Finding Zoe. Gail Harris
I thought I was too smart for the deaf program; although deaf myself, I, too, had been influenced by this horrific fallacy.)
Unable to speak and called “dumb” or “mute,” deaf people couldn’t communicate with their families, and except in large cities, they were cut off even from other deaf people. Having just a few simple signs and gestures, they were illiterate, considered uneducable, and lacked knowledge of the world.
Without symbols to represent and combine ideas, they couldn’t acquire language. But the horrendous mistake—perpetuated since 355 BC when Aristotle proclaimed the deaf incapable of reason—was the idea that the symbols had to represent speech. The misperceptions about deaf people are ancient; the belittlement of mutes was part of the Mosaic Code, and St. Paul’s pronouncement in his letter to the Romans that “faith comes by hearing,” was misinterpreted for centuries to mean that the deaf were incapable of faith—and Rome wouldn’t condone anyone inheriting property, if he could not give confession.
The seeds of change can be seen in the writings of Plato and in the sixteenth century when philosophers such as Jerome Cardan began questioning whether another form of language—one that involved the body—might be used to teach the deaf to communicate. Yet it wasn’t until the middle of the eighteenth century, a more enlightened time generally speaking, that the future for deaf people finally became brighter. It all began when a benevolent man, the Abbé de l’Épée, became involved with the poor deaf who roamed the streets of Paris and their native sign language. Not wanting their souls to be robbed of the Catechism, de l’Épée actually heard and then taught them.
To everyone’s surprise, by associating signs with pictures and words and using an interpreter, de l’Épée taught the deaf to read and write, and they were able to acquire an education. His school, founded in 1755, was the first school for the deaf to achieve public support. In 1791, the school became known as the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes in Paris, headed by a brilliant grammarian, the Abbé Sicard. By the time of de l’Épée’s death, Sicard had established twenty-one schools for the deaf in France and Europe. Deaf schools with deaf teachers blossomed, allowing the deaf to rise from darkness and disdain to positions of eminence and responsibility—deaf philosophers, deaf writers, deaf intellectuals, deaf engineers.
This amazing change reached the United States in 1816 when Laurent Clerc (a student of one of Sicard’s students), a brilliant and educated deaf man, showed American teachers the capacity for deaf people to learn when given the opportunity. With Thomas Gallaudet, Clerc set up the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817, and its spectacular success led to the opening of even more schools. All of the teachers of the deaf in the United States (nearly all of whom were fluent signers and many of whom were deaf) went to Hartford. Eventually, the French sign system brought over by Clerc morphed with the natal sign languages here—the deaf generate sign language wherever there are communities of deaf people—and American Sign Language (ASL) was born.
In 1864, Congress passed a law authorizing the Columbia Institution for the Deaf and Dumb in Washington, DC—now Gallaudet University—to become the first institution of higher learning specifically for the deaf. Its first principal was Edward Gallaudet, the son of Thomas Gallaudet, who had come to the United States with Clerc. The thrust of deaf advancements continued worldwide, and the deaf were flourishing. By 1869, there were 550 teachers of the deaf around the globe and 41 percent of them were themselves deaf.
But then tragedy struck. One hundred years of advancements shriveled into nothing.
A trend toward Victorian oppressiveness and intolerances of all minorities took its toll on us, focusing particularly on our sign language. For two centuries, there had been a counteraction from teachers and parents of deaf children that the goal of education should be teaching the deaf how to speak. Questions continued being asked well into the late twentieth century as to what good the use of sign is without speech. Wouldn’t it restrict deaf people to communicating only with other deaf people? Shouldn’t speech and lipreading be taught, so that the deaf can integrate with the general population? Shouldn’t signing be banned so that it doesn’t interfere with speech?
From his travels to other deaf schools, Edward Gallaudet found (as did other experts on the deaf) that articulation skills, although very desirable, could not be the basis of primary teaching; this had to be achieved, and achieved early, by sign. Yet, the “oralists” worked hard to overthrow the old-fashioned sign language schools for the new progressive oralist schools, leading to the opening of the Clark School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1867 (a hundred years later, Eric’s father would be its president).
The most prominent oralist figure was Alexander Graham Bell, a genius whose weird family dynamics included teaching diction and correcting speech impediments (as did his father and grandfather), while at the same time denying deafness (both his mother and wife were deaf but never acknowledged this). Sickened by the idea of “a Deaf variety of the human race,” he created the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, which aimed at preventing deaf people from marrying one another, and to keep deaf students from mingling with each other. He advocated that deaf adults endure sterilization and even convinced some hearing parents to sterilize their own deaf children. Thomas Edison soon joined the cause. With Bell’s power and influence behind the advocacy of oralism, the tipping point was finally reached.
In 1880, at the infamous International Congress of Education of the Deaf held in Milan, where deaf teachers were themselves excluded from the vote, the use of signing in schools was officially prohibited. To the deaf, the Milan conference’s edict was like the “Jim Crow” laws to African Americans and like the ghettos to Eastern European Jews. It was a sad, sad time in Deaf History, and the anger and resentment smoldered beneath the surface until it erupted a hundred years later. Even though I had no idea at the time of my learning about it, I would soon be riding the wave of that emancipation.
The truth is that deaf people show no disposition to speak at all (except those like me who have acquired speech before becoming deaf), but they show an immediate and powerful disposition to sign—a visual language that is completely accessible to them. However, after the Milan Conference, deaf pupils could no longer use their own natural language and were forced to learn the unnatural (for them) language of speech. The proportion of deaf teachers for the deaf, which was 50 percent in 1850, fell to 25 percent by 1900 and to 12 percent by 1960. In the United States, English became the language taught to deaf students by hearing teachers, and fewer and fewer of those teachers knew sign language.
It wasn’t until seventy-five years after the International Congress that things began to reverse themselves. The change was catapulted in 1955 when a linguist named William Stokoe came to Gallaudet University. He came to teach but soon realized he had so much more to accomplish. Four years later, he wrote an earth-shattering paper on sign language structure, which was the first-ever serious and scientific look at the visual language of ASL. He asserted what had always been denied: that linguistically ASL is a complete language; its syntax, grammar, and semantics are complete, although it is very different from any spoken or written language. His conclusions butted up against the long- and hard-held belief that sign language was just pantomime, namby-pamby—a pictorial language. Even Britannica had defined sign as “a species of picture writing in the air, more pictorial and less symbolic.”
Stokoe’s work was also the first to recognize the fact that deaf people had their own community, including their own language (ASL), and a history and culture that bound them together, making them different from other people (something I inherently knew but couldn’t express to my family and friends). However, in its distrust of hearing people, who in the past had dictated its fate, the Deaf community took years to embrace Stokoe’s work. It wasn’t until the 1970s (when I became deaf) that oralism was finally being reversed, and “total communication” became accepted. Total communication is the use of both signed and spoken language, which is used at most schools today.
Still, the official sign language at that time—even at Gallaudet—was Signed Exact English (SEE) and not ASL, so deaf students were forced to learn signs for phonetic English sounds they couldn’t hear. (Again this was different for me, having already learned how to speak before becoming deaf.)