The 19th century

Deaf education in the first part of the 1800s was largely inspired by an impulse to save deaf people’s souls, to ensure that they received sufficient religious training to understand the word of God. In the United States that period is generally known as the heyday of manualism. In 1817 a deaf teacher from the INJS, Laurent Clerc, together with American educational philanthropist Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, established what later became the American School for the Deaf, located in West Hartford, Connecticut. Aside from a short stint as principal of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf in Philadelphia, Clerc would go on to teach at the school for the next 41 years. Clerc’s influence cannot be understated. Through his interactions with his deaf students, his French Sign Language (LSF) influenced the makeup of contemporary American Sign Language (ASL). Through the apprenticeship and training of teachers at the American School, Clerc shaped an entire generation of American teachers of deaf people. A well-educated user of early ASL and written English (as well as French and LSF), a pious Christian, and an upstanding citizen, Clerc was an exemplar of what deaf education could achieve in that period.

The late 19th century saw a shift in public discourse on deaf people, which emphasized the need for training deaf people to become good national citizens. While there has been discussion among historians on just how much ASL was suppressed in the United States during the Progressive era (the late 19th and early 20th centuries), it is generally agreed that the oralist method had the momentum in that period. The number of deaf teachers in schools declined, and the oralist method was predominantly the method of choice in classrooms at schools for deaf people. The reasons for its rise are complex but can be traced back to a shift toward assimilation into national spoken-language communities as the primary motivation behind educating deaf people. The influx of immigrants led to nativist fears in American society, and oralists saw speech training as the best way to assimilate deaf people into modern American society. The social Darwinism of the late 19th century supported an oralist discourse that portrayed sign language and its users as relics of a primitive era, now superseded by the “modern” use of spoken language and “modern” pedagogical techniques in speech training.

The portrayal of deaf people as evolutionary throwbacks resonated in an era that saw the creation of new ideas of normalcy and degeneracy. Deaf people were no longer seen as children of the Enlightenment but rather as imperfections in the public body. In 1883 Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone and a prominent supporter of the oral method, posed the threat of a “deaf-mute variety of the human race” and urged measures preventing the marriage of deaf people. Bell’s ideas about educating deaf children with their hearing peers were gradually enacted, but the intermarriage of deaf people in the United States was never forbidden by legislative statute. In fact, deaf people have consistently married one another in high rates, often feeling most at home with one another.

From early beginnings in urban centres or schools for deaf people, deaf communities in the United States and Europe established formal associations at the local, state or provincial, and national levels in the 19th century. A number of deaf community periodicals were established in that period and were widely reprinted from their counterparts in other states and countries, thus further expanding community networks beyond local connections. In the United States those periodicals were either independently run or were part of the “Little Paper Family” of papers printed by schools for the deaf. European and Australian periodicals were commonly published by missionaries and religious workers. Through periodicals, associations, and organizations, deaf people sought both to maintain a community of their own and to foster their full participation in public life. The U.S. National Association of the Deaf (NAD), the first organization of deaf or disabled people in the Western Hemisphere, was founded in 1880. Similar associations of and for deaf people were established across the world in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Those associations have been concerned largely with ensuring the place of sign language in the education of deaf people and securing the rights of deaf people to participate in all aspects of daily life.