Text 1: The loudest silent classroom, by Nadia Holm

An original contemporary magazine article.

I had expected a quiet school. Fernlea, a residential school for deaf children on the edge of a market town, turns out to be one of the busiest places I have ever visited. In the dining hall at lunchtime, eighty children are talking at once, and not one of them is making a sound. Hands fly across tables. Faces do half the work: eyebrows rise for a question, cheeks puff out for something enormous. Somebody tells a joke and a whole table collapses, shoulders shaking.

Every lesson here is taught in British Sign Language, and English is learned through reading and writing. Ruth Agyeman, who teaches the oldest class, is deaf herself, and she explains the school’s approach with a briskness that suggests she has explained it many times. ‘A child needs one language that comes easily,’ she signs, while an interpreter speaks for me. ‘Once they have that, they can learn anything. Without it, they are locked out of everything.’

She tells me about Kai, who arrived two years ago, aged nine. Nobody at home signed, and nobody had expected him to talk. He had no word for yesterday, no way to ask why. ‘He was clever and he was furious,’ Ruth says. ‘His anger came from being alone. It made it harder for people to see how clever he was.’ Kai is now in her class, arguing about volcanoes. When I ask him, through the interpreter, what he likes best about Fernlea, he thinks for a moment and then signs a single word, which the interpreter tells me means ‘everybody’.

Some things here are simply practical. Lights flash instead of bells. Fire alarms shake the pillows in the boarding houses. Classrooms are arranged in horseshoes so that every child can see every face.

At the end of the afternoon the lights blink twice, and the corridors fill with children heading for the minibuses and the boarding houses, still deep in conversation. I stand by the door, an outsider who knows three signs, and realise that for once I am the one who cannot follow what is being said.

Text 2: A visit to an institution for the deaf, by Margaret Uttley

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1874, a woman describes to her brother a visit to a school for deaf children.

My dear Arthur, you asked me to tell you what I saw at the Institution on Tuesday, and I hardly know how to begin, for I came away both astonished and uneasy.

The master, Mr Gale, is a great believer in what he calls the German system, by which the children are taught to speak with the mouth, and to read the speech of others from their lips. The use of signs is strictly forbidden, both in the schoolroom and out of it, for he holds that a child who is allowed to sign will never trouble himself to speak. We were shown a class of twelve little ones, seated in a half circle before him. Each child in turn placed one hand upon the master’s throat and the other upon its own, and strove to make the same sound. It was slow and painful work. One small boy laboured for a quarter of an hour over a single word, his face red with the effort, and when at last he produced something like ‘ba’, Mr Gale patted his head and told us that this was a triumph. I did not doubt it, but I own I could have wept.

Afterwards a girl of ten was brought forward, the pride of the school, and she said, in a strange, flat voice, ‘Good morning, ladies. I am very glad to see you.’ The visitors applauded warmly. She curtseyed, but she did not smile, and I could not tell whether she understood what she had said.

It was in the yard, at the dinner hour, that I saw something which I have thought of ever since. The children, believing themselves unobserved, were talking together with their hands, quickly and merrily, laughing as I had not seen them laugh all morning. A monitor appeared, and in a moment the hands were still.

I do not know which system is right. I only know that the yard seemed to me a happier place than the schoolroom. Your affectionate sister, Margaret.

Both of these texts are about schools for deaf children.

Compare:

• what the writers say about the ways deaf children are taught
• how the writers present their views of these schools

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