MOORE, CHARLES. Daniel H. Burnham, Architect and Planner of Cities. MOODY, WALTER D. What of the City? NOLEN, JOHN. New Ideals in the Planning of Cities. POND, ALLEN B. The Gospel of Beauty. *RIIS, JACOB A. How the Other Half Lives. RIIS, JACOB A. The Battle with the Slum. SMITH, HENRY J. "The Ugly City," Atlantic Monthly (July, 1919), Vol. CXXIV, pp. 27-33. WALD, LILLIAN D. *WILSON, P. W. The House on Henry Street. "Buying up Slums," Outlook (January 26, 1921), Vol. CXXVII, pp. 142-144. 3. Imaginative Literature: Novel, Short Story, Poetry, Drama MORRISON, A. Tales of Mean Streets. *RIIS, JACOB A. Neighbors. STOCKLEY, E. K. Miss Billy. ZANGWILL, ISRAEL. Dreamers of the Ghetto. BACON, ALBION F. READINGS FOR TEACHERS What Bad Housing means to the Community. Proceedings of National Conferences on City-Planning. ROBINSON, CHARLES M. Modern Civic Art. UNWIN, RAYMOND. Town Planning in Practice. CHAPTER XII THE HANDICAPPED The best help for those who are handicapped, whether physically, mentally, or morally, is that which helps them to help themselves.-ANONYMOUS SECTION I. THE BLIND AND THE DEAF What it means to be blind or deaf. Shut your eyes and keep them closed for one minute. You now have a faint idea of the lot of those who dwell in darkness all their days,-faint because you have a mental image of your surroundings which a blind person has not. Now stop your ears for a little while; you can thus gain some notion of what it means to go through life in a silence. Of course the fact that you can open your eyes or unstop your ears at any moment makes these simple experiments utterly inadequate to show you the real condition of the blind and the deaf. None the less, has not the mere shutting of your eyes for a time increased your sympathy for those who can never look at the sky on a starry night or see the faces of their friends? And does not the stopping of your ears a few minutes give you a kindlier feeling toward those who cannot hear the melodies of music or know the wonders of the human voice? The blind and deaf in former times. The lot of the sightless and the deaf is far brighter today than it was centuries ago. In ancient times the Greeks and Romans occasionally took blind or deaf babies into the forest or up on the mountain side and left them there to die of cold and hunger or to be eaten by wild beasts. In the Middle Ages persons who could not see or hear were classed as lunatics or idiots; they were feared, shunned, and mistreated; their misfortune was frequently thought to be punishment for sin; some superstitious souls believed them possessed with devils. Treated at best with indifference and heavily handicapped by their misfortune, they could get food and clothing as a rule only by begging from the passers-by. Although there are a few instances where efforts were made to educate them, it was not BLIND CHILDREN LEARNING ABOUT NATURE In this picture at the left the children are "seeing" a stuffed elephant. In the one at the right they are studying geography with a relief globe. until the latter half of the eighteenth century that effective methods for their instruction and training were introduced. First school for the deaf. In 1755 the abbé de l'Épée, who had become interested in two deaf orphans, opened a school for the deaf near Paris. Henceforth he devoted his life to the education of his pupils, developing and inventing methods of instructing them, writing books about them, and in other ways arousing interest in their welfare. At first he paid the expenses of the school out of his own pocket, but it was not long until his achievements won assistance from others and finally secured the support of the government. First school for the blind. Not long after L'Épée founded his school for the deaf, a Frenchman named Haüy was stirred to pity and indignation at the condition of the blind ALPHABET, PUNCTUATION, AND NUMERALS USED BY THE BLIND Almost blind himself, Louis Braille (Brä'e), then about twenty years of age, devised the system of raised points or dots now used with modifications by the blind in reading and writing. In this system only six points arranged in three horizontal columns of two points each are employed; the number of points used and the way they are arranged indicate the various characters. by a spectacle in which a group of blind men were exhibited to a curious crowd at a fair in Paris. Shocked and angered at the sight, Haüy's interest in the blind was aroused, and shortly afterwards, on meeting a blind beggar boy on the streets of the city, he offered the little fellow money to become his pupil. After hard effort Hauy taught the boy to read; and, encouraged by this success, in 1784 he opened a school for the blind, the first of its kind in the history of the world. Supported in the beginning by private gifts, the school was eventually taken over by the French national government. BLIND WOMAN READING A MAGAZINE The Matilda Ziegler Magazine, which this woman is reading, is the only periodical which is issued every month for the blind in America. It contains news, articles, poems, and stories. It is carried free of postage by the United States mail. In reading, the blind use the tips of the first and second fingers of the right hand to follow the line, while the left hand is used to mark the beginning of the next line. First American school for the deaf. In the United States the public education of the deaf was begun in 1817 in Hartford, Connecticut. The school grew out of the gifts of a 1 1 Earlier efforts for the training of the deaf had been made in New York and Virginia, but the schools did not prove permanent. |