Saturday, March 29, 2008
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Deaf History
Girolamo Cardano: An Italian physician who was one of the first known scholars to recognize that hearing is not essential to the learning process. In the 1500s, he announced that deaf people could be educated through the written word. Believing that "the mute can hear by reading and speak by writing," Cardano tried using a code of symbols to teach his own son.
Pedro de Leon: A Benedictine monk from Spain demonstrated success in educating the deaf sons of Spanish noble families. He taught the boys how to read, write and speak so that they would be permitted to inherit their family's property.
Juan Pablo de Bonet: A Spanish monk who used his own variation of proven methods in teaching the deaf. Bonet used not just reading, writing, and speechreading as tools for education, but also a manual alphabet, in which a series of hanshapes represented the various speech sounds. In 1620, Bonet published the first book on instructional methods for teaching deaf people, which included his manual alphabet.
Abbe' Charles Michel de L'Epee': A French priest who established the first religious and social association for the deaf in Paris. One day he met two deaf sisters while he was visiting a poor section of Paris. When the girls' mother asked him to give their daughters religious instruction, L'Epee' was inspired to help the two girls and other children like them. This chance meeting sparked his lifelong commitment to deaf education.
National Institute for Deaf-Mute (1771): L'Eppe's first free public school for deaf children. Children from all over the country came to the school, bringing with them the different sign systems used in their own homes. The priest learned his student's signs, and then used the signs to teach them the French language. Gradually, a standard language of signs emerged. L'Epee's language of signs gained popularity throughout France. In all, L'Epee' established twenty-one schools for the deaf. He published some writings; among them was the first dictionary of standard French signs. He is considered, "The Father of Sign Language and Deaf Education" because of his many contributions to the deaf community.
Samuel Heinickle: A German educator and one of the most successful promoters of oralism. He taught his students speech by having them feel the vibrations of his throat as he spoke. Heinicke's contributions provided that deaf people are as capable of intelligent thought and communication as hearing people.
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet: A minister living in Hartford, Connecticut, met his neighbor's nine-year-old deaf daughter, Alice Cogswell. Gallaudet recognized that Alice was highly intelligent, even though she couldn't hear or speak, and became interested in teaching her to communicate. Gallaudet didn't know of any effective methods for educating deaf children. So with the help of Alice's father, Mason Fitch Cogswell, Gallaudet gathered support from the community, and by 1815 had raised enough money to travel to Europe, where he could study proven methods in deaf education. In London, Gallaudet met Abbe' Roche Ambroise Sincard, the successor to Abbe' de L'Epee'. Sincard was visiting London to lecture on his theories of deaf education and to demonstrate his successful teaching methods. With him were two highly accomplished deaf teachers, Jean Massieu and Laurent Clerc, who had once been Sincard's students. Gallaudet accepted an invitation from Sincard to visit the Paris school. During the two months at the National Institute, Gallaudet studied their methods of teaching. When Gallaudet was ready to return home, he invited Clerc to join him and Clerc agreed! Gallaudet founded the first free public school for the deaf in American with the help of Clerc. Gallaudet retired from his job as principle of the Hartford school in 1830. He died in 1851.
American Asylum for the Deaf and Mute (1817): First free public school for deaf in American (Hartford, CT) founded by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. Today the school is called the American School for the Deaf. American Sign Language emerged from this school in the same manner as it did L'Epee's National Institute- the students themselves brought with them the different signs used within their own communities.
Edward Miner Gallaudet: Son of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. He and his brother, Thomas Gallaudet (founder of Saint Ann's Church for Deaf-Mutes in New York [1852]) continued their father's pioneering work in deaf education. In 1857 Edward Miner Hopkins received a donation from Amos Kendall- a wealthy philanthropist. The donation was for several acres of Kendall's own Washington, D.C. estate to establish a residential school- the Columbia Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind. Congress allowed this college to confer college degrees; the schools college division became the National Deaf-Mute College, which opened in June of 1864. In 1893, in honor of Dr. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, the school was renamed, Gallaudet College. The name changed once more in 1986 to Gallaudet University. Gallaudet University is known as the first and only liberal arts university for the deaf in the world.
In 1867, the Institution for the Improved Instruction of Deaf-Mutes in New York and the Clark Institution for Deaf-Mutes in Northampton, Massachusetts began pioneering techniques for teaching by oral means alone: Oralism, or the oral method, uses a system of speech and speechreading instead of signs and fingerspelling. Alexander Grand Bell was an ardent supporter of oralism so in 1872 he opened a school in Boston to train teachers of deaf to use the oral method; and in 1890, he founded the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, Inc. Today it's called, Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf.
In 1880, the International Congress on the Education of the Deaf (Milan, Italy) Oralism triumphed when this congress passed a resolution in support of oralism. The results were dramatic and far reaching. Because of this resolution, the use of sign language in education declined and lipreading and speech were added to the curriculum in many schools for the deaf. By 1920, 80 percent of deaf students were taught in oral education programs. The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) was founded and gained support in reaction to the Milan resolution. The NAD was instrumental in keeping sign language and manual education alive.
William C. Stokoe (1960): A hearing Gallaudet professor that published a breakthrough monograph that "legitimized" sign language once and for all. In Sign Language Structure, Stokoe presented his thesis that American Sign Language is a unique, separate and distinct from English. His research proved that ASL is a natural language with its own grammar and syntax, as capable as spoken languages of communicating abstract ideas and complex information. As a result, ASL was finally recognized as an important national language.
Babbidge Report (1964): A report issued by Congress that finally and effectively dismissed the Melan resolution. This report was a long-overdue acknowledgment of the superiority of sign language in deaf education.
A movement that began in 1970 attempted to blend several different methods; the result was a philosophy that became the foundation for a new approach of deaf education: Total Communication. Total Communication allows deaf people the right to any information through all possible means, including sign language, fingerspelling, pantomime, speech, lipreading, writing, computers, pictures, gestures, facial expressions, reading, and hearing aid devices.
Public Law 94-142 (1975): his law requires free and appropriate education and allows mainstream into regular public schools, where they receive special instruction but interact with the general public school population.
Deaf President Now (DPN): A movement at Gallaudet University that triumph for deaf rights. DPN was set in motion in March of 1988, when the University Board of Trustees named a hearing candidate, Elisabeth A. Zinser, as Gallaudet's seventh president. Students, faculty, and alumni of Galluadet were stunned that a hearing candidate was chosen over two qualified deaf finalists. Protesters shut down the entire campus and after a week of pressure, Zinser resigned and I. King Jordan, a long-time faculty member at Gallaudet, was appointed as the university's first deaf president. The DPN movement unified the deaf and hard-of-hearing people in a collective struggle to be heard. Their ultimate triumph was a reminder that they don't have to accept society's limitations.
_______________
Laurent Clerc
When Clerc was two years of age he fell by a fireplace and became very ill and was diagnosed with spotted fever resulting in deafness. He was the first teacher and the co-founder of the first permanent school for the deaf in Connecticut called the American School for the Deaf (1817).
His father was mayor and justice of the peace in the small town of La Balme in the southeast part of France. Clerc was born in La Balme on December 26, 1785.
Clerc spent the first twelve years of his life wandering around the countryside. In 1797, Laurent’s parents heard about the famous National Institution for Deaf-Mutes in Paris. Laurent’s uncle had brought him to Paris to place him in the school. Laurent’s father could not accompany him because of his duties as major. The National Institute for the Deaf-Mutes was the first school for the Deaf in the world.
When Laurent Clerc was two years old, he fell by a fireplace and became very ill; the illness lead to deafness for the youngster. He later became the first teacher and the co-founder of the first permanent school for the deaf in Connecticut called American School for the Deaf in 1817. Clerc’s father was the major and justice of the peace in the small town of La Balme in the southern part of France. Laurent Clerc was born in La Balme on December 26, 1785.
He spent the first twelve years of his life wandering around the countryside. In 1797, Laurent’s parents heard about the famous Institution for the Deaf-Mutes in Paris. Laurent’s father could not always accompany Clerc because of his duties as major. The Institute for Deaf-Mutes was the very first Deaf school in the entire world. It was created by Abbe de lepee abee Roch- Ambroise Sicard. Jean Massieu, a young deaf teacher, welcomes Laurent. Laurent stayed at that institution for eight years. Later on Laurent became a teacher himself at the same school.
Dr. Mason Fitch Cogswell was a New England physician. He was a noble character wit a compassionate nature. He became interested in learning the cause of deafness while searching foe a way to help his daughter. Her name was Alice Cogswell. Alice Cogswell lost her hearing through spotted fever...
_______________________
Most of the deaf people in America in the early 1800s lived in rural areas. They were separated from each other, they were isolated. Most had very little communication with the people around them. Deaf people had a limited understanding of what they could do – of their own possibilities. And people with deaf children really had no idea of what their children could achieve.
Very few Americans believed that deaf people could be educated at all – until 1817, when a Connecticut clergyman named Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet discovered his mission in life: to bring the Gospel to people who could not hear. In Hartford, he opened the first permanent school for deaf children in America, with just seven students – and a head teacher from France who is now a legend in the Deaf community.
Laurent Clerc was a teacher at the Paris Institution for the Deaf. And he was an extremely well-educated, sharp, witty man, who was very, very deaf, and had been very, very deaf since infancy.
Clerc discovered that there were already some signs in use by some of his students. Clerc took his native French sign language and he blended it with a little bit of the signs that he saw students using here in the United States. The result was an American sign language that spread west and south as new schools for deaf children opened. New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois. In 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed a law founding the first college in the world for deaf students – eventually it would be called Gallaudet University. And all these schools used sign.
In April, 1871, a bright young Scottish immigrant, Alexander Graham Bell, began teaching deaf children in Boston. Like Gallaudet, he had a passion and a mission: to bring language to deaf people. Society in general views Alexander Graham Bell as an American hero, as the inventor of the telephone. He was famous, wealthy, and influential. His wife was deaf. His own mother was deaf. He was always associating with the Deaf community. He was a teacher of deaf children at a day school in Boston. He was very familiar with the deaf world.
Alexander Graham Bell is a very important figure in Deaf folklore. He offers an antagonist perspective because he’s like the boogie man. Bell thought that signing prevented deaf people from learning to speak, so he was against deaf people using sign, their natural language. He believed that earlier in the 1800s sign language had been their only recourse. But now there’s a better choice, the technology to teach them to speak and lip read. The oral method.
Bell thought, over a hundred years ago, that if every deaf child who received the right type of education and the use of the right technology, that those children could learn to use spoken language. Oral schools for deaf children opened in the late 1860s. They did not teach sign and, in fact, outlawed its use. Instead they began speech training,teaching deaf children to generate sounds, to mimic the mouth shapes and breathing patterns of speech. And if children knew what speech looked like, the oralists thought, they could learn to read lips. This was an idea that divided educators of deaf children, and it still does today.
Speaking, lip reading and participation in "normal" conversation was, from the beginning, the great goal of the oralist method. In 1880, the method was endorsed by an important international conference of educators in Milan, Italy. Oralism was beginning to win.
Schools for deaf children all over the United States started, one by one changing, deciding that their particular school was not going to use sign language in the classroom anymore. They changed their hiring practices. The teachers were forbidden to sign, and the children were forbidden to sign.
Bell subscribed to two popular American movements that greatly bolstered the oralist cause. One was Nativism – the belief that the current flood of immigrants was threatening the American way of life.
Many people were immigrating to this country from eastern Europe and southern Europe, and this made a number of Americans very nervous. Ethnic groups often set up their own schools here; they published newspapers in their native languages. The Deaf community, too, had their
own newspapers, their own schools, and their own churches, and used a separate language. And so people began to think of deaf people as an ethnic group, a group that should be assimilated into the general population.
Bell was famous for going to school boards and state legislatures and arguing that American Sign Language was in fact a language borrowed from France. Sign Language was not supportive of American society.
Bell was also a prominent leader in another movement that was newly-popular in America. Eugenics, the idea that planned breeding can improve the human race. "A defective race of human beings would be a great calamity" Bell wrote. "We must examine the causes that lead to the intermarriage of the deaf with the object of applying a remedy."
He was an early eugenicist. He was quite concerned that if the deaf married other deaf individuals there would be an expansion of the Deaf community. He did not see this as a desirable thing. He wanted to try to eliminate deaf organizations if he could, find other ways to socialize deaf people among hearing people rather than deaf people. Alexander Graham Bell’s greatest crime was keeping deaf people apart from each other. It wasn’t so much that he thought speech was important. Worse than that was that he didn’t want deaf people to marry each other. He didn’t want them to be near each other. He wanted them to be apart.
But deaf children had to be educated, and the only practical way was in all-deaf schools, for the most part, residential schools. Here deaf children played together, shared stories, invented games, passed on unique customs and basic values. Even at oral schools, students would teach each other signing on the sly. It was all part of what would, in time, become Deaf culture.
The schools for the deaf really were the first place where deaf people came together. And they shared their language, they shared their culture, they shared their stories about growing up. At times they had to grow up quickly. Children were often dropped off at boarding schools without understanding what was happening. Many arrived without even knowing their own names. From the age of four on up, they might be away from their families for months at a time.
Students might sign to each other – but not in class. For most of the 20th century, the vast majority of deaf teaching was based almost exclusively on spoken language.
It's common for deaf people to talk about two worlds, one hearing and one deaf. At times these worlds seem to be two different planets – and so a special notion has evolved in the Deaf community. A separate planet of sight, without sound. By 1880, the Deaf founded an organization to protect themselves -- the National Association of the Deaf. In 1906, the U.S. Civil Service flatly stated that it would no longer allow deaf people to work for the government. So the N.A.D., and its president, prepared for battle.
George W. Veditz was the seventh president of the NAD. The fiery Veditz launched an aggressive grassroots campaign against the Civil Service decision. Letters poured in to
elected officials. After two years of protest, Theodore Roosevelt repealed the guidelines. Deaf people had won the right to work for their country. “The deaf themselves fought shoulder to shoulder,” a proud Veditz wrote. George W. Veditz was one of the most well known presidents of the National Association of the Deaf. He was a beautiful writer, a beautiful signer, really a genius in every sense of the word.
George Veditz knew four languages. He raised chickens, wrote poetry, and worked as a printer, teacher, and newspaper editor. He won horticultural awards for his dahlias at the Colorado State fair, and once earned a draw with the world chess champion in an exhibition match. In 1910, he started yet another project. Making movies...
Pedro de Leon: A Benedictine monk from Spain demonstrated success in educating the deaf sons of Spanish noble families. He taught the boys how to read, write and speak so that they would be permitted to inherit their family's property.
Juan Pablo de Bonet: A Spanish monk who used his own variation of proven methods in teaching the deaf. Bonet used not just reading, writing, and speechreading as tools for education, but also a manual alphabet, in which a series of hanshapes represented the various speech sounds. In 1620, Bonet published the first book on instructional methods for teaching deaf people, which included his manual alphabet.
Abbe' Charles Michel de L'Epee': A French priest who established the first religious and social association for the deaf in Paris. One day he met two deaf sisters while he was visiting a poor section of Paris. When the girls' mother asked him to give their daughters religious instruction, L'Epee' was inspired to help the two girls and other children like them. This chance meeting sparked his lifelong commitment to deaf education.
National Institute for Deaf-Mute (1771): L'Eppe's first free public school for deaf children. Children from all over the country came to the school, bringing with them the different sign systems used in their own homes. The priest learned his student's signs, and then used the signs to teach them the French language. Gradually, a standard language of signs emerged. L'Epee's language of signs gained popularity throughout France. In all, L'Epee' established twenty-one schools for the deaf. He published some writings; among them was the first dictionary of standard French signs. He is considered, "The Father of Sign Language and Deaf Education" because of his many contributions to the deaf community.
Samuel Heinickle: A German educator and one of the most successful promoters of oralism. He taught his students speech by having them feel the vibrations of his throat as he spoke. Heinicke's contributions provided that deaf people are as capable of intelligent thought and communication as hearing people.
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet: A minister living in Hartford, Connecticut, met his neighbor's nine-year-old deaf daughter, Alice Cogswell. Gallaudet recognized that Alice was highly intelligent, even though she couldn't hear or speak, and became interested in teaching her to communicate. Gallaudet didn't know of any effective methods for educating deaf children. So with the help of Alice's father, Mason Fitch Cogswell, Gallaudet gathered support from the community, and by 1815 had raised enough money to travel to Europe, where he could study proven methods in deaf education. In London, Gallaudet met Abbe' Roche Ambroise Sincard, the successor to Abbe' de L'Epee'. Sincard was visiting London to lecture on his theories of deaf education and to demonstrate his successful teaching methods. With him were two highly accomplished deaf teachers, Jean Massieu and Laurent Clerc, who had once been Sincard's students. Gallaudet accepted an invitation from Sincard to visit the Paris school. During the two months at the National Institute, Gallaudet studied their methods of teaching. When Gallaudet was ready to return home, he invited Clerc to join him and Clerc agreed! Gallaudet founded the first free public school for the deaf in American with the help of Clerc. Gallaudet retired from his job as principle of the Hartford school in 1830. He died in 1851.
American Asylum for the Deaf and Mute (1817): First free public school for deaf in American (Hartford, CT) founded by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. Today the school is called the American School for the Deaf. American Sign Language emerged from this school in the same manner as it did L'Epee's National Institute- the students themselves brought with them the different signs used within their own communities.
Edward Miner Gallaudet: Son of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. He and his brother, Thomas Gallaudet (founder of Saint Ann's Church for Deaf-Mutes in New York [1852]) continued their father's pioneering work in deaf education. In 1857 Edward Miner Hopkins received a donation from Amos Kendall- a wealthy philanthropist. The donation was for several acres of Kendall's own Washington, D.C. estate to establish a residential school- the Columbia Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind. Congress allowed this college to confer college degrees; the schools college division became the National Deaf-Mute College, which opened in June of 1864. In 1893, in honor of Dr. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, the school was renamed, Gallaudet College. The name changed once more in 1986 to Gallaudet University. Gallaudet University is known as the first and only liberal arts university for the deaf in the world.
In 1867, the Institution for the Improved Instruction of Deaf-Mutes in New York and the Clark Institution for Deaf-Mutes in Northampton, Massachusetts began pioneering techniques for teaching by oral means alone: Oralism, or the oral method, uses a system of speech and speechreading instead of signs and fingerspelling. Alexander Grand Bell was an ardent supporter of oralism so in 1872 he opened a school in Boston to train teachers of deaf to use the oral method; and in 1890, he founded the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, Inc. Today it's called, Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf.
In 1880, the International Congress on the Education of the Deaf (Milan, Italy) Oralism triumphed when this congress passed a resolution in support of oralism. The results were dramatic and far reaching. Because of this resolution, the use of sign language in education declined and lipreading and speech were added to the curriculum in many schools for the deaf. By 1920, 80 percent of deaf students were taught in oral education programs. The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) was founded and gained support in reaction to the Milan resolution. The NAD was instrumental in keeping sign language and manual education alive.
William C. Stokoe (1960): A hearing Gallaudet professor that published a breakthrough monograph that "legitimized" sign language once and for all. In Sign Language Structure, Stokoe presented his thesis that American Sign Language is a unique, separate and distinct from English. His research proved that ASL is a natural language with its own grammar and syntax, as capable as spoken languages of communicating abstract ideas and complex information. As a result, ASL was finally recognized as an important national language.
Babbidge Report (1964): A report issued by Congress that finally and effectively dismissed the Melan resolution. This report was a long-overdue acknowledgment of the superiority of sign language in deaf education.
A movement that began in 1970 attempted to blend several different methods; the result was a philosophy that became the foundation for a new approach of deaf education: Total Communication. Total Communication allows deaf people the right to any information through all possible means, including sign language, fingerspelling, pantomime, speech, lipreading, writing, computers, pictures, gestures, facial expressions, reading, and hearing aid devices.
Public Law 94-142 (1975): his law requires free and appropriate education and allows mainstream into regular public schools, where they receive special instruction but interact with the general public school population.
Deaf President Now (DPN): A movement at Gallaudet University that triumph for deaf rights. DPN was set in motion in March of 1988, when the University Board of Trustees named a hearing candidate, Elisabeth A. Zinser, as Gallaudet's seventh president. Students, faculty, and alumni of Galluadet were stunned that a hearing candidate was chosen over two qualified deaf finalists. Protesters shut down the entire campus and after a week of pressure, Zinser resigned and I. King Jordan, a long-time faculty member at Gallaudet, was appointed as the university's first deaf president. The DPN movement unified the deaf and hard-of-hearing people in a collective struggle to be heard. Their ultimate triumph was a reminder that they don't have to accept society's limitations.
_______________
Laurent Clerc
When Clerc was two years of age he fell by a fireplace and became very ill and was diagnosed with spotted fever resulting in deafness. He was the first teacher and the co-founder of the first permanent school for the deaf in Connecticut called the American School for the Deaf (1817).
His father was mayor and justice of the peace in the small town of La Balme in the southeast part of France. Clerc was born in La Balme on December 26, 1785.
Clerc spent the first twelve years of his life wandering around the countryside. In 1797, Laurent’s parents heard about the famous National Institution for Deaf-Mutes in Paris. Laurent’s uncle had brought him to Paris to place him in the school. Laurent’s father could not accompany him because of his duties as major. The National Institute for the Deaf-Mutes was the first school for the Deaf in the world.
When Laurent Clerc was two years old, he fell by a fireplace and became very ill; the illness lead to deafness for the youngster. He later became the first teacher and the co-founder of the first permanent school for the deaf in Connecticut called American School for the Deaf in 1817. Clerc’s father was the major and justice of the peace in the small town of La Balme in the southern part of France. Laurent Clerc was born in La Balme on December 26, 1785.
He spent the first twelve years of his life wandering around the countryside. In 1797, Laurent’s parents heard about the famous Institution for the Deaf-Mutes in Paris. Laurent’s father could not always accompany Clerc because of his duties as major. The Institute for Deaf-Mutes was the very first Deaf school in the entire world. It was created by Abbe de lepee abee Roch- Ambroise Sicard. Jean Massieu, a young deaf teacher, welcomes Laurent. Laurent stayed at that institution for eight years. Later on Laurent became a teacher himself at the same school.
Dr. Mason Fitch Cogswell was a New England physician. He was a noble character wit a compassionate nature. He became interested in learning the cause of deafness while searching foe a way to help his daughter. Her name was Alice Cogswell. Alice Cogswell lost her hearing through spotted fever...
_______________________
Most of the deaf people in America in the early 1800s lived in rural areas. They were separated from each other, they were isolated. Most had very little communication with the people around them. Deaf people had a limited understanding of what they could do – of their own possibilities. And people with deaf children really had no idea of what their children could achieve.
Very few Americans believed that deaf people could be educated at all – until 1817, when a Connecticut clergyman named Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet discovered his mission in life: to bring the Gospel to people who could not hear. In Hartford, he opened the first permanent school for deaf children in America, with just seven students – and a head teacher from France who is now a legend in the Deaf community.
Laurent Clerc was a teacher at the Paris Institution for the Deaf. And he was an extremely well-educated, sharp, witty man, who was very, very deaf, and had been very, very deaf since infancy.
Clerc discovered that there were already some signs in use by some of his students. Clerc took his native French sign language and he blended it with a little bit of the signs that he saw students using here in the United States. The result was an American sign language that spread west and south as new schools for deaf children opened. New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois. In 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed a law founding the first college in the world for deaf students – eventually it would be called Gallaudet University. And all these schools used sign.
In April, 1871, a bright young Scottish immigrant, Alexander Graham Bell, began teaching deaf children in Boston. Like Gallaudet, he had a passion and a mission: to bring language to deaf people. Society in general views Alexander Graham Bell as an American hero, as the inventor of the telephone. He was famous, wealthy, and influential. His wife was deaf. His own mother was deaf. He was always associating with the Deaf community. He was a teacher of deaf children at a day school in Boston. He was very familiar with the deaf world.
Alexander Graham Bell is a very important figure in Deaf folklore. He offers an antagonist perspective because he’s like the boogie man. Bell thought that signing prevented deaf people from learning to speak, so he was against deaf people using sign, their natural language. He believed that earlier in the 1800s sign language had been their only recourse. But now there’s a better choice, the technology to teach them to speak and lip read. The oral method.
Bell thought, over a hundred years ago, that if every deaf child who received the right type of education and the use of the right technology, that those children could learn to use spoken language. Oral schools for deaf children opened in the late 1860s. They did not teach sign and, in fact, outlawed its use. Instead they began speech training,teaching deaf children to generate sounds, to mimic the mouth shapes and breathing patterns of speech. And if children knew what speech looked like, the oralists thought, they could learn to read lips. This was an idea that divided educators of deaf children, and it still does today.
Speaking, lip reading and participation in "normal" conversation was, from the beginning, the great goal of the oralist method. In 1880, the method was endorsed by an important international conference of educators in Milan, Italy. Oralism was beginning to win.
Schools for deaf children all over the United States started, one by one changing, deciding that their particular school was not going to use sign language in the classroom anymore. They changed their hiring practices. The teachers were forbidden to sign, and the children were forbidden to sign.
Bell subscribed to two popular American movements that greatly bolstered the oralist cause. One was Nativism – the belief that the current flood of immigrants was threatening the American way of life.
Many people were immigrating to this country from eastern Europe and southern Europe, and this made a number of Americans very nervous. Ethnic groups often set up their own schools here; they published newspapers in their native languages. The Deaf community, too, had their
own newspapers, their own schools, and their own churches, and used a separate language. And so people began to think of deaf people as an ethnic group, a group that should be assimilated into the general population.
Bell was famous for going to school boards and state legislatures and arguing that American Sign Language was in fact a language borrowed from France. Sign Language was not supportive of American society.
Bell was also a prominent leader in another movement that was newly-popular in America. Eugenics, the idea that planned breeding can improve the human race. "A defective race of human beings would be a great calamity" Bell wrote. "We must examine the causes that lead to the intermarriage of the deaf with the object of applying a remedy."
He was an early eugenicist. He was quite concerned that if the deaf married other deaf individuals there would be an expansion of the Deaf community. He did not see this as a desirable thing. He wanted to try to eliminate deaf organizations if he could, find other ways to socialize deaf people among hearing people rather than deaf people. Alexander Graham Bell’s greatest crime was keeping deaf people apart from each other. It wasn’t so much that he thought speech was important. Worse than that was that he didn’t want deaf people to marry each other. He didn’t want them to be near each other. He wanted them to be apart.
But deaf children had to be educated, and the only practical way was in all-deaf schools, for the most part, residential schools. Here deaf children played together, shared stories, invented games, passed on unique customs and basic values. Even at oral schools, students would teach each other signing on the sly. It was all part of what would, in time, become Deaf culture.
The schools for the deaf really were the first place where deaf people came together. And they shared their language, they shared their culture, they shared their stories about growing up. At times they had to grow up quickly. Children were often dropped off at boarding schools without understanding what was happening. Many arrived without even knowing their own names. From the age of four on up, they might be away from their families for months at a time.
Students might sign to each other – but not in class. For most of the 20th century, the vast majority of deaf teaching was based almost exclusively on spoken language.
It's common for deaf people to talk about two worlds, one hearing and one deaf. At times these worlds seem to be two different planets – and so a special notion has evolved in the Deaf community. A separate planet of sight, without sound. By 1880, the Deaf founded an organization to protect themselves -- the National Association of the Deaf. In 1906, the U.S. Civil Service flatly stated that it would no longer allow deaf people to work for the government. So the N.A.D., and its president, prepared for battle.
George W. Veditz was the seventh president of the NAD. The fiery Veditz launched an aggressive grassroots campaign against the Civil Service decision. Letters poured in to
elected officials. After two years of protest, Theodore Roosevelt repealed the guidelines. Deaf people had won the right to work for their country. “The deaf themselves fought shoulder to shoulder,” a proud Veditz wrote. George W. Veditz was one of the most well known presidents of the National Association of the Deaf. He was a beautiful writer, a beautiful signer, really a genius in every sense of the word.
George Veditz knew four languages. He raised chickens, wrote poetry, and worked as a printer, teacher, and newspaper editor. He won horticultural awards for his dahlias at the Colorado State fair, and once earned a draw with the world chess champion in an exhibition match. In 1910, he started yet another project. Making movies...
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