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Page speaking and anything else that he felt like" another "taught physical education and anything else for which no other teacher could be found, on the theory that a 'trained teacher of the deaf' can teach deaf students anything."
Curious about a popular course in public speaking, Detmold noticed that every time he passed the classroom "all the students were asleep, with their heads on their desks. 'Whats going on' I asked the professor, a highly respected deaf man on campus.
He was offended. Didn't I know that deaf people used their eyes more than hearing people Therefore, in his class he insisted that they rest their eyes."
Detmold found such overindulgent practices and attitudes throughout the deaf education system:
To begin with, the students secondary education . . . was almost nonexistent. That we admitted only the top 10 percent of them is evidence that they were among the brightest of their generation. Nonetheless, almost all of them were admitted to the preparatory class, where they had a year of math (algebra and geometry) and English composition. If they survived that, they became undergraduates, where a poor repast awaited them. The most advanced course offered in math was an introduction to calculus, ordinarily given in high school. One professor offered acceptable courses in chemistry, but
[another] merely fiddled around in elementary biology. He believed that the deaf couldn't read but liked to look at pictures, so he ordered Life magazine for them instead of a textbook. There was no physics . . . . English and American history were taught in the curious mechanical way in which teachers were supposed to teach language to the deaf. The sociology course was the kind that you would find in high school. There was no economics.
Detmold soon realized that the watered-down curriculum was a direct result of common attitudes toward deaf people:
expectations for deaf graduates, he remembers, were "extremely limited" Most of the male students would become dormitory supervisors in the residential high schools that they had attended, "hoping at sometime to be allowed to teach" Others would learn printing and go directly after college to the Gov-

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