The Discipline of Home Teaching

Abstract

Home teaching is the unique contribution of services to blind persons to the general professional set of disciplines. The home teacher is a teacher of the skills needed by blind persons to function in a seeing world. He is a counselor, personal and professional, needed by blind persons to give information and assistance in developing attitudes to cope with that seeing world. He helps the community to understand its blind persons, teaches it how to assist them and to use them as responsible, contributing citizens. Its three main functions, therefore, are teaching, social rehabilitation, and public relations.

The teacher, then, is a necessary part of a rehabilitation team and is the advance agent of the agency for the blind and its services. The visually handicapped person who has a demonstrated interest in other visually handicapped persons, who is trained as a teacher and rehabilitation worker who speaks and writes well, who has ordinary handcraft skills, who has a spirit and willingness to serve, has the basic qualifications needed to do this important job. Let us stop trying to cover the waterfront with the home teacher and then condemning him for not having reached the professional level which our jack-of-all-trades concept has made impossible. He is a teaching counselor, not a mechanic, carpenter, seamstress, cook, cosmetician and heaven knows what else. Let him teach the skills needed by blind people to “see” —braille, the use of Talking Books, typewriting, simple crafts, and to take responsibility for filling his everyday living needs. If more skill is needed than these, let him use community volunteers or let the agency develop funds to pay for skilled services needed. If homemaking skills are needed by the blind housewife let her get these in a rehabilitation center; and, if this is not possible, let the agency pay a community person with these skills to work under the direction of the home teacher. If the service of a skilled craftsman is needed let the home teacher be free to locate the service and make it available to the client through the rehabilitation counselor. The same approach can be applied to teaching academic subjects, or obtaining highly skilled casework services.

If we limit the home teacher to these tasks, insist on their being performed and pay salaries consistent with the responsibilities and the techniques we are asking, the home teacher will be able to compete with other disciplines and be a real asset to the agency.

But our brief survey would not be complete without reference to that intangible quality known as the spirit of service which comes only from a sincere humanitarian desire to work with and serve other human beings in a natural, direct, give-and-take, though professional human relationship.