ociations that do not comport with independence and manliness
of character. Besides, education has long ceased to be thought of as
charitable, and only such institutions as are for the education of the
deaf and blind are left with the undesirable signification of the word.
In addition, the state maintains institutions for certain of its
classes, as the insane, the feeble-minded and the infirm, which as a
rule are in no sense educational from our standpoint, and other
institutions of a reformatory, corrective or punitive character, and
with them have to be classed the institutions for the deaf, all being
known as the state's "charitable institutions," or "state institutions;"
while the public rarely makes discrimination, or notes the distinctions
involved.

The chief trouble, then, in classifying the schools for the deaf as
charitable is this connection of the word charity, and the grouping of
the deaf with certain other parts of the state's population which other
children do not have to share. The deaf are thus differentiated from
children who have no defect of sense, and the education of the one is
thus education, and of the other charity. Schools in which the deaf are
educated would thus seem not to be given their just status. They are
misrepresented by being aligned, on the one hand, with people of
defective or diseased minds, and on the other, with the state's
delinquent and criminal classes. The deaf thus become wards of the
state, and constitute one of its dependent classes. They are "inmates"
of an "eleemosynary" institution, and the fact that it is all for
education is lost sight of.[508]

But, we are told, the treatment of deaf children should rest upon an
altogether different basis, and they should, even in appearance, receive
an education as a right and as nothing else. Education as the paramount
privilege of American children is so deeply established in American
institutions and character that it would seem to be a principle to be
applied to all the children of the state. Admission into schools for
the deaf has become more and more like that in the regular schools.[509]
The schools are open, as a general rule, only to those able and fitted
to be educated, and the mentally and physically disqualified are often
rejected. When a child has completed the prescribed number of years of
attendance, he can be provided for no longer, and at vacation time in
nearly all schools he must depart. The schools, as we are to