History of deaf education in the United States

The oral method was used for many years until sign language instruction gradually began to come back into deaf education.

[2] In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many wealthy colonists sent their deaf children to Europe to receive schooling.

"[4] The Braidwood Academy was an expensive private oral school that was very secretive about its methods, only sharing their methodology with a few select people.

[4] The Bolling family, who lived in Virginia, were the most prominent colonists to send their deaf children to the Braidwood Academy.

[6] William, the last child of Thomas and Elizabeth, married his first cousin Mary, who bore five children, two of whom were deaf.

[9][10] It closed about a year and a half later, in the fall of 1816, when Braidwood's personal problems caused him to leave the school and Bolling could no longer financially maintain it.

[10] In 1812 in New England, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet met a little girl named Alice Cogswell, who inspired him to create a school for the deaf in the United States.

[11] He attended a lecture in France by Abbé Sicard showcasing two successful pupils of Paris' National Institution for Deaf-Mutes, Jean Massieu and Laurent Clerc.

Gallaudet spent several months at the school, and he convinced Clerc, a thirty-year-old assistant teacher, to return with him to Hartford, Connecticut.

[12] For most of the remainder of the century, education of deaf children using sign language, a practice known as manualism, continued to grow.

[16][17] Edward Miner Gallaudet strongly believed in the use of sign language and had a number of arguments with Alexander Graham Bell, an oralist.

[19] At the time, the people of the United States were fairly religious (notably Christian), and the hearing-advantaged believed that sign language opened deaf individuals' minds and souls to God.

Prior to the 1860s, the American hearing community viewed manualism, sign language, as an art, and naturally beautiful.

[19] By the end of the American Civil War in the late 1860s, the argument for “Survival of the Fittest” was applied to the issue of education for the deaf as a result of a Darwinist perspective of Evolution.

[19] During this particular time in the United States, oralism was coming about which gave some a negative view of manualism because, it was argued, it was not a natural language.

Many in the hearing community were now in favor of the evolutionary perspective, which depicted deaf people who used manual language akin to “lower animals”.

[18] Oralists strongly believed that deaf children should put as much effort as possible into learning how to live in spite of their disabilities, thus promoting the teaching of lip reading, mouth movements, and use of hearing technology.

[18] Oralists also argued that if deaf people continued the use of manual language as their form of communication, they would never integrate within the rest of society.

[18] It has been remarked that the better-funded northern schools switched to oralism while their poorer southern counterparts kept signing because it was difficult to hire new oralist teachers.

[20] A model figure for oralism and against the usage of sign language was Alexander Graham Bell, who created the Volta Bureau in Washington, D.C. to pursue the studies of deafness.

More than half of the people invited were known oralists; therefore, the Congress was biased and most, if not all, of the resolutions that were voted on by the delegates gave results in favor of the oral method.

Many of the resolutions were worded in ways that supported the oral method, such as "Considering the incontestable superiority of speech over signs in restoring the deaf-mute to society, and in giving him a more perfect knowledge of language,/Declares –/That the Oral method ought to be preferred that of signs for the education and instruction of the deaf and dumb".

Manualists, those who advocated for sign language usage, were effectively "kicked out" and replaced with teachers who used the pure oral method.

[23][24] One type of punishment used on deaf students was to force them to wear white gloves that were tied together to prevent them from using signs.

[24] Edith Mansford Fitzgerald opposed these views, as a deaf woman who felt that the oralist methods had stunted her learning.

[31] On March 6, it was announced hastily through press release (even though the selection committee was supposed to come on campus) that Zinser, the only hearing candidate, had become the seventh president of the university.

Parents were not encouraged to sign with their children because it was feared that it would slow down their speech, even though research has shown that the opposite is true.

[40] The bilingual-bicultural approach holds the belief that deaf children are visual learners as opposed to auditory learners,[39] and therefore, academic content should be fully accessible to all deaf students (i.e. not contingent on spoken receptive/expressive skills, which may vary across students), so academic content is delivered in ASL and/or written English.

[42] The auditory-oral and auditory-verbal methods, sometimes referred to collectively as listening and spoken language, are forms of oral education.

[51] Students may receive accommodations such as itinerant teachers, interpreters, assistive technology, notetakers, and aides.