The education of a young deaf child begins with his parents in his home.

Abstract

There is at present no known cure for nerve deafness, and the only treatment lies in education. Now, there sometimes is a tendency to think of education as something that begins more or less automatically at the age of 5 or 6 in the schoolroom and under the supervision of a trained teacher. While formal education might be said to start with school, most of us know, even if we sometimes forget, that learning, all learning for each and every one of us, begins at birth, and if we reflect a little we may even accept the idea that during our first five or six years—that is, during our preschool years—we learn more than in any other five- or six-year period in our lives. Continuously, during these years we are acquiring a mass of information, collecting a vast number of facts, inevitably some fancies, establishing attitudes, some of which we