ABSTRACT
It will have become clear by now that hearing impairment not only affects academic progress, it also influences personality development. The 1944 Education Act referred to each child being educated according to age, ability and aptitude. It also led to the categorization of children, which the Warnock Report and the 1981 Education Act aimed to undo. Underlying all three, however, was the need to consider the whole child. Teaching is more than the imparting of information. In some schools the emphasis shifted so strongly towards the consideration of the individual child that there was a danger of staff becoming more like social workers than teachers. The 1988 Act is the pendulum swing back towards an emphasis on facts. But it is not just a reversion to older practices, more the sort of progression referred to by Bruner, with his Spiral Curriculum (Bruner, 1960). Alongside the teaching of facts there must also be a development of skills which enable the children to make use of the facts in innovative ways. This is essential to cope with information technology. Those who have not learned to handle information may suffer from the data deprivation syndrome, now reported in the USA. Individuals feel obliged to look at anything and everything that can be put up on a VDU, for fear of missing anything.
