This won the Academy Award for Documentary Short. There will be mild spoilers ahead:

It gave me pause when I thought that the youngest of the children in this documentary (any of them still living) are 64 now. The teaching techniques used are, of course, no longer current, though the Royal School at Margate (established in 1792) is still active.

The thing I found most fascinating is that the primary techniques shown were designed to try to help deaf children function in a world not readily designed for them and to interact with people who might not really want to make the time or effort to interact with them. Learning sign language is useful in a limited sense, in that it only works if the other party in the conversation speaks it as well. This is akin to learning any other language. One can no more "speak" sign language with someone not conversant in sign than you can speak German to someone who doesn't know German.

At least with teaching children to lip read, they can have a chance to understand what is going on around them. It's imperfect, but so is every "remedy" which has been devised to overcome the limitations arising from deafness (or any other difficulty a person might need to handle in life).

Full disclosure-I am disabled and use crutches and a wheelchair. I live in a world designed for the majority, which means I run into all sorts of obstacles which aren't obstacles to people who can walk without aids (which, interestingly enough, includes many deaf people).

This is an extra on the Criterion release of Lindsay Anderson's ...If and is well worth seeking out. Recommended.