The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
During Jonathan’s early years, my mother realized that she faced a continuous teaching job. She couldn’t ignore the responsibility; she and my father both felt it was important to prepare Jonathan for the adjustment into hearing society. Remembering the Boston specialist’s advice and recognizing their own strong commitment to education, they began to visit schools around the country for people who are deaf.
They were not impressed with the quality of teachers and education in most of the schools they visited. They saw that teachers often lacked the specialized skills needed to work with children who are deaf. They also noticed that some of the teachers seemed to have no respect for their pupils. Once, for example, my mother visited a class in which a seven-year-old girl asked her how old she was. The teacher immediately slapped the girl’s face and told her not to ask adults about their age. The poor little girl didn’t understand the teacher. My mother was shocked by the harshness of the punishment.
At another school, my parents didn’t like the superintendent’s attitude toward his pupils. He treated many of the children as if they were mentally retarded. In one class, the teacher wanted a little girl to demonstrate something in front of other children. My parents noticed that the little girl flinched as if she thought the teacher was going to hit her. They knew that it was not good for the children to be afraid of their teacher. To them, it was obvious that confidence was one of the most important qualities a deaf child needed to survive and learn.
But perhaps my parents’ most consistent reaction during their visits to many schools for the deaf was dismay, at how little language the children seemed to have and at how poor their reading was. Both my parents came from families where everyone loved to read. They wanted Jonathan to love reading as much they, Dunbar, and David did. My mother had always enjoyed reading to the boys at bedtime. My father even read to them at breakfast. My parents wondered how the deaf children they saw would acquire the incentive to read if they were not learning any vocabulary in the classroom.
In 1940, when Jonathan was two years old, my father accepted a new pastorate and the Ogden family moved to Staunton, Virginia. Although there was a school for the deaf in Staunton, my parents’ research, combined with the advice of friends and other knowledgeable people, led them to decide that the best school for Jonathan was Central Institute for the Deaf (CID) in St. Louis, Missouri. So, in 1943, when Jonathan was five years old, he began attending CID, a thousand miles away.
Every time Jonathan left for St. Louis, it was emotional and heartbreaking for the whole family. Jonathan came home only for Christmas and the summer, since, by train, the trip was too long for short vacation holidays such as Thanksgiving and Easter.
When he was a little older, Jonathan made the eighteen-hour train ride by himself. But when he first started at CID, my father went with him. It was an awful experience for them both. Jonathan became physically sick. When he tried to tell me about it, the memory was so distressing that he couldn’t express himself. Meanwhile, when my father took Jonathan to CID, he found it difficult to leave. When my father finally had to say goodbye, he was overcome with emotion at the thought of leaving his small son all alone. Once outside, he hung around the school, looking through the dining room windows to catch a glimpse of Jonathan in his chair at the table. My father cried whenever he told this story, saying how small and helpless Jonathan looked sitting there. It really broke my father up to leave him.
Although my mother rarely cried in public, she always wept when seeing Jonathan off at the railway station. When the train started to pull away, the boys ran beside it as fast as they could, trying to keep up. When it finally outdistanced them, they returned to our parents and the family began the drive home, all except for little Jonathan.
Despite the trauma of these separations, my parents stuck to their decision rather than choose the easier path of keeping Jonathan close to home. They were determined to give him the language skills and education they felt he needed to succeed in life.
During Jonathan’s first year away at school, my mother visited several times to learn for herself how to work with him. She wanted him to continue to learn at home and not lose ground during vacation periods. At CID, my mother saw that the children used language and read much more than at any other school. The teachers seemed to know how to correct their language errors and how to guide them in their reading. In their own thoughts about how to educate Jonathan, my parents had already concluded that reading and vocabulary were even more important than speech itself. My mother was also soon to learn firsthand how difficult it was to teach speech to someone who couldn’t hear himself speak.
Back home in Staunton, my mother asked the superintendent of the Virginia School for the Deaf and the Blind if she could sit in on a speech class for the teachers at the school, taught by an instructor from Canada. At the end of the semester the superintendent asked my mother to be the speech teacher to five children who had just started at the school. She was surprised and flattered and agreed to teach basic speech for a semester—one hour every day for a few months. It was not a gratifying experience, however, for the longer she taught the more incompetent she felt. There was so much about teaching speech to deaf children that she didn’t know.
School officials asked my mother to stay on and become a speech teacher. She declined. She felt bad that the school viewed her as a potential teacher even though she was so poorly qualified. It only drew attention to how poorly qualified most teachers of deaf children really were. In the 1940s, many people teaching deaf children had no training of any kind in areas of deafness. Often, they’d had little or no teaching experience in hearing schools either. During her visits and work at the school, my mother noticed that these “teachers,” who knew nothing about deafness, did not relate well to deaf children and contributed almost nothing to the students’ education. They seemed to be hired only to babysit and discipline the children.
On the other hand, my mother respected the teachers at CID very much. As time went on, she grew hesitant about interfering with what Jonathan was learning in speech, even though she now knew a lot about speech therapy from her work at the Virginia School for the Deaf and her visits to CID. But the more she learned, the more strongly she felt that one had to have specialized training and to be certified before teaching deaf children. With Jonathan she did some teaching, but once he started school, she made sure she didn’t do anything but reinforce what he had learned at CID. Everything she learned and did for him, she was also learning and doing—unknowingly—for me.