1960s Part 2: O&M Goes to School
- Grace Ambrose-Zaken
- Apr 6
- 34 min read
Updated: Apr 6
The entire field of orientation and mobility (O&M) exists because of the dog guide and later the long cane. These devices were created for WWI and WWII veterans respectively. The O&M curriculum for teaching independent travel to blind people is entirely based on working with newly blind fully-functioning adults who only recently became blind.
This blog explores the literature about bringing long cane training from the army, to the universities, and to school age children in the 1960s.
Early attempts to teach O&M to congenitally blind high school students.
An early 1950s pilot project brought three of the originators of O&M, Stanley Suterko, John Malamazian and Larry Blaha to teach long cane travel skills to a group of high school students with an MVI/B. They reportedly found it difficult to understand why some high school children could master the long cane and some could not.
They described the children who could learn O&M skills as cooperative, those who couldn't were faulted for not trying hard enough, not wanting it enough. They wrote, "In spite of those who encountered problems, other youngsters showed both the ability and desire for extending their skills and quickly learned to travel independently from their home to a variety of locations" (Miyagawa, 1999, p. 193).
Children with an MVI/B who failed to pass the prerequisite test or master the long cane was faulted for lacking the 'right stuff' to be independent. Their punishment was that they would have to continue to exist in a world without safe mobility.
Those children who actually received these specialized services were the lucky ones. In describing the results of her experimental life skills program at the Illinois Braille and Sight Saving School for Developmentally-Delayed Visually-Impaired Children, O'Meara admitted that,
"Each year a greater number of these children have come to the school seeking admission. Unfortunately, the deprivation which they have suffered in the area of experiential and sensory stimulation during infancy and early childhood has made it very difficult, even at times impossible, for them to benefit from regular educational programs provided for blind and/or partially seeing children" (O'Meara, 1966, p.18).O'Meara was feeding a new myth, one that suggested that somehow, prior to the ROP epidemic, residential schools were filled with highly effective, educable congenitally blind children. Of course, what is omitted from this myth is that residential schools, like her program, only admitted those blind students who appeared ready and able to benefit from their teaching methods. Those others who survived infancy, but did not walk or talk; ended up in institutions for the uneducable.
Imagine the strain that must build up when you must travel without safety.
In the 1960s, a few O&M teachers began to ask in earnest, “At what age should mobility training start?" Miller's answer "I would risk saying, emphatically, ‘in the cradle!” (1964, p. 307). Miller was among the first graduates with a master's degree in O&M. After having learned to travel blindfolded with her long white cane, it was plain to her that children with an MVI/B needed the protection of white canes too, but how?
Infants with an MVI/B could not use a long cane; toddlers did not have the language to learn long cane skills, preschoolers appeared to reject holding the long cane, and most school-aged children were unreachable, quiet, solitary, stationary people, worn down by years of unprotected mobility who preferred to walk with a hand held.
The same year Miller (1964) was reporting the detrimental motor outcomes she found in the student population she served; Royster (1964) detailed his modern instructional road map for teaching a baby with a congenital MVI/B to become a ready adolescent for learning the long cane. Royster explained:
"In the infant stage the primary emphasis must be concentrated in more than usual amounts of emotional warmth in physical care. As the child becomes a toddler, he ...needs to be taught free and independent exploration techniques to orient himself, ...and acquire motor skills of balance and coordination. During the preschool years, ...teach imagery stimulation and spatial orientation of objects in the environment. At school age, ... activities of running, jumping, swinging, ballet dancing, climbing, and pounding should be a regularly scheduled part of the school curriculum.... Provided a continuous sequence of orientation opportunities and activities, the adolescent is ready to learn mobility and travel from a peripatologist" (p. 42). Royster, as we know, was merely reflecting the current state of O&M instruction that had been in practice, without scrutiny, for hundreds of years (Ambrose-Zaken, 2024a-d). He was merely drawing on the publications of the day which adamantly supported the methods he espoused.
O&M in the schools
In 1961, a survey about access to O&M instruction in forty-one residential schools and seventeen day schools reported that, "Twenty-eight residential and 4 day schools offered organized programs of orientation and mobility" (Walker, p. 56). These programs were provided to the upper grades, with "the greatest paucity of organized programs is at the primary level in the residential schools".
Walker (1961) concluded the lack of formal O&M programs in the early grades was "...partially explained if we accept the assumption that a considerable amount of effective, informal teaching is being done at the primary and intermediate levels" (p. 57).
The other reason for the lack of formal O&M programs was due to the lack qualified O&M specialists in schools. While there had been specialized advanced degrees to prepare academic teachers of learners with a visual impairment since 1920; university O&M graduate degree programs had only just begun, in 1960.
University Prepared O&M Specialists and Teachers of Learners with a Visual Impairment or Blindness
The first university O&M graduate degree program opened at Boston College in 1960. One feared "... obstacle was finding qualified faculty, but Father Carroll and Russell Williams, the most ardent advocates of professionalization, met the challenge by volunteering the use of their own agencies for clinical practice, and releasing members of their staffs to teach and supervise (Koestler, p. 318).
By 1970, there were seven US graduate programs in O&M all following the Boston College model adopting the US Army's O&M curriculum in its entirety. It is no accident that the graduate students who entered the field of O&M fit much the same profile as the originators of the field, as did the students they would select to teach long cane skills to. By Army design, O&M instructors and their blind students were all required to be physically and cognitively capable people, before learning to use a long cane.
The academic teachers' preparation began much earlier in the century; Peabody College began the first teachers of learners with a visual impairment (TVIs) university program in 1921. In the sixties there were thirty-seven university programs preparing TVIs. Of those, fourteen offering at least one full semester course or a summer workshop entitled either: Orientation and Mobility for Visually Handicapped Children or Orientation and Mobility for Teachers of the Visually Handicapped.
Although less than forty percent of university programs preparing TVIs were offering a course on O&M for children in the 1960s, that was still more than double the programs preparing strictly O&M graduates.
Also, these 1960s TVI graduates differed slightly from previously trained cohorts with respect to the inclusion of the new terminology from the nascent field of O&M. These graduates received this new instruction and their diploma only after they agreed to the new hands' off policy regarding their students' travel.
TVI grads avowed to have nothing to do with teaching the long cane to their students (Lord & Blaha, 1968). The modern TVI role was to start 'systematically' teaching travel concepts and get their students walking freely by any means necessary. The TVI role was to have the young children properly prepared before learning long cane skills from an O&M specialist in high school.
Long canes intentionally excluded from the classroom.
In the 1960s, most TVIs were women employed by school districts. Most O&M specialists were men employed by vision rehabilitation agencies. O&M specialists, like TVIs, were taught that students with visual impairments had to possess certain pre-requisite knowledge and skills before they could learn long cane skills.
There appeared to be no sense of urgency to bring the long cane into the schools, at first. Yet, there also weren't very many O&M specialists available. TVIs could have been trained on long cane skills and immediately boosted the numbers and access, but instead; the majority stakeholder in the child's early education was barred from incorporating long cane skills in her lessons.
TVIs understood that teaching long cane skills was not in their job description.
All TVI university programs intentionally omitted the use of the long cane during their blindfold lab classes. As Lord and Blaha (1968) described,
“The presentation of the skills was done by placing the teacher under a blindfold, the actual use of the cane was not involved. The acquisition of cane techniques is universally seen as the function of the fully trained specialists, and this role was clearly defined for the participating teachers” (p. 21).The instructional strategies taught to O&M specialists and TVIs during their university programs helped to reinforce the two-tier system of safe mobility, those who can learn the long cane and those who cannot. These early O&M graduates were taught a very narrow profile of the eligibility guidelines for learning to use a long cane.
Back then, to be eligible to use a long cane for safety, one had to have the physical and cognitive ability to learn the complex contra-lateral two-point touch long cane technique, as described by Bledsoe (1963).
The Army's own research confirms the intentional selection of the elite blind man to become an elite long cane user in their 1966 study of the 851 blinded vets who received O&M instruction during the first twenty years after its invention in 1946.
The portrait of the first long cane users emerged clearly:
Out of the mass of data and the many conclusions one could draw from them, one fact stands out above all others: this population of blind persons resembles most closely their sighted fellows, by almost any criterion one wishes to choose. Thus, their mean age is 46.1 years; 77 per cent of them live with their spouses; two-thirds own their own homes; they are regular and rather heavy readers of books, magazines, and journals (above the national average, in fact); they engage in known national standards of active outdoor recreation; they are quite active in social and civic organizations not connected with blindness. Their total household income averages $8600 a year...well above the national average" (Graham & Clarke, 1966, pp. 304-305).This description offers the clearest evidence that the long cane was intended to be used only by the elite class of blind adults. Those able to walk and talk and fit enough to have places to go. This study should have been a red flag to educators, instead it was fuel for the fire.
These defacto prerequisites fit neatly into the strange narrative that blind children would one day outgrow their delays and recognize their need for a long cane. As O&M began to make its way into high schools with a series of government funded demonstration projects, the lack of readiness began to be seen as an opportunity missed. While it led to calls for increased focus on independent walking young children. These congenitally blind high schoolers were essentially labeled untrainable.
O&M Demonstration Projects
Donald Blasch (1968) founding Director of blind rehabilitation programs Western Michigan is credited with spurring the expansion of mobility training to children and aged populations. This was made possible by federal grants to establish O&M programs in school settings. Grants were given in Illinois, California, Florida, and Kansas in public school settings. Others were given to residential schools in Massachusetts, Arkansas, and other states.
Blasch reported that most of these programs were considered "highly successful and the resistance that some of us anticipated never really crystalized. At the present time, over 45% of our (Western Michigan) graduates are employed by schools, either residential or public, and I would venture to say that 80% of our graduates work with children at some time or another" (Pg. 5).
Blasch characterized O&M instruction for children as...the skills and techniques were basically the same" (p. 6). "Most of the students were congenitally blind, and although it would appear inconceivable that educational programs could develop without including this service to the students, the fact remains that prior to the development of the present training program of mobility instructors, very few schools had formalized training in this area."
After providing fifty junior high and high school students with one to two years of O&M instruction, Blasch (1968) concluded, "The congenitally blind child lacks the visual memories of his environment which the adventitiously blinded child frequently retains and the blinded children in this study were better oriented and more independent than the congenially blind ones" (p. 52).
"Nevertheless, the more means by which we can increase the sensory input to an individual and teach him to correctly interpret it (for no interpretation leading to meaningful concept formation will develop spontaneously), the better he will be able to function. This remains true regardless of the number and kinds of gadgets and techniques that are developed. In the end, the type and amount of stimuli they provide will improve the degrees of success will be achieved, and there is no doubt that the younger clients will make better adaptations to aids" (p. 7).
Demonstration projects demonstrate congenitally blind kids unable to learn long cane travel skills
At the close of the 1960s, Lord and Blaha reported their findings from their O&M demonstration project. Three O&M instructors evaluated and taught long cane travel to fifty-one adolescents with an MVI/B aged thirteen to twenty-one years.
Their evaluations found the “blind adolescents have limited travel …in relation to normal youths of similar age. Their social life is very limited... Their travel often is confined to a high school campus and home...” (1968, p. 78).
The report recommended the adolescents' “orientation skills and knowledge need to be developed further, primarily because blind children lack experiences with their environment. They have a great need for orientation materials that can be classified as educative rather than rehabilitative” (p. 11).
Their O&M instructors reported that long cane instruction had “enhanced their physical and mental development” (p. 11). They also reported that, like Blacklock did in 1797, the 1968 “Students tend to blame parents for their limited travel experiences” (p. 12).
These fifty-one adolescents were the physical and cognitive demonstration of unsafe walking since infancy. Lord & Blaha’s conclusion was ‘parents needed to try even harder to give their infants with a MVI/B more opportunities to walk independently BEFORE they became teenagers’. Their recommendation,
“It therefore appears that active programs of recreation, travel, etc. should be instituted to generate normal travel needs. Orientation and mobility training would then become an important service to a youth in relation to these needs.” (Lord & Blaha, 1968, p. 74).
Blaha had died suddenly of a heart attack in March of 1968. Lord was tasked with finishing their report. Throughout the report we see the suggestion that children with an MVI/B did not travel because they were uninterested in going places outside their familiar routines. This narrative appears to blame children for the outcomes of the decisions made by adults since infancy.
Lord's thesis demonstrates the utter inability for sighted people who keep flashlights, extra batteries, candles, and matches at the ready for when the power goes out, to understand the safety problem for blind children. How could they never once consider how impossible a task they had given infants with an MVI/B? The expectation they could grow up and learn with only their two feet in contact with the world.
In the 1960s, the children who were able to walk and talk were provided with O&M instruction, in another project that was only 15 out of 36 students. The selection process was described in this way. "It was seen that for the children under a resource teacher or for older children, who were progressing in their school situation without the help of a resource teacher, formal mobility instruction was feasible (Kansas State Dept. of Education & Flannagan, 1969).
The remaining twenty-one children it was reported, "the needs of the children were so great that the school administrators and classroom teachers" insisted "...the pressing educational needs of the children were met" first. Until then, "school personnel, parents, and children alike were not able to give priority in attention or time to the pursuit of mobility and orientation goals" (p. 39).
As Dr. Lawrence Weiner, a psychologist at the New York State School for the Blind described in 1962, "They are often characterized by: 1) withdrawal and an inward orientation at frequent intervals or whenever it is expedient; 2) immature speech development which is often at an echolalic stage; 3) poor relationships with other children; 4) lack of initiative in active participation in the classroom; and 5) frequent exhibitions of mannerisms associated with blind children, such as rocking and finger movements" (p. 77).
These children did not fit the mold of a long cane user, therefore, they didn't get to try to learn how to protect themselves with it. It became apparent that achievement of O&M skills was predicated on the acceptance of the demonstrator as a useful co-worker in the child's educational setting.
In 1969, Mills and Adamshick summarized, "Currently, it is the consensus of qualified instructors in the field of orientation and mobility that it takes a congenitally blind student an average in excess of 200 hours of individual instruction to become a competent, efficient, safe, independent traveler" (p. 15).
The truth was as plain as the nose on everybody's face, nothing that had been done to assuage these obvious deficits that were first identified in preschool. It was in preschool when they could not walk freely. Now they were in high school.
Therefore, a spurious, even more harmful conclusion was reached, the belief that the problem was they had become blind as infants and it was nearly impossible to teach babies who had never seen before. This depressing, wrong-headed conclusion may, in part, be attributed to a national mourning for the lost potential of so many children due to the lifesaving medical intervention of flooding their incubators with oxygen.
Mourning After ROP
In the 1960s, the hope that the premature infants blinded by retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) in the late 1940s and early 1950s would have, by now, been ready for long cane training was dashed in each and every demonstration project attempting to deliver on that promise to parents (Blasch, 1968; Lord & Blaha, 1968). This led to the emotional, grief stricken conclusion that delayed development was due to the very blindness itself, never once questioning their therapeutic tools or educational failings.
Instead, almost every theoretical article, literature review, and instructional guide revealed a prejudice for visual learning. Underlying this bias perhaps the grief in knowing that these children might have had vision, but for the life-saving oxygen pumped into their incubators.
Every manuscript, keynote address, and documentary leads with a statement that sighted children learned concepts by watching and imitating; ergo, these early-onset blind infants' ability to learn had been stolen from them.
This singular emphasis on the lack of vision causing blind children to be unable to learn incidentally, led to the convenient conclusion that nothing really could be done to replace visual incidental learning.
This illogical view of an infant's brain and developmental potential can only be explained by basic bias against blind people coupled with national mourning for the overwhelming numbers of blind babies with early onset blindness due to the ROP epidemic.
The Long Cane Dilemma
The new orientation and mobility (O&M) university preparation programs sincerely believed that systematic orientation skill instruction would prepare blind children "to move about amidst the familiar and unfamiliar with relative safety and ease. Many schools serving blind children recognize this fact and now are employing teachers of orientation and mobility" (Eichorn & Vigaroso, 1967, p. 48).
As described in the prior blog, US Army long cane instruction was proclaimed by the originators to be dependent on the young blind man's ability to walk independently, physically hold and manipulate the long cane correctly, and intellectually understand and respond to long cane tactile feedback. Of course, these were the exact prerequisite skills that blind infants did not yet possess, due to the fact that they were indeed only infants.
The authors, Dr. John Eichorn, coordinator of the program at Boston College and Victor Vigaroso, a member of the peripatology staff there explained their instructional philosophy for teaching children with a MVI/B.
"To help the blind child examine his environment, his parents must provide the degree of freedom recommended for all children of his age, with commonsense prevailing. Along with liberty, the parents should allow for the inevitable bumps and bruises that all active children experience, and relay this attitude to their child" (Eichorn & Vigaroso, 1967, p. 49). These university professors may have been unaware that they were simply regurgitating advice for rearing blind babies first published in 1797 (Ambrose-Zaken, 2024d). As did all the authors who followed suit, such as Lawrence Hapeman. Hapeman, a graduate student and mobility instructor at the Missouri School for the Blind in St. Louis, published his thesis on how to teach blind babies concepts needed for O&M.
Hapeman, who later went on to prepare O&M specialists at Northern Illinois University, was taught by his professors that the problem was that parents and teachers were not "aware of those basic concepts that are needed for effective and safe travel by a blind child" and that his untested system of beliefs packaged as a 'structured orientation instruction' would have better outcomes, because "...the time spent in teaching them basic concepts could be devoted instead to the teaching of specific travel skills" (p. 41).
Hapeman's article demonstrates how university instructors simply repackaged the blind children's adaptive behavior of holding on to walls, objects and people to move as examples of 'cruising' and 'trailing', all while ignoring the fact that these children could not let go of the wall.
Instead of accepting these obvious motor delays as the hinderance they were to blind children's development, he wrongly concluded this behavior provided the blind child with "direct contact with his environment, whether it is with parents or inanimate objects" (p. 41).
Hapeman clearly preferred the blind child who walked when in contact with stationary objects to the blind child who avoided all walking. He like Minturn, blamed parents for their misguided overuse of verbal narration strategy, saying a child "cannot completely learn about his environment or himself solely through the use of words" (p. 41).
Hapeman suggested children with an MVI/B's biggest roadblock to development was they lacked visual motivation, saying: "In addition, the child must develop a motivation to travel. He cannot be aware of most objects which are beyond his reach" (p. 41).
He too suggesting there was educational merit in the bodily collisions experienced by blind babies who did walk, writing: "Unless he has explored his environment through "trial and error" and can remember the location of objects in it, he does not know whether the objects are desirable or even if they exist" (p. 41).
How does Hapeman, a man who himself wore a blindfold and used a long cane to detect and protect himself from unseen obstacles as a graduate student learning O&M, not suggest finding a way to provide an obstacle detector for blind babies? It is because he also believed that his fear of blindfolded travel justified an assistive safety device, but a blind babies fear did not?
Instead, he suggested mothers encourage their 15-month old blind toddlers to walk freely and applaud their collisions with obstacles. These same parents would later be blamed for their children's failure to thrive. Few educators ever seeming to understand it was the very barbaric conditions caused by unsafe mobility that caused these children to fail.
Although the ROP epidemic in newborns coincided with the rise of the long cane for the blinded veterans, it did not result in creation of a assistive safety device specifically for blind babies. Instead, the focus remained 'must walk', repackaged in the 1960s as 'must develop 'orientation skills' in blind babies, with the promise that one day their babies would mature enough to learn long cane skills.
The greatest hurdle of all, the prerequisites for safe mobility.
The US army assumed prerequisites for learning O&M prevented many blinded vets from O&M training, too. As Russ Williams explained, "...regional VA offices referred men who lacked the necessary emotional or physical strengths to benefit from such environmental therapy.
"Our program is tough," Williams explained over and over. "Its keynote is hard work." Only men in sound health, able to undergo a regimen of physical reconditioning after years of inactivity, could be considered. Good physical tone was essential for successful training in independent travel. A blind man needs extremely strong feet and ankles if he is not to be thrown by the pebbles, sticks and unexpected depressions the ordinary person unconsciously sees and avoids. Even though the cane weighs only six ounces, its use requires a strong, flexible wrist and an untiring arm," He told a reporter for the Chicago Herald-American in one of the few newspaper interviews he permitted (Koestler, p. 278).For parents the message of formal training and long cane use was fraught with inconsistencies starting mostly with the inability to decide whether blind children really had a problem walking, or a problem with the adults providing them with too much help. As most suggested there should be no need to treat blind infants any differently from sighted infants in the early years. Therefore, "Visually handicapped boys and girls should be treated primarily as children, not as blind individuals" (Buell, 1962, p. 65).
There was great confusion about what independence looked like in blind babies. For example, in the same 1960 International Journal for the Education of the Blind issue were two such contradictory articles. One finding "some indication of the recognition of the need for development of orientation and travel skills for those children with some useful vision as well as those who are, for all practical purposes blind."
The very next article was an anecdotal piece celebrating the independence of a blind seven-year-old girl who had climbed over her backyard fencing to her door in an effort to "run away" from home. To the population at large, a seven-year-old blind child who is able to run away without using a long cane, is doing just fine because she's doing things a sighted child does, right? Well, only when we ignore difference in safety standards when discussing blind and sighted independence.
The hardest question for the field to grapple with was, why did some children thrive, beat the odds, and others not. Made all the more difficult because the definition of thrive appeared to have a sliding scale - especially when measuring independent walking.
These questions seemed to surround the same basic premise; why was it so hard for some blind babies to walk independently and not for others? Yet in all of the searching for answers, very few questioned whether the lack of safety that naturally occurs when you cannot see where you're going could be a major force in dampening a child's motivation to move freely. The consequences of unsafe mobility was most evident in the reports that came out from the schools in the 1960s.
Which came first, the inability to walk or the difficulty using the only two safety devices designed specifically for adults?
The long cane is a deceptively difficulty tool to use correctly for safety. It is important to understand the mechanics of long cane safety. The user must be able to interpret and respond to sensory information transmitted through the half-inch diameter cane tip. To ensure the best safety outcome, the user must rhythmically swing the cane tip back and forth with each step to check the ground for danger.
Bledsoe (1977) explained on John Chester's radio show “Dialogue Today,” that the two-point touch cane technique is actually quite difficult to learn to use correctly as:
"Long cane use has to be taught and carefully taught in conditions and situations in which blind travelers go. One of the first things we discovered is that no one picks up a cane and touches in front of the trailing foot naturally. In fact, it takes hours and hours of training to get blind people to do it that way. It seems to be the opposite of conditioned reflex."
Used correctly, the user is two steps from a decision. He must be able to interpret the tactile information in time to stop, investigate further, and decide what to do next. Used any other way, the long cane is not a safety tool. Infants do not possess the intellect, patience, or motor skills to maintain the cane tip position, rhythmical movement or respond to long cane feedback.
It was believed that infants with a congenital MVI/B could naturally learn to walk without any additional safety tool. Despite full recognition that adults "loss of mobility is perhaps to greatest of all the reality losses of blindness...restoring mobility to the extent needed for normal life and work is necessarily one of the major objectives of a rehabilitation program, and modern developments have at last made it possible to achieve this objective" (Carroll, 1961, p.134)
In the 1960s, attempts to teach high school students to use the long cane were frustrating to the O&M instructors for many reasons, not the least of which was the difficulty students had in learning the precision the proper techniques demanded, finding that "some were careless in the application of the skills, which resulted in unsafe and inconsistent performances (Miyagawa, 1999, p. 193).
The degree of difficulty in using the long cane further ensured the walk first, safety last paradigm for infants with a MVI/B.
The degree of difficulty in using the long cane further ensured the walk first, safety last paradigm for infants with a MVI/B. The need to qualify for long cane instruction may have brought even greater pressure to bear on parents of infants with a MVI/B to get their children walking and talking on time so they could finally be safe.
A blind child hiding inside a bookshelf seems more like a cry for help, than indifference.
Children with a congenital MVI/B who did not walk much, or talk did not fit the profile of a long cane user.
The long cane is an effective safe mobility tool, but the originators of O&M designed a curriculum that began with learning to navigate without its protection, first. Before any long cane instruction would begin, soldiers and graduate students had to demonstrate proficiency in 'how to be guided' and how to walk without a long cane, called 'pre-cane' skills.
For the next forty years, graduate curriculum for preparing teachers of children with a MVI/B enshrined the belief that there were a set of skills blind people had to learn before they could be provided a safety device. As a result, the invention of the long cane remained out of reach by those who could not master the ability to walk without it.
In the 1960s, adults with a MVI/B used long canes for all to see, as parents continued to watch their blind infants fail to begin walking independently by eighteen months. Many of their children increasingly lost confidence in their ability to independently navigate with each passing year.
The problem with external motivation is it doesn't work on infants.
One major difference between adults and children under five is that it is harder to get children to ignore their basic instincts and walk into danger, than adults. The young, blinded vets of World War II were able to patiently wait and endure their difficult training protocols because they were externally motivated. They could only receive their additional blind benefit pay if they completed the army's mandatory blind rehabilitation training program (Koestler, 1976).
Infants have an internal sense of self-preservation. Since the beginning of time, most have successfully thwarted all attempts by adults to make them walk without safety.
In the 1960s, the choices of navigating without an assistive safety device included teaching pre-cane skills and listening skills.
Pre-Cane Hand Skills. The US army formalized the natural response of using one's hands for protection and information and called them pre-cane skills. Done the army way, pre-cane skills resemble a soldier marching in a military parade. The problem with pre-cane skills is they are unable to guard against hazards beyond hand's reach, like drop-offs.
Pre-Cane Listening skills. The US Army had an interest in finding other technologies and strategies beyond the 'long white stick' for use by its blinded veterans. One example included investigating and testing the limits of human hearing. As part of their final stage before discharge, and their increased benefit pay, blinded WWII vets were told to leave their long canes behind at Valley Forge before being shipped out to Avon Old Farms (Koestler, 1976).
"Of Old Farms environment it was said ‘if a blind man could learn to cope with the topography of old Farms, he could get along anywhere.” It was "...comprised of 26 irregularly shaped buildings...the maze of passages and pathways...The ceilings are of various heights, none of them very high; the stairways are winding and uneven, and the floors are uneven too" (p, 263). The "...policy was to take away from the blinded man arriving at Old Farms 'the thing on which he had come to place the most confidence--his cane. During the 18 weeks he remains at Avon, while on our grounds he gets about without a cane, without a a dog, and without a guide--completely on his own" (p. 264).
It was at Old Farms that the men were taught to use 'facial vision' to navigate (Koestler, 1976; Miyagawa, 1999). Facial vision is a term that encompasses the hearing ability to detect both audible and inaudible sound waves as they bounce off objects. As described by Manley (1962) "facial vision" or obstacle perception as a person approaches close to a wall, he may feel something like gentle pressure on the forehead. If he is traveling slowly this may be sufficient warning for him to stop before bumping" (p. 11).
Avon Old Farms had low ceilings and circular staircases made of stone with heavy iron doors that stuck out inside the rooms, and narrow passageways with low hanging metal pipes. The design of the space made navigating blind without a long cane extremely stressful. Many felt Old Farms decision to side line the cane “delayed perfection of cane techniques until 1948 at Hines’ (Koestler, 1976).
Most reports from the blind vets confirmed that facial vision did not work well enough to feel safe walking without the long cane at Avon Old Farms. They simply put up with it to receive their pay bump at the end of the program and this crazy scheme was the last obstacle in their way (Koestler, 1976; Miyagawa, 1999).
Various teachers in public schools attempted to teach children with a MVI/B to use their facial vision and said they found improved outcomes for their subjects (Manley, 1962; Hunter, 1962). As described by Hetherington in 1955,
“Much of the success of a student’s ability to master foot travel is dependent somewhat upon his ability to perceive objects in time to avoid them... It is our belief that the sooner a child can become aware of this ability and develop it, the more confident he becomes. The elementary students taking travel are given obstacle perception exercises and training...” (P. 15).To be clear, the "obstacle perception exercises" being advocated for here were listening skills. While listening is an educable skill, nobody's hearing can detect the exact location of the edge of a coffee table or drop-off. To do that, you either need sight or touch in the form of a mobility tool between you and the obstacle.
Children and adults with a MVI/B, who are also hearing capable, can develop more skillful listening abilities. It is just a lot easier to detect obstacles with a mobility tool designed for the protection of blind people. People with a MVI/B who have highly trained listening skills, like Daniel Kish, a blind man who has made a career teaching object perception and echolocation, rightly use long canes for safe mobility (pictured).
Studies on the touch abilities never adequately impressed teachers as, the blind children's touch was not necessarily better than sighted children of the same age (Miller, 1969). Yet, that does not explain why, when the touch sense was in tact, it was not used to its full advantage by providing tactile protective devices for moving through space. Especially once the Army's white cane proved that elongating one's touch through an assistive device was an effective method to improve travel outcomes in blind adults.
"The sense of touch has a serious and pervasive shortcoming with respect to spatial perception. Most of the objects that can be experienced and compared simultaneously or nearly so with vision must be perceived piecemeal by touch. Fragmentary tactual perceptions that have taken place at different times must be synthesized subsequently if the tactual perceiver is to gain and organize perception of the shape, size, and position of objects in his spatial world" (Foulke, 1962, p. 3).
Imagine the bravado it takes for a sighted person to question the adequacy of touch when compared to sight. This comparison has little use when using vision is not an option. Touch takes on a more important role, and enhancing it is possible through assistive tools.
Early school standards favored the able bodied, visual child.
The practice of preparing TVIs to walk without long canes created in them a certainty that walking without a white cane was a 'best practice' for their students with a MVI/B. It was simply expected that blind children would roam the hallways untethered and unprotected.
The children who succeeded in achieving these standards were those who could walk independently. The more sight you had the better you could walk. One need only to listen to the hours of Safe Toddles Podcast interviews with adults who grew up in the 1930s thru today to know that some children born with a MVI/B beat the odds. Not only did they learn to walk, they reluctantly learned to use the long cane as teenagers, and went on to college, a career, and a full family life.
What did those kids have that the children born with a MVI/B who became crushed by the expectation of walking into danger every day, did not walk without assistance, did not talk, and were placed in special classes to address the consequences of daily, unsafe mobility, and did not go on to achieve adult independence.
In the end, the success of one group cannot excuse the failure of properly addressing the difficulties of the other. For the sake of the high achievers different educational standards remained in place in the 1960s, pre-education laws that required free and appropriate public education for all students.
For example, New York City schools used students' mobility as an entry criterion to resource room programs. The 1965-66 Curriculum Bulletin: Educating Visually Handicapped Pupils: Board of Education – City of New York, stated:
“1: Resource Program for Visually Limited Children: The resource program for visually limited children serves those pupils…whose mobility is sufficient for regular class placement…” and “2. Resource Program for the Blind serves those students who…possess sufficient mobility with which to participate in the regular school curriculum” (p. 1).While the definition of 'sufficient mobility with with to participate in the regular school curriculum' in 1965 for blind school-aged children was not provided. Given the picture below, the understanding was it meant able to walk within school grounds without a mobility tool or assistance from another person.
While this picture is proof positive that some blind children able to meet this requirement, these criteria naturally favored children with low vision 20/70-20/200 and severe visual impairment 20/300-20/800, with a full field of view. In other words, those children who were not mobility visually impaired or blind.
Farrell (1956) "There is, however, one definite limitation to the substitution of fingers for eyes and that is the extend of view. Eyes can see over a wide range and for long distances. Fingers can see only what they can touch and the horizon of the blind is thereby restricted to the reach of the arms. The blind man of Puiseau, when asked by the philosopher Diderot if he ever wished for sight, replied: "Were it not for curiosity, I would just as soon have long arms." In any consideration of methods and tools of learning, these two factors, the substitution of touch for sight and the restricted horizons, must never be overlooked." (p. 94).
Farrell goes on to give a history of tactile reading systems. Forgive me, but blind men do not need longer arms to read or type Braille. The reason for the longer arms would be, of course, to reach out ahead and check the nature of the path before them. To that end, there were few choices for safer travel as a blind man. As Koestler described:
"The cane, the dog, the friendly elbow of a human guide--were these the only answers to greater freedom of movement for blind people? Could modern technology offer no more efficient solutions? Millions of dollars and uncounted manhours have been invested...with relatively few usable results. At various times since World War II, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Veterans Administration, the Rehabilitation Services Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and other government bureaus have all sponsored and financed research efforts to find effective substitutes for the information provided by the human eye. ... "in 1961, 1962, 1964, and 1971 ...high-level experts in physics, engineering, electronics, automation, biophysics and optics exchanged ideas with equally high-level specialists in psychology, sociology, physical medicine, rehabilitation, and social services. At each conference, progress was assessed, new technological approaches disclosed and discussed, and ever-closer lines drawn between theory and application." (Koestler, p. 321)
Which seems to be part of the problem. Rather than exploiting the senses a blind person does have by enhancing them and teaching them to become more competent with better tools designed to aid those senses.
"One of the pilot demonstrations was carried out by the Society of St. Vincent dePaul of St. Louis, in 1962. Guidelines were issued in 1963, by R.S.A.,* stating the objectives of the projects as follows: The focus was clearly "...to show blind people themselves the possibilities of cultivating maximum capability in getting about without sight, thus helping them to discover and capitalize on latent aptitudes in mobility skill and become as free as possible to come and go." (Blasch, 1971, pp. 11-12)
1966 COMSTAC Report
Twenty years after the introduction of long cane, Koestler wrote, “most of the work with systematic orientation and travel training programs had only been done with blind adults” (1966, p. 231). Yet, when the leading experts in the field of blind travel gathered in 1961 to create O&M standards, they believed that there had “…been enough experience to confirm the validity of using the basic cane program standards for children as well” (p. 231).
The most anticipated publication in the field of O&M of its day, The COMSTAC report, detailed the standards for teaching O&M to children born with a MVI/B, which read a lot like Royster's (1964) instructional road map for teaching a baby with a congenital MVI/B to become a ready adolescent for learning the long cane, ignoring all of Miller's (1964) concerns.
“It is often said that preparation for orientation and travel should begin at birth. In a blind child’s earliest years, the emphasis is on orientation; as he grows, he needs more and more systematic travel teaching. Just as much care should go into good teaching and experience in orientation in the early years as should go into systematic travel teaching later… “ (Koestler, 1966, p. 231)Table 6. Modern interpretation of 1966 advice to parents.
Koestler, the editor of the COMSTAC report, was a highly respected author in the field of blindness and visual impairment. She wrote "The Unseen Minority: A Social History of Blindness in the United States" (Koestler, 1976). As the editor, she was responsible to ensure the result accurately reported the tone, intention, and current thinking of the leaders of each specialty area serving learners with a visual impairment or blindness.
The COMSTAC report once again described the familiar instructional sequence for teaching infants with a MVI/B as walk first, safety last. The authors of the COMSTAC report again maintaining that a child with a MVI/B can learn to orient to space, i.e., walk freely without a safety tool, first. Despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
Summary
Beginning in the 1960s, it became well documented that toddlers with a MVI/B didn’t explore even when their legs worked fine, didn’t speak even though they understood, and didn’t seek out their peers even though they loved being engaged socially.
Lord and Blaha's 1968 findings had exposed the antiquated 19th century experiment of “treating blind children the same as sighted peers” as an epic failure, yet the connection of delayed walking skills and unsafe mobility remained elusive to these early educators. Afterall, 160 plus years of certainty that infants with a MVI/B can learn to walk effortlessly, was difficult to dispute and was left unquestioned.
All while research throughout the 20th century consistently described preschool children with a MVI/B, as demonstrating devastating motor skill and other developmental delays that began very early. While many of these outcomes were linked directly to the unsafe walking environment blindness created, until Ambrose-Zaken, while many insisted that the only way to change the outcome was to change to incoming information children received, no one succeeded in changing the device sufficiently to achieve success.
The Belt Cane provides blind infants fair warning and protection as they explore, instead of painful surprises.
Throughout the 1970s there were multiple studies that revealed these instructional mandates were not successful with children with a MVI/B, the fault was assigned to the children and to their families.
Any innovation in mobility tools would have to wait for the 1997 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) that included Part C, early intervention. The next blog will discuss the early intervention in the 1970s before and after the authorization of P.L. 94-142 Education of All Children Education Act.
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Report No- SAV -1057-67
Pub Date (68] Note- 76p.
Ten articles treat mobility aids and training for the blind. The following subjects are discussed.
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