Education of the Deaf

The Connecticut Asylum for the Education of Deaf and Dumb Persons (later the American School for the Deaf) opened its doors in Hartford, Connecticut, on 15 April 1817, with Thomas H. Gallaudet (1787–1851) as principal and Laurent Clerc (1785–1869) as head teacher. Aside from a short-lived school in Virginia, there previously had been no provision for the formal education of deaf children within the United States. Gallaudet, an evangelical minister, had visited British schools two years earlier at the behest of a group of parents in and around Hartford to study the methods of teaching deaf children in use there, with the aim of opening a school in the United States. The private schools of Britain, however, treated their techniques—which focused on oral communication and permitted no use of signed language—as proprietary secrets. Gallaudet then traveled to the Royal Institution for the Deaf in Paris, a publicly supported school that pioneered the use of sign language in the instruction of deaf students. Impressed by what he saw, Gallaudet convinced Clerc, an instructor and former student at the Paris school, to return with him to Hartford, where Clerc taught Parisian sign language to Gallaudet and other teachers at the new school. The language that later became known as American Sign Language resulted from the fusion of Parisian sign language with existing regional American sign languages.

Clerc was instrumental in helping to establish schools for the deaf in several other states as well, while his former students founded or taught in schools around the nation using his methods. By 1829, schools had been established in New York, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Ohio; altogether, more than thirty were established during Clerc's lifetime. The schools used what today would be termed a bilingual approach, making use of natural sign language along with finger spelling and written English, in addition to an invented system known as "methodical sign language" designed to represent English vocabulary and grammar on the hands. (This proved to be too unwieldy for effective instruction, however, and was largely abandoned by the 1850s.)

Similar to many such institutions founded during the Second Great Awakening of the early to mid-nineteenth century, the schools for the deaf were intended in part to serve as Protestant missions. Just as evangelical churches sent missionaries to Africa, Asia, and American Indians in the West, so did they support schools for the deaf as missions to deaf people, who were described by Henry B. Camp as "a community of heathen at our very doors." The emphasis on religious education, along with the employment of both hearing and deaf instructors using bilingual methods, continued until the late nineteenth century.

Due to the relatively low incidence of deafness, the schools were necessarily residential. Students from rural areas—the great majority—met other deaf people for the first time and learned how to communicate beyond the level of pantomime and gesture. They encountered the surprising knowledge that they shared an identity with others. From their new common language and common experience, they began to create an American deaf community and culture that has persisted to this day.

See alsoDisability .

bibliography

Lane, Harlan. When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf. New York: Random House, 1984.

Van Cleve, John Vickrey, and Barry A. Crouch. A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 1989.

Douglas C. Baynton