Study of the Impact of Academic Anxiety on Deaf and Dumb Students (With Special Reference to Meerut District)

Abstract

The term "deaf and dumb" is so often applied to that class of individuals who neither hear nor speak, it is becoming obsolete among educators of the deaf, as implying a radical defect in both the auditory and the vocal organism. People who are born deaf or who lose their hearing at a very early age are unable to speak, although their vocal organs may be intact. They become mute because they are deprived of hearing; they are unable to imitate the sounds that make up speech. To correct the error in the term mute, it is customary to refer to human beings who cannot hear or speak as deaf-mute, a term that implies that they are silent but not necessarily unable to speak. The brute animals that are deaf are deaf and dumb; a young child, before it has learned to speak, is mute, but not mute. Individuals have been found who hear but do not speak. The term stupid can be applied to such if they either lack the power of speech or are unwilling to speak and lack intelligence. Education essentially involves the process of encouraging, strengthening, and leading the faculties, whether of mind or body, to make them fit and ready instruments for the work they are to do; and, where necessary, it must moreover include the first awakening to activity and usefulness of some faculty which, without the awakening, might remain forever dormant. From the point of view of intellectual development, the deaf individual is the most disabled of the disabled class. This paper is presented to show a comparison of the impact of academic anxiety on deaf and mute students.