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Speech and Intellect
Speech bears somewhat the same relation to the mind that
the hammer and saw bear to the carpenter, It is the mind’s
most effective and most important tool. It is not only the vehicle
in which the products of the mind are transferred and deliv-
ered, but it is essential also to the creation of these products, to
their crystallization, collection, and classification. Thought, in
its highest sense, therefore, cannot exist independently of speech.
Hence it is that if yout’deprive a person of speech you deprive
him at the same time of his most effective means for mental
development, and it also follows that if you train and perfect
his speech you must greatly improve his mentality. In the
normal child mental development and speech development progress
simultaneously. Neither can be said to precede the other. The
child thinks and speaks. If he does not speak when he thinks,
we at once suspect that there is something wrong with the organs
of speech; and if he also fails to make use of the other forms
of expression, such as gesture and pantomime, we even doubt his
ability to think.
A child’s educability depends more than anything else upon
his? Ylesire to be educated. The desire to speak is inherent in
every normal person, and, if this desire is not’ gratified, the
desire to be educated will be diminished or blunted. What is
the use of knowing things if you sannot communicate them?
The child who will not be educated Swill retrograde and become
feeble-minded. Being out of harmony with his environiment, his
moral nature will becoine perverted. He will grow destructive
and show other signs of degeneracy and imbecility. He does
this because he does not understand his syrroundings, and he
is not himself understood by those abotit him, He elicits the
sympathy of the household and his every wish is anticipated and
seit erecta ee al -)
granted without even the asking, Under these circumstances,
of course, education becomes an impossibility. There is no
necessity for the child to talk, and there is no inducement for
. him to learn to know things.® e is what we call a spoiled
child, and he differs but little in his actions from the imbecile. * * *
Our whole system of education, beginning at the cradle, has
been developed to meet the requirements of the normal mind,
i and, is wholly inadequate to the requirements of the abnormal
or feeble mind. The training of speech should occupy an impor-
tant place in the curriculum of schools for the feeble-minded.—
Literary Digest.
