good advice to us in connection with this bill. I hope you will forgive me if I in turn offer what I think is good advice to you.

Miss JEAN. Thank you.

Senator DOUGLAS. Namely, that pending the adoption of this bill by Congress, the national foundation alter its policy and include in it the education of the whole child, because if it is true, as you state, that you may spend from two to fifteen thousand on the child yet the end results be zero because of lack of education, it seems to me as long as you are spending private funds it might be well to treat fewer cases and give more thorough treatment of those cases.

So this is the advice which I offer to you while we have your advice to the Congress that we take up the burden. Now I find myself very sympathetic to this bill, but we are going to have difficulties in getting it adopted and made part of the law of the land. Now, until we do get it adopted, I hope that the private organizations will have a somewhat better rounded program; that as excellent and as noble as the work is which you have done, the needs that you have revealed be not entirely shifted upon the community but be met by private resources insofar as possible to do so.

I hope you will forgive me for offering this, but I believe in the theory of reciprocal trade.

Miss JEAN. You would be the first to resent the fact, Senator Douglas, if a national organization for health attempted to direct the education of one single child.

Senator DOUGLAS. No; I would not resent it at all.

Miss JEAN. It is not our job.

Senator HILL. Is not this true-as the evidence yesterday and the day before indicated, it is much to the interest of the child's education and of the child to fit him in with other children in the way, perhaps, that the State can do where private institutions could not do it. Is that not true?

Miss JEAN. He comes from his public school or his parochial school and he comes into the hospital. He has 8 weeks of the hospital. His books are brought with him from the school and he has them, where it is properly done, and he has the same curriculum and he goes right back and fits right into the classroom. He is not going to be in the hospital always. This is for 2 or 3 or 4 months, maybe 3 years, then he goes back into life.

Senator DOUGLAS. I think you might draw a distinction between those who go back into the schools and those who go back into the homes, and it may well be, as you say, that private organizations should not give financial aid to work in the schools. But where the children are at home it seems to me that would not be a breach of a mandate to help take care of them there.

Miss JEAN. I will carry back that message to our board of trustees, Senator Douglas.

Senator DOUGLAS. I offer you the advice for what it is worth.
Miss JEAN. Thank you very much.

Senator HILL. Thank you, Miss Jean, very much for your testimony.
Miss JEAN. Thank you.

Senator HILL. Our next witness is Mr. Miers, of New York.

Mr. Miers, you may proceed in your own way. We are very happy to have you here.

I notice you are a Phi Beta Kappa, is that right?
Mr. MIERS. That is right, sir.

Senator HILL. You should find a kinship with my distinguished colleague here.

Senator DOUGLAS. Well, I try to conceal that, but it will sneak out. Senator HILL. Proceed in your own way.

STATEMENT OF EARL SCHENCK MIERS, EDITOR, ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC., NEW YORK, N. Y.

Mr. MIERS. Gentlemen, in testifying before this committee on the Physically Handicapped Children's Education Act of 1950 only one reason can justify my presence here.

I speak solely from the point of view of a person who has lived for 40 years with a perfectly observable handicap.

My affliction is called cerebral palsy.

In a loose sense, cerebral palsy is a term employed to describe any paralysis, weakness, incoordination, or functional deficiency of the motor system resulting from the permanent destruction of certain brain areas.

I did not breathe for some time after birth-and then only after being plunged from cold baths to hot baths-and insofar as the brain is very sensitive to low oxygen intake, the cerebral damage I suffered seems obvious.

The medical term for this type of injury, I believe, is anoxia.

Such terms and such explanations, however, become entirely academic; the important fact is that my handicap first was noticed when I was 3 days old, and from that time the world in which I lived had to be accepted as a normal world for me.

I grew up in the New York metropolitan area, where hospitals and clinics were readily accessible, but 30 or 35 years ago so little was known about cerebral palsy that even this circumstance became largely academic.

If all the doctors and therapists who examined me and gave me advice without knowing whereof they spoke were placed in a line I suspect that this notable procession would reach from here to Baltinore, with a side excursion to Havre de Grace for that sporting element in the profession who will take a chance on anything-the horses or a diagnosis.

But one wise old doctor told my parents, "Give this boy the finest education you possibly can; don't worry about the shakes in his arms as long as there aren't shakes in his head."

Today, on looking back, I am eternally grateful that my parents saw the importance of education and equipping me for a useful, active life. Tremendous sacrifices were involved for them-on the one hand financial and on the other spiritual-but I am glad they prevailed in every emergency, including that tense moment at the end of my senior year in college when the department head in journalism didn't want to graduate me, despite my honor school averages, because he felt I would be unemployable and thus spoil his record of immediately placing all his graduates in newspaper jobs.

True, the department head made no effort to place me in a jobso I placed myself-but since graduating from college in 1933 I have

been editor for a Philadelphia publishing house, director of a university press, and now am an editor for Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Senator HILL. What position?

Mr. MIERS. Editor.

I have published 10 books, under my own name, and, I guess, tons of shorter stuff-none of it procommunistic. [Laughter.]

To support adequately a wife and three fine youngsters by providing for them proper medical and educational advantages, an American kind of home, and the leisure in which to find their own way in life according to the basic tradition of our American system, requires constant scratching, and I can assure this committee that the American business world still retains a convincing degree of free, hard-boiled, hard-hitting competition.

To

Ours is not a very sentimental society, especially when it comes to paying the butcher or baker or collector of internal revenue. survive under the American system a man must be worthy of his hire. Our largest area of failure, both as a society and as a government, rests with those persons who have not had the opportunity for education to the very limit of their native abilities.

The uneducated American still remains our most gravely handicapped citizen; he is least capable of comprehending the complexities of the atomic age, usually the first to become embittered, the first to be out of step with the enlightened public opinion so essential, at this time, in maintaining a healthful national morale; and since you and I are partners in the business of running this Government, we should face the fact that, in the long run, the inadequately educated citizen costs us a pretty penny to support.

I believe we will be wisest if, as partners in this enterprise of government, we do some straight-from-the-shoulder, unemotional thinking about the handicapped and about education. Four premises impress me as basic in any such consideration.

First, the handicapped are with us and will continue to be with us, for they constitute, reasonably and decently, a normal, potentially useful, and not inconsiderable percentage of our total population.

Second, unless we wish to produce a Nation of mollycoddles, dolefed and spiritually bankrupt, we must maintain the competitive basis of our system, insisting that a man must win his own way by having some service to give back to the society that supports him.

Third, within the physical and mental limitations that nature imposes upon a man, he must be given equal opportunity to compete for his survival-simply another way of saying that as a person he must be secure within his own dignity as the master of his soul. I am sure that every Congressman will recognize this philosophy neither as New Deal nor Old Deal nor Fair Deal, but as traditionally the American Deal. Implicit within the GI bill of rights was the principle that a lad who has been away to war deserves the right, upon his return-and if he possesses the initiative and the ability-to catch up on his education, not as a sinecure of any sort, but simply as a manifestation of an American sense of fair play that would see him compete on an equal footing with those who remained behind. This same principle motivates the Physically Handicapped Children's Education Act of 1950.

Fourth, I think we have good reason to ask, What do we want from our handicapped? To me, as an American, there are only two goals

for the handicapped that seem acceptable. The first goal, as I see it, is that wherever possible the handicapped must be given the chance to become stable citizens; they must be encouraged to become wellintegrated personalities, rising above the bruised spirit that a handicap inherently breeds; and we want them to become successful wage earners and good family people, for at heart we remain a nation of strong family units. The second goal, as I see it, is that the handicapped must give us that leadership which comes naturally to them from the very intensity of purpose that drives them on, which comes from the deeper maturity of viewpoint that they require to detach the courage of their spirit from the thorn of the flesh, and which comes from the tenderness and the compassion and the love of life that only the silence of suffering truly nurtures.

The Physically Handicapped Children's Education Act of 1950 asks you to appropriate money to enable the individual States to implement realistic programs of education based upon these four basic premises.

This request is anything but sentimental.

Actually, you are being asked to invest in a share of the special services and equipment essential to giving the American handicapped a fair chance, an equal chance, to grow in stature and effectiveness as future wage earners, as future family people.

Experience has demonstrated time and again how with education, with a fair chance, the handicapped can provide for themselves and for others dependent upon them.

Experience also has demonstrated how without education, without a fair chance, the handicapped are twice confounded.

The choice to be made rests squarely on the levels of human right, moral justice, and social alertness.

Senator HILL. Any questions, Senator Douglas?

Senator DOUGLAS. No.

Senator HILL. We want to thank you, sir, for coming down here for this very fine and moving statement. We appreciate it very deeply. Mr. MIERS. Thank you, sir.

Senator HILL. Miss Betty C. Wright, director of field service, American Hearing Society, is our next witness.

STATEMENT OF BETTY C. WRIGHT, DIRECTOR OF FIELD SERVICE, AMERICAN HEARING SOCIETY, WASHINGTON, D. C.

Miss WRIGHT. Mr. Chairman and Senator Douglas, I officially represent the American Hearing Society national organization here in Washington. We have about 11,000 members. One of these members appeared before you yesterday, Mr. Paul Pernecky, Jr., who told you his story of what special education had done for him. And we have 115 chapters in 32 States. Its objects are threefold: Prevention of deafness, conservation of hearing, and rehabilitation of the hard of hearing. And I want to state that we are in favor of Senate bill 3102 especially, of course, because of inclusion of acoustically handicapped children.

I note that the committee have heard a number of statistics. Senator HILL. We will put your statement in full in the record. Miss WRIGHT. May I say here that in talking about statistics this morning, Senator Douglas, you asked some questions, and I wondered if I could help in any way here.

Senator DOUGLAS. I would appreciate it very much.

Miss WRIGHT. Our American Hearing Society has issued a report from the chairman of its committee on hard-of-hearing children which I offer for the record. And on the basis of this report there are some interesting statistics which have come to light.

Now we believe that out of the number of children in the United States today in the public schools there are 4 percent who have defective hearing. Now, that does not mean that all of them are severely handicapped. But on the basis of the Texas figures, which register as hard of hearing a child who has a decibel loss of about 35, which is about 30 percent of hearing-he would need a hearing aid according to the Texas estimates-and according to the Texas estimates, if they are applied to the total school population of 30,000,000, which I imagine will be so at the end of this census, there would be 120,000 children who would need hearing aids in order to complete their regular education, which will give some idea of the children in that field. That does not mean that all of the children who need special education are covered, but it will give you some idea.

Senator DOUGLAS. That would be roughly four-tenths of 1 percent? Miss WRIGHT. Four-tenths of 1 percent.

Senator DOUGLAS. Yes; four-tenths of 1 percent.

Miss WRIGHT. In Texas. I can give you the exact figures, but they were supposed by law to register what they called hard-of-hearing children, and they established a criterion for hard-of-hearing children, and they registered 4,764. So the percentage is 0.004 applied to the total school population.

Senator DOUGLAS. They were children whose hearing was only onethird normal?

Miss WRIGHT. There would be a 30- to 35-decibel loss in one ear. Senator DOUGLAS. LOSS?

Miss WRIGHT. Loss of hearing.

Senator DOUGLAS. I see. And what would be the standard, 100? Miss WRIGHT. We could call it 100, or 120.

Senator DOUGLAS. A loss of one-third in one ear?

Miss WRIGHT. In one ear. But in the criteria we have adopted, and the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology, they have to have a threshold of 20-decibel loss at two tones or 30decibel loss at one tone in one ear. So it is very much like the Texas criteria they used.

Senator DOUGLAS. What in your judgment, Miss Wright, as to which group needs aid, the 4 percent who have some loss, which would come to a little over a million, or the four-tenths of 1 percent of that figure who apparently need hearing aids? Which group is it that needs aid?

Miss WRIGHT. Of course, I would say that the severely handicapped child needs it first. But I also know this, that a child who would need only lip-reading instruction might not have as big a loss as that but would also be greatly handicapped in the schoolroom even if he did not need a hearing aid. It would not cost as much to educate him because he would not have to have special equipment, but he would have to have specially trained teachers to teach lip reading or corrective speech.

Senator DOUGLAS. Would he need lip reading if less than a third loss?