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The Perversity Of Deaf-Mutism

Creator:  An Extremist (author)
Date: October 1873
Publication: American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb
Source: Available at selected libraries


Introduction

By the 1850s, leaders in deaf education began to question Gallaudet’s views on the nature and efficacy of sign language. After the Civil War, oralism, teaching deaf people lip reading and articulation while rejecting sign language, came increasingly into vogue, and the positions advanced by “An Extremist,” presented here, were increasingly in the mainstream. Meanwhile, deaf people arduously protected the cultural heritage begun at schools such as Gallaudet’s and maintained the primacy of sign language even as many institutions discouraged its use.

By 1900, Gallaudet’s vision was all but dead. By then, deaf education was less about bringing deaf people into a community of like-minded evangelical Protestants than about trying to bring them into a community of like-minded citizens of a culturally homogenous nation. (Deaf education was thus drawn into the efforts of Anglo-Saxon educators to "Americanize" recent immigrants.) For the hearing experts who promoted oralism, the understanding of sign language as a God-given first language had been supplanted by one in which sign language was an atavistic throwback to an earlier evolutionary stage. The title of “first language” -- or “natural signs” -- was no longer a positive label. It was a sign of a backward primitivism.



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THE American system of deaf-mute education is a failure. Tried by its own standards, it is condemned. Its object is "to restore the deaf-mute to society" -- that is, to enable and encourage him to take an equal place in the society of hearing and speaking people. But in fact it only inspires him with a stronger and more exclusive affinity for other deaf-mutes. It strengthens the spirit of clannishness which leads him to seek their companionship, not for the passing moment merely but for life, and to be interested in tidings of them and of what concerns them, not in occasional cor-respondence merely, but in broad sheets of small type de-voted to such intelligence.

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Such being the case, let us preserve our system, and rep-robate the deaf-mute for exhibiting such tendencies as its consequences.

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For is not our system perfect?

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We bring deaf-mutes together from every part of a wide territory by the score and the hundred. Infants of six, young men and maidens of six-and-twenty, we herd them all in one building; we preach to them and pray at them all in one chapel; we feed them all in one dining-hall; we provide each sex with its own study-room, but only one for each; we send them to sleep forty, eighty, an hun-dred and twenty in one dormitory; we subject all, young and old, to the same discipline, exemplifying the tender care of the elder brother and the elder sister in monitors armed with mark-books and arming themselves with broom-sticks; we keep them under the same influences -- only shift-ing them from class-room to class-room, it may be twenty times and it may be never -- for ten months in the year and for from five to seventeen years at a stretch; we shield them from the contamination of other youths in a college of their own; and if they do well -- we make them teachers and keep them in the same society till the end of their days.

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We give them books carefully prepared so as to display in all their hideousness the dry bones of the English language. Solid page on solid page of sentences all in one tense; phrases so highly idiomatic one meets with them twice in a lifetime; lists of all the diseases flesh is heir to, from dan-druff to a stubbed toe -- these form their idea of English. But English is sacredly confined to the class-room and the text-books. When we wish to amuse, to instruct, to re-prove, when we talk to them, when we talk to each other, we grimace and gesticulate and jump.

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And yet after all our sedulous care, they obstinately per-sist in not understanding and not writing English, and shunning those who do; in talking in signs; in attending deaf-mute conventions, reading deaf-mute papers, and marry-ing deaf-mutes.

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Surely this can only be utter perversity or original sin.

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But if gregariousness be the result of aggregation, let us first pull the beam out of our own eyes, and then out of theirs the mote which is its splinter.

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A DISGUSTED PEDAGOGUE.

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