Denver's acoupedic program

Abstract

Early in 1964, an 11-member advisory committee was appointed by the federal government to study educational opportunities for the deaf. Among its recommendations were the following: American people have no reason to be satisfied with their limited success in educating deaf children and preparing them for full participation in our society .... The infant should have a better chance of being identified in the early months of life .... Parents of deaf children need more readily available counsel, guidance and instruction. Programs designed to facilitate language and speech preparation for very young children as well as programs to make maximum use of residual hearing should also be more generally available.1 For several centuries we have tried to alleviate the handicap of deafness through manual and visual methods of communication. Only in the past 20 or 25 years has it become feasible to offer a different approach, the auditory approach, as a result of tremendous improvement in the power and fidelity of wearable hearing aids. This technological advance, coupled with programs for early detection of hearing loss, makes it possible for audition to be integrated into the total personality development of the prelingually deaf child unless it has been shown conclusively that there is no residual hearing. Fortunately, total deafness is a rare condition. For example, out of 177 children in a well-known school for the deaf, only 3 children failed to respond to amplification (personal correspondence). The successful use of an auditory approach involves much more than fitting a hearing aid and changing methods. Innovation in education means questioning and discarding many time-honored concepts, sometimes a painful process.