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The Birth of Special Education

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In the hundred years from 1750 to 1850 popular attention was captivated by efforts to educate the deaf, the deaf-blind, the idiotic, and in the case of Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron, a feral child. Certainly, these first experiments in the power of pedagogy were motivated by humanitarian desires, not least the religious imperative to redeem a soul lost to animality.

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But the education of the other, for so long an object of humor and distaste was also motivated by the ambition to forward a political agenda.

By providing empirical proof of a philosophical theory of mind, and the effectiveness of physiologically informed methods, the successful training of a previously unmanageable subject presented an irresistible case for progressive social policies and institutional practices.  And, by revealing a new professional expertise, they also initiated the field of special education.

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This was certainly the case with Victor, "The Wild Boy of Aveyron," tutored by Jean-Marc Itard at the National Institute for the Deaf in Paris.

Aged around 12 or 13 years, Victor had been captured in the forests of Southern France in 1799—apparently left to die after having his throat cut, it is believed he must have been in nature for at least 7 years.

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Philosophers in Paris pounced upon the opportunity to study this enfant sauvage and investigate whether or not he could be educated in accord with the revolutionary new theories employed in medical and educational practice.

If successful, Victor might demonstrate that the human mind was as Condillac (Locke's French follower) argued, the product of sense experience.

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Consider also the case of Charles Emile, a 15 year old boy at the Bicêtre. According to John According to John Connolly he entered the institution

wholly animal . . . idiotic in his inclinations, sentiments, perceptions, faculties of perception and understanding . . .. devouring everything, however disgusting; brutally sensual; passionate, - breaking, tearing, and burning whatever he could lay his hand upon; and if prevented from doing so, pinching, biting, scratching, and tearing himself, until he was covered with blood.

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Just one year later,

"this same poor idiot boy is now docile in his manners, decent in his habits, and capable . . . of directing his vague senses and wandering attention.”

“A wild, ungovernable animal, calculated to excite fear, aversion, or disgust, has been transformed into the likeness and manners of a man.” 

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Closer to home was Laura, the deaf-blind mute educated by Samuel Gridley Howe at the New England Institute for the Blind (later Perkins' Institute). Laura became the great success story of the age and a symbol for the effectiveness of child-centered pedagogy.

Much like Helen Keller, Laura suffered from Scarlet Fever at 18 months, loosing her senses (she had almost no sense of taste or smell).

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Under Howe's direction Laura made remarkable strides. She learned to read through raised letters (prior to Braille), and eventually received a common school education.

She even wrote an Autobiography. Laura became justly famous around the world—indeed, it was by reading Charles Dickens' account of her education at Perkins that the Keller family sought help for their daughter.

Annie Sullivan got advice from Laura on how to educate the wild girl from Alabama!

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More recent is the case of Genie. Imprisoned for most of her thirteen years in the attic of her Los Angeles family home, Genie's demented father had kept her chained to a potty chair; separated from the outside world. Devoid of affection and isolated from a linguistic community, one cannot conceive of the daily horror she must have endured.

When discovered in November 1970, Genie became an instant curiosity attracting public attention and the interest of psychologists, who saw in her condition a means of testing theories of intellectual development and language acquisition.

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At the time Chomsky's theory that the human ability to understand language is the product of an innately wired organ within the brain had created a revolution in psychology; behaviorism was rapidly being replaced by cognitive studies.

If Genie could not learn language this would lend support to Chomsky's argument by demonstrating that the special structures of the brain had to be triggered at a developmentally appropriate time by the right kind of linguistic experiences.

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The Birth of Special Education

I begin the history of special education in Post-revolutionary France with efforts to teach the deaf to communicate. Here a new experimental approach to understanding and controlling human nature flourished, what contemporaries called “the science of man.”

In essence, this was a radical form of empiricism developed by the French followers of John Locke, and turned into practical policies by a group of social scientists known as the Idéologues.

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Metaphysical speculation about the nature of mind was replaced by physiological and anthropological accounts of behavior.

This had important political implications.

If the actions of men and women could be explained in terms of environmental influences then, the Idéologues reasoned, scientifically-based pedagogic practices could be devised to perfect more rational, moral, and industrious citizens.

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After the National Assembly severed ecclesiastical control of public institutions the Idéologues—from their seat at the National Institute—sought to justify a host of secular social policies.

The movement’s leader, Destutt de Tracy, argued that the purpose of government was education: The Republic existed to improve the character of the population.

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According to Tracy the nation needed an educated elite who could govern society through rational practices much as a doctor might maintain health through a balance of diet, exercise, and climate.  To this end he helped establish a dual system of schools across France: local elementary schools to teach basic literacy to the population and central academies to train his classe savante.

Tracy’s political and educational writings had a profound influence on his American translator, Thomas Jefferson.

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Pedagogy was also of paramount concern.

Here the Idéologues looked to the disciplinary techniques of Philippe Pinel, who’s pioneering work with the insane demonstrated the power of therapeutic practices to restore alienated minds to reason.

Moral treatment helped initiate the asylum movement that swept Europe and America. It was also readily applied to the education of children.

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Also important was the Abbé Sicard, who drew upon Condillac’s epistemology to construct a language of gestures for the deaf. It was Sicard’s student, Laurent Clerc, who brought signing to America.

Sicard taught his instructional strategies at the Ecole Normale, the college established by the Idéologues to trained the future teachers of their school system.

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In 1800 Jean-Marc Itard attempted to apply these principles to the education of Victor, the Savage of Aveyron. The Idéologues expected a spectacular proof of their theory of mind and the power of modern pedagogy to transform society.

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As it turned out, Itard taught the world a great deal about pedagogy, but the mixed results he achieved with Victor only served to fuel growing skepticism about the plasticity of human abilities and the optimistic claims of social scientists. 

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When the Idelologues were purged by Napoleon and the authority of the Catholic Church restored, a spiritual explanation of human nature came back in vogue.

A key question was whether the mind is physical or immaterial. This had special significance for the mentally retarded.

Was their immortal soul corrupted?

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Itard’s student Edward Séguin claimed that his success training such children supported a more traditional religious view.

Ostracized by Parisian intellectuals, Seguin emigrated to America where he had a profound influence on the development of special education.

He also came into contact, and conflict, with Samuel Gridley Howe.

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Fundamentally opposed to the empiricism of the Idelologues, Howe’s educational experiments with Laura and several idiotic children were based upon the phrenological theory of mind.

This theory also led him to oppose signing among the deaf. Together with Horace Mann, Howe was instrumental in turning Deaf instruction from manual to the oral methods of speech and lip reading.

Committed to physiological explanations, he rejected Seguin’s view of mind. Science had to explain the cause, treatment, and ultimate elimination of disability.

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Epistemological Background

Condillac agreed with Locke that all our ideas come from sense experience. But he went a step further, rejecting Locke’s assumption that the mind was prefigured with a faculty of reflection.

The powers of comparison and combination central to intelligent thought were nothing but transformed sensations, habits of mind and action generated by the association of ideas.  Sensations, either pleasant or unpleasant, generated attention, and attention, in turn, made possible the combination of ideas from which the faculties were constructed.

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Crucially, Condillac also reversed the relationship Locke had established between ideas and signs, arguing that language was not simply an instrument for communication, but rather the tool by which thoughts are assembled.

In a state of nature, he argued, men and women (noble savages) had lived like animals—limited to imagination, they expressed their emotions through the language of action that accompanied sense experience.

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Gradually, however, they learned to use such cries and gestures as primitive metaphoric signs.

Memory emerged, and the capacity to control the imagination and communicate basic meanings developed.

With the acquisition of language the faculties really started to grow. Freed from dependence on the real, the imagination and memory were able to work in concert, directing attention according to interests and desires.

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To support his conjectural history of the mind Condillac pointed to wild children and the deaf, who demonstrated that without language human beings would be trapped in an animal existence of purely imaginative thought.

The work of the Abbé Epée seemed to prove his thesis. Building upon the basic language of action, Epée systemized the spontaneous signs of his students and invented hundreds of other gestures to represent the words and grammatical structures of the French language. No longer limited to the immediate world of sensation, this artificial language of signs allowed the deaf to form all the mind's faculties—there was not a thought or sentiment they could not entertain.

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Pinel’s work also drew upon Condillac.

As he explained in his Treatise on Insanity (1801), years of experience demonstrated that while many cases of alienation arose from organic causes (such as stomach disorders, brain lesions, and head injuries), the majority resulted from a functional imbalance of the mind.

These latter, non-material causes were of two forms: either the individual was gripped by an inappropriate chain of ideas cemented by the imagination, or their reason had been overpowered by strength of their passions.

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Condillac had defined insanity as “an imagination that, without our noticing it, associates ideas in a completely disordered way, and sometimes influences our judgments or behavior.”

Not only did this suggest continuity between the normal and the alienated, it provided a key to the restoration of sanity in those cases where patients had became obsessed with certain thoughts—guilt over some deed or religious fanaticism, for example.

Pinel would work with patients to shake such fixations and restore the rule of reason. He even resorted to theatre—putting on mock trials, an exorcism, or some staged event that resolved the patient's concern.

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In other cases moral treatment had to work directly on the passions.

Certain emotions stemmed from basic physiological needs, but Pinel also pointed to other “artificial” desires—such as envy, pride, and the lust for property—that arose from social conditions. As many of the case studies in the Treatise demonstrate, there was a clear relationship between the excitement of the times and the rule of reason.

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Here Pinel turned to Rousseau and the pedagogic manual Emile. “What an analogy there is between the art of directing lunatics and that of raising young people," Pinel declared.

“Both require great firmness, but not harsh and forbidding manners; rational and affectionate condescension, but not a soft complaisance that bends to all whims.”

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Indeed, it is remarkable to see how the asylum movement itself mirrors the structure of Rousseau’s ideal education.

Set in a natural and pristine environment free from the evils of the city, a paternal if not familial moral authority figure personifying order and stability carefully manages his patient’s experiences to harmonize the passions and bring a true balance to faculties otherwise alienated by the unnatural pressures of urban life.

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The Education of the Deaf in France

After Epee died the Revolutionary government opened a National Institute to continue his work—with Sicard as its first director.

Sicard recognized that Epee’s signs were not as sophisticated as Condillac thought. Students were learning to communicate French without understanding its meaning.

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A former assistant to Epee, Sicard had worked with the deaf at a school in Bordeaux. It is there he met his star pupil, Jean Massieu.

Working closely the two men set about constructing a formalized language by transforming the crude and idiosyncratic gestures devised by Epée into brief stylized, easily articulated signs that carried root meanings and syntax.

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The best way to capture the meaning of a word, he argued, was to illustrate how the object was used.

Thus his sign for BREAD started out as a series of motions indicating the way the dough was formed.

Deaf students would then be asked to abbreviate and stylize the actions as they saw fit and the gesture would be recorded by the teacher along with a motion to indicate its basic part of speech—such as a noun or adjective.

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Like Epee, Sicard also put on public displays to promote the successes of his methods.

But his lectures were more theatrical.

He invited the audience to submit written questions. One student would read and sign to the other, who then wrote responses on a chalk board.

In one exchange, when asked to distinguish between desire and hope. Massieu replied "desire is a tree in leaf, hope a tree in bloom, enjoyment is a tree with fruit."

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In the summer of 1815 Sicard visited London with Massieu and by now his most promising student Laurent Clerc.

Clerc signed and Massieu responded.

Audiences were so amazed with Massieu’s answers—especially his poetic definitions of abstract terms—they were published in a book of quotations.

Google Books (PD)

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This page from the book illustrates the message Sicard wanted to send about his work with the deaf.

Through the words of Clerc: Epee created the language of signs; Sicard perfected it.

The deaf were being transformed from brutes to men and owed these two fathers a historic debt of gratitude.

Clerc’s actual view of Sicard, at least, was not so rosy.

Google Books (PD

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While in England Sicard and his students visited the London Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb. Manuel signs were used, but emphasis was given to lip reading, written language, and speech.

Clerc caused something of a stir when he started signing with the deaf students at the school. How was it he could communicate with English students who knew nothing of Sicard’s signs?

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Clerc was demonstrating something unexpected, and indeed somewhat unwelcome to the instructors.

The deaf were capable of developing their own signs and their own language.

Indeed, when questioned, Clerc even argued that deaf communication was superior because more it was more natural than artificial spoken languages like French and English.

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Signing in America

While in London Clerc was introduced to Thomas Gallaudet, an American who had travelled to Europe in order to learn the latest methods for teaching the deaf.

Gallaudet quickly revised his plans and invited Clerc start a deaf school in New England. Clerc agreed on the understanding that instruction would be conducted solely by sign.

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Clerc started out in Hartford with some 20 students. Two years later Congress helped him establish the American Asylum for the Deaf.

Soon he was enrolling more than 200 students, typically between the ages of 12 and 18 years.

He also trained many teachers who opened other schools. By 1860 there were 20 institutions based upon manual instruction spread out across the country.

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But after the Civil War the tables turned against signing and the system of schooling Clerc came under sever attack.

Some started to worry that brining the deaf into the tight communities formed in these schools might lead them to develop their own independent language and culture.

Moreover, despite Massieu’s achievements, signing was still regarded as an inferior form of language. It did not develop the higher faculties and it did open the treasures of the written and hearing world to the deaf.

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The same concerns were being expressed in France.

An outside review of the Institute for Deaf-mutes captured the problem.

There were three types of signing. Children came with simple mimic signs they had learnt at home. These were quickly dropped as were socialized in the school culture.

After thirty years of operation the students at the National Institute had developed their own language of signs which were nothing like the gestures Sicard had devised.

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Highly complex and involving various parts of the body and facial expressions, they were executed as great speed: it was difficult to see where they began and ended.

And many had no straightforward translation into French.

In short there was Home Sign, Paris Sign Language and Sicard’s Paris Signed French.

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For the deaf Sicard’s system of methodological signs was manifestly inferior to their own “natural language.” Why should gesture be forced into the mold of spoken French?

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But such signing had a fatal flaw. It could not be written down and did not help the deaf share in the fruits of civilized life.

It seemed clear to the reviewer that first and foremost the deaf should learn to read and write. This meant restricting signs so that children, rather than taking the easy option, focused their efforts on text.

Once the child became proficient with words, he was sure the craze for signing would wither away.

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Why indeed were the deaf sent to such communities to learn such socially dangerous skills?

In an increasingly conservative state signing was seen as socially radical and practically inappropriate. Students had to fit into conventional structures; and this demanded knowledge of spoken language.

By mid-century the government was opening Oral schools. Doing away with practical trades the student would spend the day on language learning—singing was severely punished.

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One of the most ardent opponents of signing was Victor’s teacher, Jean Marc Itard. A physician, Itard had experimented with medical cures for deafness. With the discovery of the wild boy he had the opportunity to perfect methods of oral instruction.

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The Wild Boy of Averyon

Captured by the villagers in the province of Aveyron, a diminutive boy between twelve and fifteen years of age had come out of the woods to steal potatoes.

Running naked, with matted hair and scars all over his body, apparently mute, possibly deaf, urinating and defecating indiscriminately, and with little concern for warmth, shelter, or human contact, he appeared more brute than human.

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The local commissioner recognized the scientific significance of the discovery and wondered whether the boy was a deaf-mute the celebrated Sicard could educate?

Only two months earlier the Idéologues had helped establish the Society of the Observers of Man, the world’s first anthropological society dedicated to understanding the origin and differences of humankind. Victor's discovery could not have been more timely.

So it was he arrived in Paris under Sicard’s care.

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Pinel conducted an examination and concluded that the boy was not a true savage but a congenital idiot who had probably been abandoned by his parents. Victor showed no signs of perfectibility, and beyond his desire for food, paid no attention to his environment—much like the mentally retarded children Pinel cared for at the Bictre.

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Not everyone at the Society agreed. Invoking Condillac, Itard suggested that long periods of isolation might have brought about a kind of functional idiocy.

Indeed, unlike the children at the Bicetre, he had survival skills no congenital idiot could ever acquire.

Evidently, a sufficient number of the Society's members were persuaded, and the group agreed to fund a trial that would help Itard determine the truth of Condillac’s hypothesis.

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Itard’s plan was to awakening the boy’s nervous sensibility, socialize him, and then utilizing new interests, employ the power of speech to construct his faculties.

When Victor acquired the mental faculties necessary to understand the world, instruction would commence, and, who knows, the savage might even be turned into a citizen.

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 Since Itard’s plan was “to develop the sensibility by every possible means, and to lead the mind to a habit of attention” he set out to expose Victor’s senses to “the most lively impressions.”

This included long baths in hot and cold water; feeling rough and smooth materials, and training Victor’s ear to discriminate sounds.

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He worked on social skills by rewarding desired behavior with Victor’s favorite activities—long walks and large meals.

Having produced social interests in his pupil, Itard then turned to his main objective, teaching Victor the use of language.

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As time passed Victor started attending to human voices. Success seemed within Itard’s reach when Victor was heard to utter “lait” after being given a glass of milk. Yet try as he might, he could not get the boy to say the word first.

So Itard pursued a different approach. Following Sicard’s pedagogical methods, he started by asking Victor to match common objects—scissors, a hammer, and keys—with chalk outlines drawn on a blackboard. He then introduced written words. Erasing the figures Victor learned to fetch the requested item when he saw its name.

He even started to arrange the letters L-A-I-T when he wanted a drink.

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After 9 months Itard could boast that the boy was “endowed with the free exercise of all his senses . . . [gave] continual proofs of attention, reflection, and memory,” and was “able to compare, discern, and judge, and apply in short all the faculties of his understanding to the objects which are connected with his instruction.”

Impressed by Itard’s achievements, The Society of Observers of Man agreed to fund a five-year study to see if he could now educate his student.

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“Less a story of the pupil’s progress,” he admitted in his Second Report (1806), “than an account of the teacher’s failure,” Victor had reached a conceptual ceiling: he could not acquire the linguistic skills necessary to intellectual development.

The Second Report reveals both Itard’s genius as a teacher and his single-minded commitment to Oralism.

Working in the school famous for the development of signing, he ignored the boy’s spontaneous gestures and struggled year after year to teach him to hear and speak. One wonders what Victor’s fortune might have been had he learned the language of the deaf?

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Unable to teach Victor how to imitate sounds Itard thought he might be able to demonstrate the power of speech by sight.

For “over a year,” he reports, “all my efforts and all our exercises aimed at this one end.”

Sitting “face to face, grimacing as hard as possible . . . exercising the muscles of the eyes, forehead, mouth and jaw in every kind of movement . . . gradually concentrating on the muscles of the lips . . . and then the tongue,” the pupil followed his teacher in what must have been a truly surreal ritual.

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But all to no avail; after twelve months the sounds Victor’s produced were no more distinct than on the day the experiment began.

By this time Victor was undergoing the violent emotions of puberty: he was simply impossible to control.

Reconciled to the futility of his quest, Itard admitted defeat and abandoned his “pupil to a life of incurable dumbness.”

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In 1807, two years after Itard had terminated his experiment, the phrenologists Franz Joseph Gall and Gasper Spurzheim visited Victor.

They were not impressed.

Despite all of Itard’s training, he failed to respond when his name was spoken.

As for his education, after years of patient and kind training, they noted that Victor was able to do little more than match a few words with objects and return some common household items to their proper place.

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For Gall and Spurzheim, the lesson to be drawn from Itard’s experiment was clear.

Rejecting Ideology, and its environmental account of mind, they turned from experience to biology and maintained that human beings are born with all the moral and intellectual powers necessary for social life.

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If a well-organized boy had been left to wander in nature, his fate would be very different.

He would certainly not have "adapted to the mode of living and the character of wild beasts” and, upon entering "society, [would] be seen to develop human dispositions, not only by a prompt imitation of social usage's, but by his capacity for instruction.”

Was this not proven by the education of the deaf?

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Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe

Two years after Combe’s tour of America, Horace Mann embarked on an educational tour of Europe—a joint honeymoon with Howe and their new wives Mary Peabody and Julia Ward. Combe planned all the major stops and provided introductions for the party—meeting up with them in Germany.

Mann was in search of evidence to support his pedagogic initiatives in Massachusetts; Combe assured him that the methods used in Prussia with such success were perfectly aligned with the phrenological theory of mind.

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Mann’s Report painted a frightening picture of the stark alternatives for human nature that flowed from the character of a country's institutions.

He was particularly appalled by the condition of children in the industrial centers of England. "For the love of gain" the English manufacturers had committed crimes "such as have never before been known in any part of Christendom or Heathendom."

In sharp contrast to England, Prussia had utilized public schooling to elevate its people, achieving, in Mann's eyes, a social revolution equivalent “to the new creation of millions of men.” These same pedagogic methods had to be adopted in Massachusetts.

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Europe was not the only source Mann drew upon to justify his reforms. Massachusetts also had institutions that demonstrated his view of human nature and the power of the new pedagogy.

At Worcester, Samuel Woodward was using moral therapy to cure the insane, and in Boston, at the Perkins Institute, Howe was using phrenology to achieve the impossible, the education of the deaf-blind girl, Laura Bridgman.

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This was an experiment no teacher could ignore. Describing Howe’s work, Mann told the readers of the Common School Journal that Laura's remarkable education has resolved important philosophical questions and provided a practical lesson for the power of teaching guided by the proper (phrenological) theory of mind.

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A unique situation presented itself: encased in a sensory tomb and devoid of almost all external stimulation, a mind had been preserved in its natural state.

out of the living reality of this child's nature God has perfected praise. She exhibits sentiments of conscientiousness, of love of truth, of gratitude, of affection, which education never gave her. She bestows upon mankind, evidences of purity, and love, and faith, which she never received from them. It is not repayment, for they were never borrowed. They were not copied from the creature, but given by the Creator.

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"According to Locke's theory," Howe explained, the narrow range of stimuli reaching Laura's mind (i.e., tastes and touch) seemed to imply that "the moral qualities and faculties of this child should be limited in proportion to the limitation of her senses."

But this was simply not the case. Her intellectual development and her "remarkably acute . . . moral sense," demonstrated the existence of "innate intellectual dispositions; and moreover, innate moral dispositions.”

The great strides Laura was making in her studies was clear and compelling evidence that each "child has dormant within his bosom every mental quality."

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Moreover, Mann and Howe claimed that Laura’s spontaneous moral sentiments and joyful disposition was unmistakable proof of the inherent goodness of human nature.

Her purity revealed that all vice and wickedness resides in corrupt social institutions, and no institution, Howe contended, was more wicked than Calvinism which, trading on the doctrine of original sin, distorted the emotions of the immature mind in the name of orthodoxy.

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Having quickly mastered finger spelling, Laura’s education then proceeded with modified object lessons, as Howe gradually and ingeniously improved Laura's language skills and expanded her knowledge of the world. By the age of ten, she had learnt the principle parts of speech, she knew the names of all the common objects in her environment, and she was freely finger spelling with the other blind students at Perkins.

Her success had profound implications for the education of the deaf.

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Deaf-mutes may "prefer to express themselves by natural signs, because they are suggested immediately by the thought," but his experience with Laura proved they should be prohibited from developing pantomime, in order that finger spelling (and hence, the English language) would become "so perfectly vernacular, that [their] thoughts will spontaneously clothe themselves in it." “Spoken language,” he argued, “subtle, flexible, minute, precise, is a thousand times more efficient and perfect instrument for thought.”

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Clec disagreed, seeing little value in the crude and slow finger spelling employed by Laura, a method, he observed, that took "ten different hand shapes . . . to convey the single brief sign UNDERSTAND."

Whatever Laura's successes—successes Howe was unable to achieve with other deaf-blind children in his charge—Clerc was convinced that those born deaf and blind "should be educated among deaf people who see" rather than "hearing people who do not.”

The dispute between Harford and Boston was only just beginning.

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Reaction and Controversy

Laura’s education had been conducted to discredit empiricist theories of mind and undercut the Calvinist view of human depravity. It was also clearly intended as a demonstration of the new pedagogy and the power of phrenologically informed practices to revolutionize schooling in Massachusetts.

But not all of Mann's readers embraced his vision of individual and social perfectibility, or his argument that Howe's successes with Laura, let alone Woodward's ability to cure the insane, had any relevance for the education of school children.

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This became evident when an association of thirty-one masters from the Boston Grammar and Writing Schools rose to challenge Mann’s “hot bed theories” and sentimental view of child. But they were no match for Mann and Howe, who used the power of the School Board to mandate their soft-line practices in the city’s schools.

Equally volatile was dispute between Boston and Hartford ignited by Horace Mann’s Report (1843).

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Deaf Education in America

While in Europe Mann claimed to have witnessed a superior form of deaf instruction.

Where the deaf and dumb of America were "taught to converse by signs made with the fingers . . . incredible as it may seem," he found that in Germany "they are taught to speak with lips and tongue, . . . a power of uttering articulate sounds," that restored the "helpless and hopeless . . . to society."

"All the deaf and dumb who have learned to speak,” he insisted, “have a far more human expression of the eye and countenance than those who have only been taught to write."

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Hartford was quick to answer. Their investigations revealed that what little the Germans had actually achieved was purchased at the expense of the profoundly deaf and the general education of the semi-mute.

True, some could speak and lip-read, at least within their immediate circle, but their intellectual development was sadly lacking.

Manual communication had to remain at the core of all deaf education in America, but some accommodation to Oralism could be made for those few with residual speech and hearing.

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With these concessions the articulation-signing debate lay dormant until the 1860s when a wealthy lawyer, Gardiner Hubbard, sought Howe's help with the education of his daughter Mabel—the future wife of Alexander Graham Bell—who had lost her hearing at age 4 after a bout of scarlet fever.

Hubbard had taken Mabel to the Hartford Institute, only to be told that she could not enroll before age 10. Mabel, Hubbard learned, would soon lose her voice, but could eventually look forward to acquiring “the beautiful language of signs.”

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Determined to avoid this fate, he turned to Howe, who told him exactly what he wanted to hear. Mabel could be taught to read lips and her speech could be saved.  The key, as with Laura, was to prevent the girl from signing. All that Hubbard had to do was to hire a private tutor to help Mabel’s mother provide round the clock oral instruction. No special skills were required, only womanly perseverance.

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Howe, it seems had given similar advise a few years earlier to a couple from Providence, Rhode Island. Their daughter, the aptly named Jeannie Lippitt, had become quite proficient at lip reading, although she made little progress in vocalization.

Resolving to give Howe’s scheme a fair trial, Hubbard and his wife enlisted the services of a teacher, Mary True.

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Without any background in deaf education, they followed Howe’s recommendations to the letter.

Gradually their intensive efforts bore fruit, as Mabel became proficient at reading lips and improved her ability to articulate words. After two years, Hubbard could report that his daughter “spoke imperfectly but intelligently, and understood those around her.”

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By now a zealous convert to Oralism, Hubbard, joined with Howe to press the Massachusetts legislature to establish a state school for the deaf. As Chair of the State Board of Charities Howe had the influence to press the cause.

Sign language, he maintained in 1865, "not only prevents the entire and harmonious development of the mind and character but it tends to give morbid growth in certain directions." As such, the goal in educating the deaf was not to create a special class of people—as many feared the Deaf community at Hartford was becoming—but to fashion the deaf "into the likeness of common men."

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Like all his other social reforms, Howe’s arguments for the education of the deaf flowed directly from his commitment to the basic phrenological principles of inheritance and exercise. Both blindness and deafness resulted from the infringement of natural laws.

But where blindness typically had a functional cause, producing an inherited lack of vital energy, deafness was more likely a congenital defect—the product of an inappropriate marriage—that also rendered the child prone to vicious tendencies.

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This distinction had implications, especially for the education of the deaf. The powerful propensities they inherited could only be controlled “by intimate intercourse with people of sound and normal condition—that is, by general society,” while they would “be strengthened by associating closely and persistently with others having the like infirmity.”

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Language was the key.

“In its largest sense,” Howe observed, “this is the most important instrument of thought, feeling, and emotion; and especially of social intercourse.”

Fortunately, the blind, while weak, had strong social instincts that impelled them to develop their linguistic facility and participate in the general population.

Not so with the deaf, who, without speech, could not communicate and form healthy relationships.

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Of course, the “rudimentary and lower parts of language, or pantomime, [were] open to mutes,” but this mode of communication only served to harden the animal propensities, brutifying the deaf and perpetuating their isolation in an impoverished culture.

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The development of mind and character depended upon the complexity of the language.

Those who talked in English, thought in English, and so, unlike speakers of less civilized tongues, exercised their higher faculties more thoroughly.

Sign, with its obvious physical commonality to the communication of animals, did not excite the higher powers, and thus prevented the deaf from becoming rational beings.

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It is not surprising that, reacting to this “dangerous incursion” into the education of the deaf, Laurent Clec should compare the efforts of the Oralists to the European treatment of Native peoples.

As he saw it, by representing their language and customs as infantile and barbaric, Mann and Howe transformed Deaf culture into a brutish stage in the ascent of Christian civilization. The very humanity of the deaf was thus the real issue in the escalating debate over sign language.

89

After a long and bitter battle the Legislature agreed to take up the offer of John Clarke, a Northampton banker, to fund a school for the deaf in Massachusetts, prior to their enrollment at Harford, age 10.

It was also decided that admittance would be restricted to “two classes of state pupils,” those “who were partially deaf,” and “those who had lost their hearing when over four years of age.”

90

Despite these mandates, many of the twenty pupils who enrolled in the first class were beyond primary age, and eleven “were either congenitally deaf, or had lost their hearing at two years or under, and before they had acquired any language.”

Yet remarkable achievements were reported. Philip Gillett of the Illinois State Asylum told a meeting of his fellow principals that despite his prejudice against Oralism, he had seen “semi-mutes readily comprehended the remarks of teachers or others from the motions of the organs of speech . . and [use] their own voice and organs of speech intelligibly and intelligently.”

By 1893 70% of those attending Northampton were born deaf.

91

Building upon these successes a new day school, named for Horace Mann, was opened to teach speech in Boston. Growing rapidly under the energetic leadership of Sarah Fuller, by 1875 it enrolled 63 students to Northampton’s 60.

Most importantly, Fuller brought Alexander Graham Bell to the United States. A strict Oralist, it was Bell more that any other person, who turned Howe’s theoretical program into a practical reality. With his invention of the telephone in 1876, he had the time, means, and public authority to gain control of deaf education.

92

Bell shared virtually all Howe’s views on language, physiology, and pedagogy. He believed sign was too concrete a medium to serve as an effective instrument for abstract thought and was distressed by its tendency to separate the deaf from normal society.

Drawing upon similar eugenic principles, updated to confirm with evolutionary theory, he echoed Howe’s fear of unhealthy communities that promoted intermarriage, and thus the birth of defective children—even the emergence of a degenerate variety of the human race.

93

After reviewing statistics indicating that over 30% of the students at Hartford and similar institutions had deaf relatives, he called for immediate legislation to ban deaf marriages.

Like Howe, he campaigned vigorously to replace residential asylums with day schools that would allow the deaf to stay in the family home and, as far as possible, mix with normal children.

94

“Special teaching,” he also promised, would “be a matter only of the first few years of life;” after that, deaf children could be mainstreamed.

Equally important, Bell opened an oral teacher-training program at Northampton, and, in 1891, organized and richly endowed the American Association for the Promotion the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf (AAPTSD).

95

In concert with the instructors and publications flowing from Clarke, the AAPTSD’s Chautauqua style meetings and Review (later named the Volta Review) effectively gave control of deaf education to oralists.

By 1900 Bell had ensured the majority of America’s teachers of the deaf were Oralist; three quarters of instructors were hearing, and half of all students were banned from using sign in school.

96

In 1920, only one-in-five teachers were deaf and 80% of students were prohibited from signing.

This dominance continued until the 1960s when the merits of ASL, kept alive by generations of the deaf, would be seriously explored.