If no oral day or boarding school is available near at hand, the mother
should have the far-sighted love that is unselfish, and the courage to
part with her little five-year-old child during the months of the school
year, and place him in some one of the distant schools where he can live
and be taught in a purely oral environment. There are two alternatives
to this, each of which is sometimes attempted, but both are undesirable.
First the mother not infrequently attempts to have her child educated in
the schools for hearing children. This is very unsatisfactory and even
dangerous, for if persisted in it results in wholly inadequate progress,
uneven development, bad speech, irretrievable loss of time, and often in
a complete nervous breakdown. This may not come for some years, but the
nervous system, once undermined by the excessive strain of trying to
keep up under impossible conditions, can never be fully repaired. Here
is what a _partially_ deaf woman writes of her experience as a child:

"When I was three and one-half years old scarlet fever left me almost
totally deaf. My father was a physician. He was urged to send me to a
school for the deaf, but his medical training told him that what was
needed was association with speaking children, if I were to retain my
speech, for at that time the oral method was unknown in our state. So I
went to school with hearing children. Unless you have been deaf, you
will not understand the misery in this statement. A little, lonely deaf
child, I went to a public school, hearing practically nothing of the
teachers' instructions or the pupils' recitations. Of the torture of
that deaf childhood I will not speak. You all know how cruel children
may be, and a deaf child among hearing children often suffers untold
torments."