page 4

A GREAT WORK.

No doubt because blindness is regarded as a worse affliction than dumbness, there is more public interest in the training of the blind than in the training of the dumb. The splendid work: done at the Jubilee Institute for the Blind in Auckland receives more of such attention than the equally fine work done at the school for the deaf at Sumner, near Christchurch. Perhaps the fact that 1 he Christchurch institution is wholly a State business, while the Auckland one is largely supported by private generosity, is partly responsible for the difference. Be this as it may, the retirement of Mr. J. E. Stevens from the

directorship of the Sumner school is an opportunity for drawing attention io what has been done there. Many people are quite unaware that the dumb who arc speechless throu'/h deafness from infancy, can be taught to speak in the ordinary way, and very few indeed have any idea of the methods employed, the difficulties to be overcome, and the real measure of the resultant triumph. It is rarely that one sees in a newspaper or a magazine references to this ' most humane science of lip-reading. Most of the world's interest, in it. baa been stimulated by the ex'.rnor.linary w«« of Helen Keller, who is blind .as well as deaf. The difficulties in her case were extreme, but in that of the child with sight who has never beard the spoken word they are quite sufficiently formidable." The pupil has to be introduced to a new world; slowly and with great skill and patience it is given what amounts to a new mind. Its affliction will always-be severe, but if it is of normal mentality it can be taught to speak in a way that can lie understood, and to understand, under favourable conditions what is said by reading the speaker's lips. Such training is the only road to education and intercourse, and the school at Sumner has in hundreds of cases turned what would otherwise have been lives of pitiful isolation and stagnation into lives of happy usefulness. The success of the school is primarily the result of the skill and devotion of the late Mr. Van Ascli, the first director, but as a member of the s,tnff for thirty-six years, for seventeen of which he has been head, Mp. Stevens is entitled to a large share of the credit for the record of tlio school and the present position of the movement to educate the deaf. He has bad the satisfaction of seeing the work extended by the establishment of classes at other centres. His is a notable career in our educational aunals.