Words Made Flesh

Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture

R. A. R. Edwards

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814724026
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

During the early nineteenth century, schools for the deaf appeared in the United States for the first time. These schools were committed to the use of the sign language to educate deaf students. Manual education made the growth of the deaf community possible, for it gathered deaf people together in sizable numbers for the first time in American history. It also fueled the emergence of Deaf culture, as the schools became agents of cultural transformations. Just as the Deaf community began to be recognized as a minority culture, in the 1850s, a powerful movement arose to undo it, namely oral education. Advocates of oral education, deeply influenced by the writings of public school pioneer Horace Mann, argued that deaf students should stop signing and should start speaking in the hope that the Deaf community would be abandoned, and its language and culture would vanish. In this revisionist history, Words Made Flesh explores the educational battles of the nineteenth century from both hearing and deaf points of view. It places the growth of the Deaf community at the heart of the story of deaf education and explains how the unexpected emergence of Deafness provoked the pedagogical battles that dominated the field of deaf education in the nineteenth century, and still reverberate today.

1
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc
A Yale Man and a Deaf Man Open a School and Create a World

Why then are we Deaf and Dumb? I do not know, as you do not know why there are infirmities in your bodies, nor why there are among the human kind, white, black, red and yellow men. The Deaf and Dumb are everywhere, in Asia, in Africa, as well as in Europe and America. They existed before you spoke of them and before you saw them. . . . I think our deafness proceeds from an act of Providence, I would say, from the will of God, and does it imply that the Deaf and Dumb are worse than other men?

—Laurent Clerc, addressing the Connecticut
State Legislature, 1818

Beginnings

They were an unlikely pair to start a revolution in American education. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1787-1851) was a hearing American, a minister by training, a graduate of Yale. Laurent Clerc (1785-1869) was a Deaf Frenchman, a fluent signer, a gifted teacher at his former school, the National Institute at Paris. A series of fortunate events brought the two together from an ocean’s distance. Their meeting has slipped into legend in the Deaf community, but it is worth recounting the tale here. For with their partnership, they founded not just a school but an American community, a Deaf world.

It was not Gallaudet’s lifelong plan to enter the field of education at all, never mind deaf education. How could he have considered deaf education as a career path? After all, there was no school for the deaf in all of North America in those years. Wealthy families sent their deaf children abroad to be educated, mostly to Britain. Deaf children from families of lesser means were left to develop their own idiosyncratic gestural systems in order to communicate. They created so-called home signs to communicate at least on a rudimentary level with their families, but they went without a formal education. Accordingly, most deaf children never gained access to English, to the language of a community, in other words, wider than home.

The fact that no school existed in the country does not mean that Americans were wholly ignorant of the possibility of educating the deaf. Many American newspapers and periodicals printed articles about deaf education in Europe throughout the early years of the nineteenth century. Most of these reported on the work being done to educate the deaf in France. The French system had been staunchly manual in orientation since its inception in the eighteenth century. The Abbé Charles-Michel de l’Epée began working to educate the Parisian deaf community in the years before the French Revolution. He is widely credited with inventing the manual method of deaf education, choosing to use signs and gestures with his students rather than speech.

In this way, he was bucking the European trend at the time, which was largely running in the direction of the oral method, most strongly in England and Germany. He published several works on his method, including The Method of Educating the Deaf and Dumb Confirmed by Long Experience, which was originally published in French in 1784 and translated into English in 1801. He also argued strenuously with the German oralists for the superiority of the manual method. Before he died in 1789, he gained the support of the emerging revolutionary government, which vowed that his then private school for the deaf would not die with him. The nationally funded National Institution for the Deaf at Paris subsequently opened its doors in 1791.¹

The works of Abbé de l’Epée and his successor, the Abbé Roch-Ambroise Sicard, were well known, especially in the North in the United States, and their use of the sign language was widely and specifically lauded in the American press. Remarking upon the sign language in 1805, one writer called it that “silent representative language, in which the eye officiates for the ear, and communicates the charms of science, and the delights of common intercourse to the mind, with the velocity, facility, and certainty of sound.”² Praise for the sign language as a language with the same facility as that of a spoken language was not uncommon in the American press in these years.

Given the general praise for the sign language, it comes as no surprise to learn that the American press gave little attention to the oral method of deaf education. While Sicard and the National Institute at Paris were frequently mentioned, the schools of England, dominated by the Braidwood family, received far less attention. The Braidwoods ran two academies, one in Edinburgh and one in London, and both adhered to the oral method.³

For all the attention heaped on the French in the American press, the fact remained that wealthy Americans with deaf children were most likely to send their children to the Braidwoods to be educated, presumably less out of any particular support for the oral over the manual method than for the shared language of the two countries. One such father, Francis Green, published a treatise on the oral education of his deaf son, Charles, entitled Vox Occulis Subjecta. A notice of publication appeared in The Panoplist, or The Christian’s Armory in 1805 and the author wished the elder Green much success in his efforts to found a similar school in America. Significantly, the article did not particularly recommend oral education, though at the time Green did, but it did support the cause of opening a school for the deaf. As the author remarked, “Considering the number of deaf and dumb people among us, such an establishment seems highly desirable, and we wish the attention of the publick, in these prosperous times, may be turned to an object so deserving their patronage.”⁴

There is some evidence to suggest that there was a weighing of the methods being conducted in some circles in the United States in the early nineteenth century. An 1807 article described a public demonstration of the results of oral education. A reporter recalled his response to the presentation of a young orally trained deaf girl: “There was a something in her voice extremely distressing,” the reporter commented, “without being absolutely discordant; a plaintive monotonous sound, rather tending to excite melancholy than pleasure.”⁵ Rather than being impressed with the uncommon sight of a deaf girl speaking, this observer was struck instead by the inferior quality of the girl’s voice. The act of speaking did not alone transform this girl into a hearing person, providing instead a pale and rather pathetic imitation of one. The rest of the article dwelled favorably on one of Sicard’s public demonstrations, describing the impressive presentation of his favorite student, Jean Massieu, using only the “language of gesticulation.”

Another part of the explanation may lie in the popular understanding of deafness in the period. At this time, it was widely believed to be in the nature of deaf people to communicate by gestures, for two reasons. First, it was natural because deaf people could not hear, and so of course they would gesture rather than vocalize to communicate. Second, it was assumed that God had provided these natural gestures as a mechanism for his deaf children to communicate in spite of their deafness. That is, where the human body had failed, God had provided. Hence, God’s deaf creatures quite naturally used gestures, as God had so arranged. The use of a more highly developed sign language in a classroom setting was accordingly viewed as appropriate for deaf students.⁶

Founding a School

The founding of a school for the deaf in the United States did not depend initially on the attractiveness, or lack thereof, of any particular educational theory. It depended mostly on the deafness of one young girl, Alice Cogswell. The daughter of Mason Fitch Cogswell, a prominent Hartford, Connecticut, physician, Alice had lost her hearing to meningitis soon after her second birthday. Unwilling to send his daughter abroad to be educated, Cogswell instead decided to persuade the state that a school for the deaf was needed in Connecticut. Using his social connections, Cogswell persuaded the General Association of Congregational Ministers in Connecticut to commission a census of the deaf in the state.⁷

In June 1812, the association reported that it had counted eighty-four deaf people in Connecticut. From this result, Cogswell estimated that there were some four hundred deaf people living in New England alone and probably two thousand in the country as a whole. He used the census figures to begin a publicity campaign to convince the public and the state of the need for a school for the deaf. Cogswell also organized a group of his friends, many also wealthy New Englanders, to raise funds to send Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet on a fact-finding mission to Europe.⁸

Gallaudet and Cogswell knew each other even before the campaign for a school for the deaf began, as the Gallaudet family home was neighbor to the Cogswells’. Gallaudet had left Hartford for New Haven to attend Yale University, where he graduated first in his class at the age of seventeen in 1805. He received a master of arts from Yale in 1807 and subsequently worked there as a tutor. In 1812, he went to Andover Theological Seminary to prepare for a career in the ministry. Graduated in 1814, he was ordained a Congregational minister. He was always rather sickly, and illness found him recuperating at the family home, where he took an interest in the Cogswell family’s efforts to educate Alice.⁹

At this time, 1814, those efforts included attending a local private school.¹⁰ Wealthy Hartford resident Daniel Wadsworth urged Lydia Huntley, a family acquaintance and schoolteacher, to open a school in his mother’s mansion. He personally invited fifteen girls, drawn from Hartford’s elite families, to attend. The Cogswell sisters, Mary, Elizabeth, and Alice, all received invitations.

Huntley had no experience with deaf pupils, and she was dismayed to find that there were no readily available books on the subject in the United States, either. Nonetheless, she found that Alice came to the school using “animated gestures” and, it seems, an early form of American fingerspelling, referred to as “the old alphabet” and related to the two-handed British manual alphabet. How could the Cogswells have come to know a form of fingerspelling? Apparently, Mason Cogswell’s father, James Cogswell, knew the deaf portrait painter John Brewster and may very well have learned it from him.¹¹ Huntley was able to incorporate these communication systems into her classroom and used them to teach Alice. By the time Gallaudet was recruited into the effort to open an American school for the deaf, agreeing to go to Europe on a fact-finding mission in the summer of 1815, Alice was already busily acquiring English.

Gallaudet, for his part, went first to Britain, where he hoped to learn about deaf education from the Braidwood family and planned to visit both of the Braidwood academies of London. The Braidwoods offered to take Gallaudet on as an apprentice at their London school, where he would teach handwriting to the students while he learned the Braidwood oral method, as long as he promised to stay in London with them for three years. Gallaudet was unwilling to agree to these terms.¹²

As it happened, the Abbé Sicard was in London, giving a public demonstration of the manual method and touring with his two best former students, now teachers in their own right, Jean Massieu and Laurent Clerc. Gallaudet attended the London exhibits and met privately with the abbé, who urged him to visit the school at Paris and promptly offered to instruct him in the manual method there.¹³ While Gallaudet had been, by his own admission, impressed with the demonstration, he still decided to head to Edinburgh first, to visit the Braidwood Academy there.

While in Edinburgh, Gallaudet met Dugald Stewart.¹⁴ Stewart, a Scottish philosopher of the common sense school, was a fierce critic of oral education, believing that oralist teachers were fools because they confused speech with reason. Articulation, he argued, was akin to teaching parrots to talk. In an address to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1815, he openly criticized the oral schools of Britain. Stewart explained his support of the manual approach of the Abbé Sicard, declaring that its purpose was “not to astonish the vulgar by the sudden conversion of a dumb child into a speaking automaton but . . . to convert his pupil into a rational and moral being.”¹⁵

Stewart admitted that, at least among European audiences, the use of the manual method rarely excited the imagination of the masses as much as the sight of a deaf child speaking. But, when Gallaudet met with Stewart in Edinburgh in 1815, the philosopher urged Gallaudet to abandon altogether his quest to learn oral methods. Stewart insisted that Gallaudet should follow up on the invitation of Sicard and proceed directly to Paris in order to learn the French method of manual education and adopt it for exclusive use in the new American school. Following Stewart’s advice, Gallaudet was inclined to look at manualism with new enthusiasm. Upon seeing first-hand the results that Sicard was having with his students, Gallaudet swiftly decided that the manual method was the best one to bring home to Hartford, and he abandoned his early ideas of trying to combine the two methods.

God, Country, Yale

Gallaudet’s educational background contributed to his admiration for Stewart, for he had studied Stewart’s writings as an undergraduate. This exposure made it more likely that he would take Stewart’s point of view seriously. His school days had also helped to prepare him to embrace manual education. It is not insignificant that Gallaudet attended Yale. Yale wielded an extraordinary influence over early American deaf education. In the first twenty-five years of the American School’s life, 1817-1842, there were twenty-five instructors. Of these, six were deaf; and, with the exception of Laurent Clerc himself, all were graduates of the American School. This is a high percentage of deaf teachers overall; 24 percent of the group under examination here was deaf. The remaining nineteen instructors were hearing, and of these, eighteen were Yale graduates.¹⁶

The influence of Yale on the development of deaf education in the United States goes even further than these numbers would suggest. The first six principals of the American Asylum were all Yale graduates. An analysis of the schools and instructors of the deaf, conducted and published by the American Annals of the Deaf in 1900, revealed that the “roll of graduates of Yale University who have entered the profession of teaching the deaf is long and illustrious. Twenty-nine graduates of Yale alone . . . have taught at the Hartford school. . . . The New York Institution . . . has enrolled sixty-three college graduates in its corps of instructors . . . one-third of whom were Yale men.”¹⁷ When Yale’s president visited Gallaudet College in 1879, then Gallaudet president Edward Miner Gallaudet introduced him by saying, “And so we may greet President [Noah] Porter of Yale College, if not as a teacher of deaf-mutes, certainly as a teacher of such teachers; while he is a master at whose feet not only we of this College, but all who work at our side in the broader field of general education gladly sit as disciples.”¹⁸

Yale’s influence in this fledgling field was quite extraordinary. One possible explanation for the presence of Yale graduates in the field in such disproportionate numbers begins with Yale’s classical curriculum. One of the achievements of the classical world was a highly refined sense of the power of gestures. “As it happens,” historian Douglas Baynton reports, “pantomime was a highly developed and well-respected art form among the ancient Romans, a fact that fascinated the manualists.” He concludes that, for these Yale men, the “use and cultivation of the sign language in the present was to them the revival of a high Roman art form. . . . a way of entering a world of the past, of sharing in what the ancients had themselves cultivated and revered.”¹⁹

Still, why would so many Yale men choose, throughout the antebellum period, to go into deaf education? After all, here was a field with a steep learning curve; they would all be required to learn sign language, a language of which they were all entirel...