1960s Part 1: Prerequisites to Long Cane Safety

The introduction of the United States Army’s long cane into civilian life in the 1960s stirred significant controversy. Many school staff were skeptical about their blind students’ need for a long cane and scoffed at the new practice of blindfolding sighted adults to train them in teaching the blind.

Warren C. Bledsoe, son of Maryland School for the Blind’s (MSB) longest-serving superintendent, grew up among blind pupils and specialized teachers. Before enlisting in World War II, he and Richard Hoover—later recognized as the father of long cane travel—were trained educators at MSB.

In 1945, Bledsoe underwent blindfolded long travel training while developing orientation and mobility (O&M) long cane skills. Even today, blindfolded cane travel remains a core component of graduate O&M studies, culminating in the “drop-off exam.” Students navigate unfamiliar terrain using only sensory input—no technology—demonstrating their mastery of orientation (knowing where they are) and mobility (moving safely with a cane).

Bledsoe emphasized that blindfolded sighted individuals could approach the challenges faced by newly blinded adults in ways impossible for the congenitally blind (Bledsoe, 1952). Yet he also observed that congenitally blind children often avoided independent walking, displayed poor posture, and experienced delayed social skills—not because of inability, but because they had never known safe mobility.

Blind campers unfamiliar outdoor terrain without any assistive safety devices.

Bledsoe's comment was but a simple footnote in his otherwise powerful treatise entitled "Resistance". His impassioned speech strongly advocated the use of the long cane by all blind adults. He laid to rest to the fear of serious consequences for any blind man who becoming "too dependent" on a long cane.

Unsafe Mobility as the Norm

By the 1960s, the first generation of children blinded by the ROP epidemic were reaching adolescence. Thousands of children with mobility-visual impairments (MVI/B) were now in public schools, revealing stark developmental differences. Even the most accomplished blind students often relied on holding someone’s hand to walk (Blasch, 1968). Yet professional guidance insisted blind children walk independently, regardless of risk.

Studies of the era highlighted significant walking delays, and children frequently received long canes only after high school (Hunter, 1962; Donlon, 1964; Kurzhals, 1968; Miller, 1969). Literature praised children who overcame these odds while blaming parents of those who did not, fostering unrealistic expectations for independent mobility.

Young blind men appear to easily walk down campus stairs without a long cane.

In these two competing narratives we find the familiar pattern of finding fault with those parents and children. While the literature suggests that there are no two blind children alike, they were held to the same expectation-- to walk unprotected and uninformed by an assistive safety device.

The Price of “Independence”

Judy, born with a mobility visual impairment in 1952, described walking independently as a child without assistive devices:

“A lot of strategies…walking along the line between grass and sidewalk…hitting things…cuts and bruises from head to toe…you don’t worry about falling…you just keep going” (Ambrose tapes, 2000).

While Judy eventually thrived, she acknowledged the extreme risks and did not recommend such under-protection for any child. Yet children like Judy fueled the 1960s narrative that only through early, unprotected walking could blind children become independent adults.

A frequently asked question is, if unsafe mobility is so bad for blind children how do you explain blind adults like Judy?

Judy graduated college, had a successful career, and she and her blind husband are self-described world travelers. Yet even though Judy attributed her success to her parents childrearing practices, she expressed mixed feelings about their extreme methods. Such as their insistence on her being a completely independent traveler.

At age five, they put Judy on a Greyhound Bus without a chaperone as part of her 3-hour commute to school. Judy reflected, "I don’t think a parent should let any child do that, blind, sighted, or indifferent".

Judy would be the first to admit that no amount of successful blind adults who grew up beating these highly unfavorable odds should ever convince anyone that this risky approach to childrearing is the best and only way to raise a blind child. Yet it was these very kids, like Judy, who fueled the literature of the 1960s, urging everyone to believe that only a childhood devoid of safe mobility could result in an independent blind adult.

What about those children who didn't go to college? Those who fared far worse under these same conditions of growing up walking blind, what about their untapped potential? So much praise heaped on parents whose blind children beat the odds, parents of those with significant developmental delays could only feel they must be to blame.

The Blame Game.

Families raising children with MVI/B faced scrutiny. Home visitor Emma Minturn of MSB attributed developmental delays to parents’ failure to “talk to their baby enough,” despite children struggling due to unsafe mobility, not lack of parental engagement (Minturn, 1960). Teachers’ expectations—requiring children to navigate obstacles, playgrounds, and unfamiliar terrain without assistance—placed impossible demands on young blind children and their families.

Emma Minturn, a home visitor from the Maryland School for the Blind, in a few short paragraphs both absolved teachers while simultaneously blamed the doctors and the mothers for her student's poor outcomes. She wrote, "at this time, we knew little of what went on with these babies. They were like, yet unlike, others we had known. We were feeling our way. Doctors were puzzled and many advised, "when your baby is ready he will do that which he is supposed to do; let him alone." So the little "let alone" baby, unmotivated, unstimulated, very often became a little vegetable" (1960, p. 57).

The children continued to arrive on their first day of school unable to walk or talk; Minturn seemed certain it was the parents who were failing to understand the assignment. She explained the children were silent because, "mothers had been told, "talk to your baby." And some took that to mean talk to the child every waking hour" (1960, p. 57).

 Yet, even when Minturn admitted, "something went wrong with the "teaching to walk" methods. Our babies developed a toeing-out, waddling sort of gait" (pp. 57-58); she evaluated that outcome to mean again that the mother was responsible. She was convinced that "a blind child can be taught to toe forward, to swing out from the hips with chin up" with the right teacher (p. 58).

Yet, like many seeking to promote their methods for addressing the global developmental delays in these congenitally blind children, Ms. Minturn had no proof of what she advocated. Hers, like all of the texts of this era, failed to acknowledge that walking blind without protection was an impossible and unrealistic goal.

Unaided Blind Walking: No warning, no protection, no escape.

The Consequence of a life of unsafe mobility was obvious for all to see. Koestler's (1976) social history of blindness reported,

"Every teacher had seen children report for school who had not yet learned to use a knife and fork or to tie their shoelaces; some were physically underdeveloped and lacking in basic motor skills; some were excessively timid; some were addicted to such "blindisms" as eye-rubbing, facial contortions, rocking and swaying of the body or other forms of self-stimulation; some were so totally self-absorbed as to be unable to relate to others."

In the 1960s, Josephine Miller was among the first graduate students trained in O&M. A teacher of physical education and mobility for the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind in Victoria, Australia; Miller observed:

	“The problem presented itself to me as soon as I entered a school for the blind. Why, if blindness was their only defect, did these children present such a picture of physical abnormality, with poor posture, awkward gait…I asked Dr. Hoover*, What could be the cause of this?	“…He looked sad and said, “Nothing, I guess, but tension. Imagine the strain that must build up when you have to travel like that (without safety)” (Miller, 1964, p. 305). * R.E. Hoover, originator of the Hoover cane technique.

Moor, a specialized teacher, also painted a bleak picture of the children with an MVI/B entering her school in the 1960s. She described the children with an MVI/B as “frequently indifferent to the school experience, and at first may physically withdraw by curling up on the floor or even on a bookshelf” (p. 9).

Moor’s choice of the word ‘indifferent’ seems out of context with her description of children with an MVI/B physically withdrawing from an unfamiliar place. A blind child hiding inside a bookshelf seems more like a cry for help, than indifference.

The picture above is a screenshot taken of a video sin the late 1990s. It was included in a curriculum Developmentally Appropriate Orientation and Mobility Practices (Anthony & Lowry, 2004). The narrator reported that

"Jasmine, age 3, had very little vision, if any, due to optic nerve hypoplasia".

The purpose of including a video of Jasmine running headfirst into the wall in the O&M curriculum was not explained (Anthony & Lowry, 2004). Yet, it is used here as a plausible reason for Moor's students hiding inside the classroom bookcase.

Blindness, the inability to see, is dangerous to walking independently. Why, then, was the highest prestige goal set for a blind child to act if they were sighted and that included demonstrating the ability to roller skate with a low vision guide.

NYISE Annual Report 1966

ROP Epidemic in the Schools

In 1968, “one-tenth of the population of individuals with a visual impairment were under twenty years of age” and twenty-five percent were infants and toddlers who were not receiving educational services (Moor, p. 9). Many of these students were not succeeding in accomplishing basic life skills independently.

There was a great demand for solutions which caused an explosion of professional journals and textbooks written by executive directors, university graduates, faculty, and practitioners in the field. They all contributed their experiences with school-aged children with an MVI/B. Many practitioners attempted to answer the one question that seemed impossible to solve. Why most students with an MVI/B were not walking independently, most of the day, like their sighted peers.

What was worse, unlike their sighted peers, the older they got the less independent they seemed to become. Yet, few questioned or attempted to replace the archaic expectation that blind children should have no difficulty walking independently at home, in school, and in their community; despite the fact that they clearly did.

Children with an MVI/B relied on guides despite insistence they be taught walk without help from sighted people. Fields (1961) described independent travel instruction provided to New York City students as, "the teacher of the braille class helps the blind child to develop ability to get about the school freely and to travel without too much dependence on others" (p. 338).

The early education goal to have blind children walk without assistance or an assistive safety device was embraced by the most prominent experts of the day. For example, in Reverend Thomas Carroll's quintessential book "Blindness: What It Is, What It Does and How to Live with It; he proclaimed, "...don't ever let your child get dependent on us. Remember, he can make his way without undue dependence if, except for his blindness, he is normal" (1961, p. 256). He continued,

You may doubt that possibility at times -- that he can really be normal and independent. But it might help you to remember that the author of this book is completely convinced of the possibility. Your youngster can grow with this handicap, adjust to it, live normally in a sighted society, and achieve the purpose for which God put him here. But a tremendous amount will depend on you, and on your willingness to let him do it" (Carroll, 1961, p256).

No safety devices within reach in this first picture found her book, Fun Comes First for Blind Slow-Learners. (Huffman, 1957)

Educational Experts and Unsafe Prerequisites

Phil Hatlen, renown Superintendent of Texas School for the Blind, described Lowenfeld as “the twentieth century’s most prolific, scholarly, informative, thoughtful, and creative writer in education of the visually handicapped” (1981, p. 68).

Lowenfeld, educated at the Vienna Teachers’ Academy, began his career as a teacher of blind children in 1922. In 1930, he was awarded the Rockefeller Research Fellowship to go to the United States to study American work for the blind. As the story goes, this award likely saved his life when, in 1938, Lowenfeld’s contacts led to his liberation from occupied Austria and appointment as Director of Educational Research at the American Foundation for the Blind. He was also hired as an Instructor for the Programs in Blindness and Visual Impairments at the prestigious Teachers’ College, Columbia in NYC.

After over 20 years of teaching and research, Lowenfeld's advice to parents of children with an MVI/B was the blind children

 “must learn to walk without help of any kind in familiar territory. What is familiar territory expands as they grow older, until they learn to venture out into places that are new to them. When the time comes to do this, they should learn to use the cane. Usually this is found practical only after a youngster is fourteen years of age, more often older than that” (Lowenfeld, P. 187-188).

Table 5. Modern interpretation of 1961 advice to parents.

Table 5 demonstrates how Lowenfeld's advice published in the sixties were based on theories first published in the 1700s (Ambrose-Zaken, 2024a). For example, his use of the phrase “permit the child to become oriented himself” continues to support the unsupported theory that to achieve successful blind walking, adults simply needed to "let the blind infant go."

Lowenfeld, advised that blind children must learn to walk unassisted in familiar areas before learning the long cane, often delaying cane use until age 14. His teachings reinforced the dangerous notion that mobility delays could be overcome solely through sheer willpower, ignoring the lack of protective tools in children’s lives.

While Lowenfeld emphasized experiential learning—connecting reading to real-world experiences—he disregarded the very real dangers of unprotected mobility. Children with an MVI/B often entered school physically underdeveloped, timid, or withdrawn, yet while many suspected these delays were linked unsafe condition of walking blind, innovation in assistive tools was focused on sound and route familiarity.

Conclusion: Unsafe Mobility as Institutionalized Norm

The 1960s established a persistent, harmful paradigm: blind children should walk independently, with the long cane reserved for later years. Teachers, parents, and doctors continued these practices, unaware that early user of easy mobility tools could prevent delays, injuries, and developmental consequences. The lack of protective interventions shaped a generation of blind children who were expected to thrive despite unsafe practices—a lesson with implications for modern O&M and early intervention strategies.

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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.