Oralism In The Early 20th Century

Nora Groce, in “Everyone here spoke sign language: Hereditary deafness on Martha’s Vineyard,” explains that she discovered that the deaf population on Martha’s Vineyard was about .006% higher than the total American deaf population. She comments “In the nineteenth century, and presumably earlier, one American in every 5,728 was born deaf, but on the Vineyard the figure was one in every 155,” (Groce, 1985, p. 111). She describes how this usually creates many problems, the main one being that it can inhibit their “ability to communicate” which can cause them to become socially isolated (Groce,1985, p. 112). Groce was aware that unlike on Martha’s Vineyard, most hearing people do not know sign language making every part of life involving communication extremely difficult for the deaf and hearing impaired. Fortunately

The schools built began to shun sign language, focusing on oral education. A conference brought the decision that oral based education was more effective than manual education. Despite the diminishment we see in education during the 1900’s, we see huge strides for Deaf advocacy from both Deaf people side by side with hearing people. The first home run was performed by Deaf ballplayer William Hoy. The first hearing aid is developed. William Taft protects Deaf people’s rights to federal jobs in 1909. WWI along with WW2 provided jobs for Deaf people. The first African American graduate from Gallaudet College, Ida Wynette Gray Hampton. Captions are established 1958. In 1960, ASL was beginning to be recognized as a language. The first cochlear implant device constructed. Ending a time of Educational decline, Congress claims that oral education a “dismal

The book “A Journey into the Deaf-World”, by Harlan Lane, Robert Hoffmeister, and Ben Bahan, is about the different people who are considered deaf: hard-of-hearing, deaf, and CODA. People who are hard-of-hearing are people who don 't hear well; people who are deaf lack the power of hearing since birth; you can be born hearing and throughout time lose some or all of your hearing sense. People who are CODA (children of deaf adults) are often signing because their parents are deaf and CODA’s often are helpful by being interpreters. CODAs become a great link between their parents and the hearing world. This book explains about deaf culture and how sign is a visual and manual way of conversing. The benefits of sign language are many and the ASL “foreign language” is growing among hearing as well. About more than 500,000 people sign in America alone. ASL is dated from 1779, but probably even earlier. Sign language promotes cultural awareness; deaf culture uses sign language as their main form of communicating.

All throughout the entire "Deaf President Now" movement, the message was clear that deaf people have the self-determination and capability as any other hearing person. To watch hundreds of deaf students and supports protest from Gallaudet University to our nation's capital, using American Sign Language as their only medium of communication. Only shows the effect of the "power and intelligence" (Van Cleve p. 173) behind sign language. "With similar unity in the future, they may move into a

There are numerous facts concerning the Deaf culture that I am not aware of, and a few of those elements have been made known. One of the new facts that surprised me was that approximately 90 percent of Deaf people are married to other Deaf people. This goes along with them being a tight-knit community. Another interesting piece of information I have learned is that I am to focus on a signer’s face, instead of their hands, while they are signing. Once I began to consider the expressions he or she would be showing while signing, and how one should pay attention while talking to another, it made perfect sense.

     ASL is essentially the offspring of native new world sign languages and French Sign Language. LSF merged with the indigenous sign languages when it was brought to the United States in 1817 by Laurent Clerc, a Deaf Frenchman who opened the first American school for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. Grammatically, ASL is far removed from English. One common misconception is that ASL is simply silent English; a means of representing English with the hands. Codes such as this do exist, but they are rough hybrids of English grammar and ASL hand

In 1861, George Veditz was born of hearing and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, USA by his two German immigrant parents. By the age of five he was already fluent in two languages, English and German. However, when he was just eight years old, Veditz lost his hearing to scarlet fever. Fortunately, he was taught sign language by a private tutor, and had decided to attend Maryland School for the Deaf. After his graduation, he went to National Deaf-Mute College, which later became known as Gallaudet University, to become a teacher (Cadeaf.org). Years passed and in 1904, he became the president of the National Association of the Deaf (NAD). There, he laid his legacy toward his most prominent accomplishment, the Preservation of Sign Language. With the help of film technology, Veditz also become a well-known Teller to the Deaf community and has made significant contributions to Deaf literature

Previous researches on Deaf cultures were mostly on superficial issues such as the typical cultural differences between the deaf and the hearing communities, the history of Deaf education, the distinctions of the deaf from the Deaf, and the critical points in the fight against discrimination. Sociolinguistics of sign languages also has its typical subjects such as Martha’s Vineyard, justification that American Sign Language is a true language, and the spectrum from Signed Exact English to American Sign Language. The study seeks to add knowledge to the developing area of ethnic minority studies in the Deaf community particularly the Black Deaf. In this paper, a brief description of the Black Deaf community, their history, signs and identity has been given. The study also seeks to find out more about the issues of the Black Deaf community by engaging them through interviews.

The technique that Clerc taught was by the use of his hands, which he communicated with French sign language, blended with a bit of signs used by students in the United States. To Gallaudet the language was a inspiration which he called it, “Highly poetical,” but to Clerc and many of the deaf people, the using of sign was natural and useful. This was a result of a created acculturated nonverbal language known as American Sign Language (ASL). As new schools for the deaf spread west and south, American sign language also evolved as well in the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois. By the year of 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed a law constituting the first college in the world for deaf students called Gallaudet University and all these schools used sign as a curriculum.

The Book I decided to read is called “Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf”. In this book the author Oliver Sacks basically focuses on Deaf history and the community of the deaf developed toward linguistic self-sufficiency. Sacks is a Professor of Neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He became interested in the problem of how deaf children acquire language after reviewing a book by Harlan Lane. The book was titled “When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf”. This book was first published in 1984 and was published again in 1989. Before reading Harlan’s book Sacks did not know any sign language. The book encouraged him to begin studying sign language. Sacks became extremely interested on how the deaf learn to communicate with the ability of sound being nonexistent. He wanted to know what this process may tell us about the nature of language. Seeing Voices is made up of three chapters, the history of the deaf, a discussion of language and the brain, and an evaluation of the problems behind the student strike that occurred at Gallaudet University, in March of 1988.

George William Veditz was the president of the National Association of the Deaf located in the United States and was one of the first people to make a film of American Sign Language. Veditz recognized the injustices suffered by deaf people such as job discrimination, repression of sign language, and the general treatment of deaf people as second-class citizens. In 1880, oralist at the (International Congress on Education of the Deaf) in Milan voted to ban sign language, which quickly spread the ban of sign language in education worldwide. Therefore, Veditz wanted to inform the public about these injustices. He did so by writing numerous articles, organizing Deaf conferences, writing a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt, and making a series

Deaf education in the United States has a long history going back a couple centuries. One event that happened in about 1880 turned many people against sign language in education. Milan 1880 was like no other event. In the history of deaf education Milan 1880 had a major impact on the lives and education of deaf people. This event alone almost destroyed sign language.

According to an online journal by Carla A. Halpern, in 1817, a Connecticut clergyman named Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, opened the first permanent school for the deaf in Hartford (Halpern, C., 1996). This deaf school was for American children which only had seven students and a head teacher by the name of Laurent Clerc. Clec was from the Paris Institution for the Deaf and had been deaf since infancy. He bought to the United States a nonverbal form of communication known as French sign language (Halpern, C., 1996).

He traveled around the country giving speeches on the benefits of oralism, accompanied by Deaf students that learned how to use speech. He goes on to argue that the use of American Sign Language in regional residential schools, the development of Deaf clubs and programs, and the exposure of young Deaf children to Deaf adults and administrators were encouraging the pattern of Deaf-Deaf marriages. His goal was appeared to be to make Deaf people less noticeable in society. Saying that without a Deaf Community, people would be forced to integrate into society. He assumed it would integrate hearing and Deaf people together more, and the change could appear as education reforms rather than discrimination against the Deaf race. However it just instilled anger into the Deaf Culture, which caused many debates to start up. Bell did gain success; he sent the memoir to anyone and everyone involved in deaf education yet it still continued to fail. He was ultimately trying to eliminate their culture because he thought everyone should be alike in a way. American Sign Language was their language just like English, Spanish, and French, and so on. Alexander Graham Bell and his father’s goal was to help the Deaf. They wanted to make them to feel like they are apart of a society; however, while doing that they were also dehumanizing them in a way. The Deaf Culture takes pride in being deaf, and the work that the Bell family was doing was taking away their true deaf identity. His father published a variety of works on the subject, several of which are still well known, especially his The Standard Elocutionist (1860) and treatise on Visible Speech, which appeared in Edinburgh in 1868. The Standard Elocutionist appeared in 168 British editions and sold over a quarter of a million copies in the United States alone.

In the earlier part of the nineteenth century, society viewed “Deaf people … as objects of pity, in need of charity” (Branson and Miller 125). Deaf schools began to spring up in Britain as charitable institutions for deaf children. "People who were poor and deaf provided wealthy people who were in the pursuit of social honor and devout people who were seeking religious worth the opportunity to exercise charity (124). In these institutions, the instructors religiously "saved" deaf children, but they also attempted to normalize them as much as possible. Demonstrations of the deaf children for middle and upper-class patrons showed the progress and normalization of their success stories.