American Annals of the Deaf Volume 53 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 Excerpt: ...desired to be relieved of the embarrassment of considering persons for appointment to duties which such persons could not perform." The statement that" relatively very few of these defective persons applied for examination, very few passed" may be true of the persons whom the Commission in their regulation of October 25, 1906, improperly classified with the deaf (persons afflicted with insanity, tuberculosis, paralysis, etc.) but that it is not true of the deaf is evident from the statistics given by the Commission itself. For it says further on that "in the Departments at Washington out of more than twenty-five thousand employees about twenty-eight are known as deaf-mutes." Now twenty-eight deaf-mutes out of twenty-five thousand employees, instead of being "relatively very few," are relatively very many. The proportion of twenty-five thousand employees to the entire population, of the country according to the Census of 1900 is 25,000 to 75,994,575, or one-thirtieth of one per cent.; while the proportion of twenty-eight deaf employees to the entire deaf population of the country according to the same Census is 28 to 37,246, or three-fortieths of one per cent. It appears then that the proportion of the deaf in the United States who have been accepted as capable of performing the duties required in the Departments is much greater than that of hearing persons, the ratio being nine to four. True, the Commission says that "only eight were appointed through examination," which may or may not be a smaller proportion that that of the hearing employees so appointed; but it also says that "in nearly every instance, when such disabled persons were certified as having passed the examinations satisfactorily, they failed ...