Let some parent in each locality make it his or her business to get the names and addresses of all other parents of deaf children in the vicinity.  Induce them to come together some evening and choose a chairman and an executive committee of three.  Let these four people make a point of studying the education of the deaf as conducted in the most advanced communities.  Let the executive committees of the several local associations get together once or twice a year for a sort of state convention of parents.  Let them invite leading educators to address them, and let them appoint committees to visit schools in other states where different methods are employed.  If such a movement was once started there would be found plenty of subject-matter for discussion, and plenty of opportunities to work for a betterment of conditions.  The author of this little book would be glad to give any aid in his power to such a movement, and to place the results of his twenty-five years of experience at the disposal of any parent, or parents’ organization.

The first efforts should be directed to inducing, or compelling, the so-called “Combined Schools” for the deaf throughout the United States to wholly segregate at least a small oral department from the manually taught pupils.  The orally taught pupils should never come in contact during their school life, either in the shops, dining rooms, playgrounds, or schoolrooms, with those pupils with whom finger spelling and signs are employed.  All employees, whether superintendents, teachers, supervisors, teachers of trades, or servants, who have to do with the orally taught pupils should be compelled to use only speech and lip reading (and writing, if absolutely necessary) under penalty of dismissal for failing to do so.  Only by means of such segregation, and the enforcement of speech as a universal medium of communication, can the appropriations for oral work be made really productive of good results in what are now called “Combined Schools.”  This can be done on a small scale at the beginning, with the little entering beginners.  Then if all beginners are put into this oral department it will gradually grow at the expense of the manual department, until, after a period of eight or ten years, the entire school will have become oral.

This is the only method of procedure by which satisfactory results in speech teaching for practical purposes can be obtained in return for the generous appropriations that the states make.  It has been fully demonstrated by actual operation in the state of Pennsylvania, where the largest school for the deaf in the world has in this manner been changed from a “Combined School” to a pure oral school.

All the deaf children in the State of Massachusetts are now taught wholly by the oral method.  If that polyglot and heterogeneous population can be so treated, there is no state in the Union where the same could not be done if there were the desire and the ambition to do it.