Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/356

 EDUCATION

308

EDUCATION

on which are engraved or embossed the letters of the theory, Haily took this young waif to be the subject of alphabet arranged in serial order at equal distances his first practical essays in teaching the bUnd. Lesueur from each otlier, as in the diagram here given. was promised a regular daily allowance in place of the

(X&cde^a-^CCrrvnofto^-i tuvx

A

Lana-Terzi Contrivance for CoRRESPONDrN'G bt Knots

Suppose now that a person who is not blind should wish to send to his blind friend this message: 11 nemico ti trama insidie (the enemy is trying to ensnare you). Let him take a piece of thread or twine, apply the end of it to the extreme point of the tablet, extend the thread over the space from a to the first letter i of the message and make a knot at that point; for the second letter, apply this first knot to point a, extend the tlireatl over the space from a to the letter I, make, as before, a knot at that point, and so on for the rest of the letters. It will readily be understood how the blind person, to whom the roll of knotted thread or twine is sent, can make out the communication by applying the various thread lengths over the distances indicated by the knots, and thus discover each letter of the message. The bUnd correspondent, in his turn, can easily send by this same method whatever com- munication he wishes.

A few years after the publication of Lana-Terzi's "Prodromo", Jacques Bernouilli, being at Geneva in 1676, taught Elizabeth Waldkirch to read by a method not unlike that of Cardano. The young lady made such progress that after four years she was able to cor- respond with her friends in German, French, and Latin, all of which she spoke fluently at the age of fifteen. She knew almost all the Bible by heart, was familiar with philosophy, and was an accomplished musician.

About the year 1711 the first known attempt was made to construct a tactile ciphering-tablet or appara- tus by which all the operations of arithmetic might be performed and recorded. This was the work of Nich- olas Saunderson, who became blind when one year old. So distinguished was this blind mathematician that he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in the LIniversity of Cambridge. The Abb6 Claude- Francois Deschamps (1745-91), in his treatise on the education of the deaf and dumb, is said to have also sketched the outlines of the art of teaching the blind to read and write. Diderot in his "Lettre sur les aveugles", which appeared in London in 1749, and for which he was condemned to prison, mentions his in- terview with Lenotre, better known as "The Blind Man of Puisaux". Ajnong other remarkable things related of him is the teaching of his son, though not blind, to read by means of raised letters. Between 1772 and 17S4 we read of the earliest attempt to make maps in relief for the blind. This invention is ascribed to R. Weissenburg, of Mannheim, who was partially blind at five years of age, and totally at fifteen. Whether any of the credit is due to Weissenburg's teacher, Cliristian Niesen, cannot be ascertained. Though Diderot was among the first to call special attention to the condition and wants of the blind, and to make them generally known through his famous letter, yet neither he, nor Leibniz, nor Reid, nor Con- dillac, nor any of the Encyclopedists went beyond abstract psycliological speculation. None of them proposed any measure of practical utility or relief nor devised any plans for the instruction and traming of sightless persons.

The modern era in the history of education of the blind opened in 1784 — nearly three centuries after the desultory and apparently ineffectual attempts of Car- dano and others — when Valentin Haiiy (1745-1S22) set himself to do for the blind what the .\bb^ del'Ep(5ehad done for deaf mutes. It was in June, 1784, that Haiiy met, in one of the churches of Paris, a young mendicant named Lesueur, who had been blind from his birth. Having already spent many years in studying the

income which he was supposed to earn by begging. Before long the number of Haiiy's pupils increased to twelve, then to double that number, and finally to fifty. His school was at first a day-school, to which children of both sexes were admitted. When Haiiy, in 1786, exhibited the attainments of twenty-four of his best pupils at Versailles, Louis XVI and his court were in raptiu-es at the wonderful novelty of children without sight reading, writing, ciphering, doing handi- craft work, and playing orchestral music. So great was the interest which this and similar exhibitions aroused, and so generous the patronage of the king and the public which they secured for his school, that Haiiy soon had sufficient means to board his pupils. From the very beginning the institution had the triple character of a school, a workshop, and an acad- emy of music; and to this day these three depart- ments have been maintained with such a record for efficiency that the institutioii founded by Haiiy has served as the model for most of the many others in both hemispheres. But true intellectual culture for the blind dates only from the day when reading by touch was made possible. To Haiiy is due the credit of having provided a sy.=tem of tactual printing and a perma- nent literature for the blind. In the light of a cen- tiiry's progress and of better systems of printing and writing invented since his day, the shortcomings of Haiiy's print in relief may lessen the value of his in- vention, but, in fairness to his memory, it must be remembered that Haiiy alone succeeded in making practical for the blind as a class what others before him had merely foreshadowed, or had successfully apphed only in individual instances. In spite, there- fore, of the derogatory claims made by two or three writers, and notwithstanding that he himself ad- mitted having seen a letter printed by Theresa von Paradis from t^TJe made for her by von Kempelen, the fact remains that no one before Haiiy had ever tried seriously to make printing available for the blind; to no one before him had the idea occurred of printing books for the blind, or of establishing libraries of liter- ature printed in relief. The movement originated by him has resulted in the establishment in all civilized coiintries of institutions of learning and industrial training schools for the blind. Before the close of the eighteenth century, a period of only sixteen years, four such institutions had sprimg up in Great Britain, viz., in Liverpool ( 1 79 1), in Edinburgh ( 1 793) , in Bristol ( 1 793) , and in London (1799). Other countries were not slow in following the example. The following table shows what the leading countries of Europe and .America have done for their blind during the nineteenth century: —

No. of

First Inst.

No. of Blind

No. of

founded in

Educat.

Schools

the year

Inst.

and

Asylums

France

1784

32,340

24

10

England

1791

26.330

24

54

Scotland

1793

4.000

5

2

.\ust ria-Hungary

1804

41,400

11

17

Germany

1806

49,570

34

48

1807

221,208

37

6

Sweden

1S08

4,100

3

5

Switzerland

1S09

2.500

4

5

Ireland

ISIO

5.120

6

7

Denmark

1811

1,961

2

2

Spain United States

1820

21,000

11

5

1831

64,763

44

24

Belgium

1S36

4.935

8

4

Italy

1S3S

30.210

19

5

Norway

1S61

2,816

2

1