| Description | Interview with Miss McHugh, headmistress at Chorley Wood grammar school for blind girls, Hertfordshire. She continues to talk about her objectives to enable girls to live indepedently in the sighted community, the need for a balance between teaching academic, artistic and social skills and her efforts to get the girls to take part in social activities outside the school. She talks about the special skills taught at the school to enable the girls to communicate with the outside world, including typing, using a tape recorder and mobility and orientation, all of which take longer to teach than with sighted people. She discusses the particular issues affecting partially sighted girls and describes the admission process. She talks about the need for more flexibility in education structures for blind children, gives her opinions about non-residential education and describes the difficulties that will arise from placing blind students in sighted schools. She talks about the opportunities available to girls, the varied social backgrounds of the students and their future prospects in employment, further education or training courses. She discusses the fact that most of the students get married, mostly to blind or partially sighted men, and her opinions about this. She talks about the lack of development of teaching methods for students of 'average' ability and considers the suggestion that the personality of blind people is stunted and their identity being undeveloped (tracks 1-11).
Total: 32.56 mins
Dubber's reference number: PLA KF565D0764780 |