Documentary Movie Reviews
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Thursday's Children (1954)
Rate:
5
Viewed:
5/19
5/19:
Before making his name in This Sporting Life, Lindsay Anderson, along with Guy Brenton,
directed an Academy Award-winning documentary short called Thursday's Children.
It's a twenty-minute look of deaf children learning how to speak and speechread at The Royal School for the Deaf in Margate,
Kent, England which permanently closed in 2015 after more than 220 years in service. As a bonus, the whole thing is
narrated by Richard Burton.
I'm sure the subject was something new for many viewers in 1954, but today, it's dated and plodding. There's too much dead
time, and Richard Burton should've supplied more information about the background of the deaf children such as cause of
their deafness, age of identification, length of time in the gap between identification and education, other existing
disabilities, language issues, parental involvement, etc.
The educational methods of that time no longer apply, and hearing aids and cochlear implants have become a large
part of auditory-oral deaf education. Richard Burton mentions one in three deaf children ever learn real speech
(by the way, what exactly does that mean? Like hearing people's speech or the kind of speech that's at least intelligible?),
but I think it's much lower, more like 10% to 20%, especially among the profoundly deaf children.
All in all, Thursday's Children is a nice time capsule of oral education for deaf English children during the 50's.