This article draws on Brodey’s early work with the blind and introduces an important concept that would inform his subsequent work: developmental learning. The concept refers to what today we might describe as learning how to learn.

Can studying blind children help us in educating normal children to develop further? Perhaps! Common sense, natural, and what is accepted as normal step-by-step patterns of development are based on complex learning processes. Through reaching across the gap between the blind and those who can see some may touch the swirling process of developmental education.[1] Let us start our journey towards this objective with an extreme problem stated thus:

“The American Foundation for the Blind is distressingly aware of the fact that even today, throughout the country, there are still many, many very young blind children being committed to institutions designed for the care of feeble-minded persons. The Foundation is additionally and acutely aware that there often exist real misunderstandings in recognizing the difference between the feeble-minded and the child who may seem retarded because he happens to be blind....The blind child being considered for commitment perhaps has had few opportunities to learn, and even granted the opportunities, he may still not have progressed as he might have with the aid of vision.”

Add to this Helen Keller’s description of her own retardation and we have set a problem which reaches to the very roots of education.

In her book, The World I Live In, she states:

“Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. ! cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. ! I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose that I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking, I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heartbeat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.”

“It was not night - it was not day.”

The void of not knowing fulfillment[2] is different from the sudden loss of structural focus that we each have experienced and dread, perhaps on awakening out of sickness in an unfamiliar room. This is instead a void we can know only after we have experienced fulfillment. Those who live in chronic starvation may not know the experience of being well fed. They may not leave the lethargy of malnutrition to seek food. Lack of food colors every moment of their brief life (19).

Developmental education includes first building systems for discovering ways of discovering what one has never experienced and second building systems for selection and programming of all data that makes contact with our intake apparatus. Most of this system building ordinarily receives no mental recognition (21).

THE LEARNING CYCLE

Each child is bathed in the stimuli emanating from that which exists (12). Undifferentiated, unknown, unthought of, and unlanguaged stimuli impinge upon us. Each child using what equipment he has samples the stimuli available to him. But the richness of education is to instill these perceived stimuli into symbol which can be shared. This distillate explodes into a richer capacity to use the perceptual apparatus available, which in turn improves the ability to receive and utilize raw stimuli, and so learning is an accelerating[3] process. Learning is a process which multiplies itself—grows; alteration in perceptual input alters the growth cycle. Each child is different in his perceptual apparatus and capacity. Each child’s experience with his world and his people brings him to organize his world in a different way. The developing perceptual world of each child deserves our knowledge and respect. In order to educate and influence children in their first years of life we must constantly correct our own image of the particular child in terms of his learning cycle. But this is not easily done for our ingrained conventions, which work well enough for the average, hide from us the need to study the basic process of experiencing and anti-entropy work which are so important to the structure[4] of the child’s world.[5]

THE CHILD’S WORLD

Think for a moment of the experience of childhood that the teacher-in-us realizes intuitively. Any child is so sma!I, imagine door knobs high as you can reach, and undersides of tables, eyes at grown-ups’ stomach level. There is an organized holdup-the-bottle-to-get-it-filled life before understanding words, certainly long before speaking. As we hold our boy he experiences muscles, our skin, when we are tense he holds his mouth tight. He smiles when we smile, and amuses us when we are at ease. Sometimes his mood builds our moods as our irritation builds his. Sometimes he can break exhaustion with a spontaneous hug. lf we have a headache, chances are he can’t please us. But he is not putty which we mold. He organizes his world out of the bits and pieces he experiences through the structure he has set according to his own primitive theories, thus, before he has learned out conventions of causation, a fist that banged on the table is also experienced as a table that banged his fist.

Symbols do not come first. Experiencing and structuring and then labeling is automatic only to those of us who have learned and forgotten. The child breaks our sounds into repetitive patterns - words, and imitates us imitating him, as he gradually corrects his words to ours. We imitate less his baby sounds, reinforcing the usefulness of his language by our specific answering action-response. The cry “bottle!”; brings mother and a drinkable bottle.

He learns of things, and weather and wood and people. He feels with his muscles, his body, his “innards” - the million million sensations: What are pockets like on the inside of pants? How much will a purse contain? How cookie big is your mouth at once? Sizes, distances, someone is far when his mouth and arms are shouting, but his voice is hard to hear. How close are Mama’s footsteps, and is she coming?

He begins to learn the vast fund of information we take for granted. Bit by bit he classifies sensation into groups of sensations and progressions of sensations which can be labeled with his words - words no longer just imitative (12).

But the use of words makes necessary the breaking of continuities into nameable pieces. The conventional lines of cleavage for separating into these nameable pieces are early learned (21). We all know what shoddy inaccuracies we are driven to offer a child who has asked, “What’s that?”; or “Why?”; in order to reach his level of understanding. We may be put in this same position when we try to encourage an older child to share an idea in words, but one must begin somewhere.

And it’s not stop, look, listen - as we teach them. Who performs each of these acts separately? They are simultaneous actions. The child who performs them separately will be killed.

If you restore the continuity of perception and omit the conventional separation of sight, sound, touch and smell, the problems of perception and variant sampling of the existent world are altered. Can you re-experience this continuity: on the seashore put a fresh shell in your own mouth as the naughty baby does, feel the wonder of textures, shapes, hard, slippery, soft; listen to the swish of the water’s coolness on your legs, and smell it as you listen to the gulls, watch the sound of the spray, smell the darkening sky before the storm.

A kiss is more than four lips - or touch - or smell - or sight.

A bath of continuous sensations “substances”[6] our reality. Words are limited by the conventions of each culture (9). How many words are there to describe the difference of mother’s and father’s smells? Cold sweat of fear smells different from radiantly glowing, happy, warm skin. Life is itself in motion and the whole is more than all its moving parts. A word is the name symbol of a pattern. The pattern is substanced by ever-changing sensory experience woven together. Experience smell, touch, feel - warm to cold, hollow to full-sounding, smashed into small pieces or bigger, with a tinkle or a crash - the patterned image of the vase unseen persists.[7]

Images of things and relationships exist not only in sight, but if nearsighted eyes blur the smile of welcome from father in his corner garden or the embarrassment of blindness ices brother’s face to flitting fingertips; if you can’t confirm it with your eyes or fingertips - is it warm and still, or, was I right or wrong; if reduced hearing loses the gentle answer, or heightened sharpness catches the critical whisper - then all is different.

A HYPOTHESIS

The perceptual stimuli we are immersed in, bathed in and which we can sample is our contact with that which exists also. This stimulus bath is screened initially by the selectivity developed perceptual apparatus of our species (20), secondly by our individual perceptual capacity, and thirdly by our conventions of what is supposed to exist.[8] Perceived stimulus is the s raw material - the bricks from which our house is built (18). Alter the bricks and the house is fundamentally different

Altered perceptual intake systems have I been given scant attention except in their extreme forms - blindness, deafness, etc. In the past there was the average and the blind, deaf, etc. Perhaps now it is time to utilize rather than to ignore the variations in perceptual range that are common to all, including those who have been lumped as average and those called handicapped. There are those among us whose vision, hearing, smell, touch is vastly more acute - whose perceptual range is broadly increased. The genius child has an extra task in sharing because he too operates in a vastly different perceptual world. As he looks about him he is able to relate sound stimuli, visual stimuli, touch, and the real melding of all these with appreciation of an intricacy of relations which increases vastly the capacity to predict, look for evidence, and test for utility his predictive system. Much is lost in just plain productivity in schools, in factories, in business by our just plain lack of search and research into the fundamental area of individual variation in range of perceptual capacity.

Now let us return to the learning cycle: The richness of education is to distill these perceived stimuli into symbols which can be shared. This distillate explodes into a richer capacity to use the perceptual apparatus available, which in turn improves the ability to receive and utilize raw stimuli and so learning is an accelerating process. But as the degree of difference between one person’s world and the world of another increases, the ease of relationship[10] diminishes and the learning cycle slows. As the learning cycle slows the degree of difference increases and the learning cycle slows. Extreme slowing or negative feedback in the learning cycle beginning early in life may produce secondary retardation.

Having approached a conceptualization of the importance to learning of variations in perceptual capacity, let us pursue this theme by way of focusing on the child born blind. But let us not slip back into the comfort of a convention - blindness is not a condition in itself but is an end point in a continuity.

SECONDARY RETARDATION

The blind child’s patterns of experiencing the substance out of which his thoughts are built - his sensations - are not the same as more average grown-ups, children, brothers, sisters, or parents easily understand. Our “normal” ways of classifying experience into thought for sharing and relationship have been profoundly reinforced by visual experience Our cleavage planes which we use to build language - this is a wall, and this the mural, our points of separation as horizon, sea and sky - are most frequently visual. Grown-ups comprehend children through their own child experience, experience now automatic and forgotten is important to build into the parent of the blind child a realistic sense of how vision allows us easily to share conventions by which we program the ordinary way of life. Beyond the statement “He is blind, he can’t do even simple, ’ordinary’ things - he is retarded” one must add: “No, he is blind, so he has basic special problems of developmental learning and I have special problems of developmental teaching. He may be ignorant, unlearned. To him ordinary things are not just ordinary. This is secondary retardation.” The more that the parent is able to share and understand the child’s world, as previously noted. the less tendency to slowing in the learning cycle. The blind child may learn routines of action, when to eat, how to go to the bathroom, but talking and thinking and so many indescribable learnings come from sharing the million million experiences with others who teach, rarely by intention, but unwittingly as the child watches: the little boy struts exactly like his father, the girl puts hands on hips in defiance just like sister or mother. No one tried to teach her! But it’s hard if you can’t see to feel that truculent look, and the very presence of your exploring hand softens the attitude. The span of a hand cannot catch the whole of a body stance so well as leaning body to body, but to those who can see, the whole body is rarely conceived of as an organ of perception, and how does one share the truculent look felt with leaning body but unseen.

A hand can recognize the texture of many people’s skins as accurately as eyes recognize creases in a face. But where is the language for talking about the many kinds of textures of skin so important in recognizing another person (11). With whom can you talk about smell or tone of voice or the individuality of handshakes ? As adults we can speak of analogy, but the child’s thinking and language are more limited. We all know the frustration of not being able to communicate the most important facts of life. Can we remember not understanding why we couldn’t communicate and the feeling that it would never be possible

The development of language is an accelerative process; each word learned makes possible the development of two more. Thus, the development of language accelerates language development.

It is a practical predicament. To distill perceived stimuli into symbols which can be shared is difficult when you experience through an altered perceptual spectruml Rapidly transmitted information in response to childhood testing - scowl, shrugged shoulder, grin, raised eyebrow - is largely lost. To illustrate: consider the situation where a group of blind persons at a conference table wish to tell their sighted boss of dissatisfactions. He sits silent and physically unmoving (no sounds of restlessness - chair squeaking, etc.). They now are silent. The signals one sends must be constructed in terms of their message value to the person receiving.[11] They cannot speak, since they do not know the reaction of the boss’s face and have reduced information around which to temper or strengthen their position. We have each known the sense of foolish, frustrated emptiness when an important message sent is apparently not received in terms of “simultaneous” return signals that we can take in.[12]

A two-year-old’s intimate learning is not easily accomplished by telephone. Yet sound at a distance with the other person unseen or literally out of touch is like a telephone to those not already well grounded in perceptual experience. But it is not easy for the parent or teacher or significant other to have a capacity to resonate with this blind child and his “telephone” problems - having had no similar experience.

Relationship resonance is necessary for developmental learning. Reduced information of a commonly accepted conventional range means reduced sharing; reduced sharing means reduced opportunity for consenual validation (17), more slowly learning to organize a world, and only gradually and slowly testing into common experiential substance that which has been learned by using common words and symbols.[13] But without a sense of shared experience the blind person is less able to stimulate or appreciate the relationship resonance of those available to share. This may be stated thus: Sharing with others symbols, ideas, language, stimulates more testing and more awareness of conventional sampling, and this awareness of conventional testing of the stimulus environment facilitates communication, which facilitates sharing, and so the wheel turns. Thus for the blind child the learning cycle tends to accelerate more slowly, the wheel turns with more resistance.

AN APPLICATION

In approximately four-fifths of blind children developmental learning process is maintained at a rate of acceleration adequate to make obvious to all the child’s learning capacity. Each child is thus ensured an educational program. The Pilot School is working to help a few of the twenty per cent of blind children whose development is directly and severely slowed. Its broader purpose is to explore this area. It has built its program on one major idea: to love another is not just feeling love towards what the other is supposed to be, or what we wish he were. All then power of loving is meaningless except as we discover the other as he really is[14] (7). This is not to underestimate the power of wishes, longing (5) and expectation. But you can see how hard it is to allow the disillusionment of saying, “He is of the same species but is not made in the image of me. His world is made up differently than mine - he sees with his hands, his feet, his ears, his smell, his skin. His world is as real as mine - but he cannot be the same.” A door is still a door - a window still a window but it lets in city sounds, rays of warmth, smells of summer but not light. You tell when the other person is anxious by the sound of his breathing or the wriggling of a chair. You listen to an elevator two floors down but the wind’s roar can blanket sound and blow away your vision; just as a fog hides the world from those who see. Can we allow a world to exist so different from our own (20)?

Common experience, common building blocks, are necessary for communication. We try to reach the child’s world and catch him with our knowledge of his ways. We are building from the child’s curiosity his own attempts to learn. Sometimes we sit quietly and watch his activity; sometimes we turn his rhythmic circling into a structured two-person game of “ringaround-the-rosy.” Like at trout fishing, we catch the flashes of his interest and build them into a learning program.

Only last summer we began a phase of the Pilot School program.[15] The children, the siblings, the parents, and all of us have tried to invent new techniques to communicate and understand. Realities important to perception without visual sight may be so unthought of or so taken for granted, and unspoken, that even the words of free association have failed us. We have tried to reach beyond what we conventionally think about. We have prodded the mind to think in new ways with such action devices are father, mother, child, teacher, psychiatrist spending their weekly two hours of meeting time experiencing blindfoldedness. This device has high utility. Parents report blindfolding themselves at home and being led by their blind children through the environment as it is sampled and experienced while blindfolded. This beginning attempt to break out conventional set, this beginning sharing, these explorations have taught us new respect for what these children, slow in terms of our demands, already know. The child leads the mother unfaltering; the mother is afraid: She reports in surprise, “I forgot to keep my head up; it just seems to flop; it’s easier to just sit and rock and listen to repetitious records - I was hypnotized by the dullness.” She begins to experience inside how taken-for granted visual information livens her sighted days; she realizes by absence how we make sense of what we hear by what we see. Changing a part irretrievably changes the whole - into something different. She becomes aware that acoustics may govern space perception - what an awful room, voices bounce off walls. When you enter a room involvement with determining who is in the room and where, makes difficult an easy conventional greeting. This may be interpreted, without this unconventional experience, as lack of warmth. She begins to know - “It’s being average that allows ’ordinary’ things to be ordinary” (6).

Is the child’s temper tantrum out of anger at her, or frustration at losing his orientation? When the mother is lost, the child leads her to his own big chair, his home base, and tries to tell her how the refrigerator sound is one of his “landing” beams.

Gradually we learn to recognize when he is lost; then the parents’ vision can give information to the child when it is useful - a true sharing. It takes enormous intuition to share in, untutored, the blind child’s world. Many parents and teachers untutored and under stress are not so gifted. To be able to share the million million details of a world so different from our own we must build an inner image of what this world is really like: An eight-year-old taps the floor with his shoe and by the rebound of echoing sound locates himself and explores the room. He walks with assurance and comfort - unless he hits a low object not felt with echoing sound and facial skin vision.

That this boy’s skill is so highly developed without aid or instruction means high intelligence, but his language communication imitates like an emotionless gramophone (14). He uses verbal language for communication only occasionally, “Damn it!” he says as a beautiful scallion he was munching slips from his hand. To those not interested in the relation of blindness and secondary retardation this child is "feeble-minded" - he does not share our discipline, he spurns our ways, he seems to regard us as useless except to house him. Is it that he regards us as useless or that we have not known a beginning way to share his existence as more than the stereotype “blind” or “retarded”? Is what we regard as stubbornness ignorance - the ignorance of the ingenious “uncivilized” Bantu hunter who is “uninterested” when the American tourist talks loudly of the value of education and disturbs the distant antelope?

We must learn to share the child’s skill at listening to the walls and trees, the rebounding echo - to think and speak sometimes in terms of what is known to him, to join our language to his experience.

Those who can see have many skills to learn from those who cannot-skills which can greatly increase the breadth of all people’s experience. Do all small children have perceptual skills that only the blind are motivated to develop? Why are these skills not utilized in the sighted, is there no motivation, or do we train out ranges of perceptual skill by our out of awareness convictions? (The “miracle” of rapid reading suggests training out by older methods.) Are humans using their perceptual potential, have we trained out - extinguished - all but a small fraction of human perceptual potential? This is another story.

The study of variations from stereotype has always been the beginning of discovery both for science and for each of us (1). At the Pilot School we are busy learning as well as teaching. We have a talking period - show and tell. We imitate the children in a manner unashamed and often less than social, for purposive imitation is by convention unpopular except among comedians and children. We catch their sounds on the tape recorder. This “sound mirror” is the only mirror that they can know. They value that we value their sounds and words enough to mirror them. We first imitate them as they do us and from resonating with their responses we work at breaking pure imitation into twoway talking. We have our work book period in which the children share and structure into thought the touch of felt on paper - squares and triangles - a getting ready for braille. We have our play and observation period where we do whatever will help the child become aware of commonness of experience between himself and other children, child and teacher, teacher and parent.

Our teaching builds from the immediacy of a moment (18). This is why we must depend on a grasp of the situation which is built in by long though, but at the moment - spontaneous. We touch, we hug, we bite back, we close our eyes to catch a nonvisual image. Sometimes wearing perfume teases talk of smell, sometimes walking hard or soft brings talk of footfalls, and children wearing taps on shoes activate talk of echoes. Often there is no talk. Verbal silence brings thoughts of the language of space (9), of movement styles[16], of repulsion-attraction tensions (4) and of the language of inner gurgling, breathing and sweating.

The techniques we have used in our work have been built out of and have helped to build the structure of this paper. Some may be disappointed that this paper is not directed to procedures. We hope to publish further. But this presentation is to share a direction of approach, to conceptualize a way, to build some bridges.

Though our sample is small, our controls nonexistent, and we are not out to prove, it is our opinion that we have been useful to these children and that their progress is greatly accelerated. The increase in rate of acceleration of developmental learning has varied. The ignorant children have fared better than those more actively withdrawn and withholding. But all have jogged suddenly ahead in the months of working with us. To date the parents, teachers, neighbors, social workers, relatives, consultants, storekeepers, policemen on the beat - people who know these few children we have worked with - feel pleased to see their gains. We have seen that each gain makes easier new adventures, and children move faster and faster. We have reached the children and established relationship previously not existing. But it is hard and draining work and sharing !heir world is a task which can be only slowly encompassed, for only gradually with effort can one break through the conventions programmed in our own first years of life.

It is a basic enriching if we can comprehend our early learned perceptual conventions (often learned and preserved from our toddlerhood “why’s?”), and subject them to adult scrutiny. The security so obtained is necessary if we are to allow to co-exist the different conventions which are natural and normal to the blind child, but it has broader application. Our approach has been fashioned in the hope of catching you, the reader, into considering the more severe variants in perception as representing significant points along a continuum of perceptual variation. This is a route which breaking through our “everyone-knows” may make available many questions of perception and perceptual capacity as yet untapped by modern man. Work on our capacity to take in raw stimuli seems to have fallen behind the development of our capacity to manipulate symbols. Just as the normal fivefoot height of the adult in the Dark Ages is now considered short, so compared to man’s future capacity to perceive we may all be as yet undeveloped. Advances in developmental education hinge on our knowledge of perception.

We hope that our journey has led to new experience, new learning and new questions.

SUMMARY

Working with the blind child reaches issues common to all education The developmental education of each person as he lives in a perceptual world different from the next is only highlighted and exaggerated by the study of more extreme variants. The task of structuring, testing, sharing “the world I live”; (3) is common to all children. A way of thinking about the early programming of the human (developmental education) and the effect on the utilitzation of information (the learning cycle) of variations in perceptual intake apparatus has been presented. The models of modern physics have been substituted in this presentation for more familiar ways of conceptualizing. It is hoped that this presentation will interest the reader in the amount of basic research yet to be done in this area.

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