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The Oral vs. Sign Debate FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH Douglas Baynton, 1997:
DOUGLAS BAYNTON: The first schools for the deaf were established during the period of the Second Great Awakening, when Americans were forming missionary societies to American Indians in the west, to Africa, to China, and elsewhere. Hundreds of missionaries learned the languages of the people they wished to convert and then went to live among them. Their task as they saw it was to bring people out of darkness of ignorance into the light of Christian truth. Now, most of the early teachers of the deaf were also missionaries and they spoke of deaf people in similar terms. Deaf people were cut off from the word of God, from the good news of the Gospel. So, teacher-missionaries learned the language of deaf people and went to live among them, bringing them together in boarding schools to preach to them and to save their souls. These early teachers who used sign language were known as manualists. Those who, later in the century, opposed the use of sign language and wanted to limit deaf people to speech and lipreading, called themselves oralists. Now, these terms are somewhat misleading because manualists, at least later in the century, did not oppose oral training. They incorporated speech lessons and lip-reading lessons into their schools and actually usually referred to themselves then as combinists in order to reflect this change. They combined both manualism and oral training. Oralists on the other hand were not merely concerned with teaching speech and lip reading. They also were adamantly opposed to the use of sign language in any form. And so the term "oralism" should be seen as connoting not just the teaching of oral communication skills, but opposition to any kind of gestural communication. Oralism functioned as an ideology that, in part, depicted sign language as primitive and repugnant. The eradication of sign language was as important to their mission as the teaching of oral communication. There were several strands of cultural change at work in this change. For example, the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth was characterized by a pervasive belief in progress. But the way that people conceived of progress changed over time. For most of the previous century, when people talked about progress it was social progress, progress in social institutions, in the laws, in human achievement. The sciences would improve, there would be an accumulation of knowledge over time. But it wasn't progress in an evolutionary sense, in the sense that people would improve physically or mentally. But what happened with the advent of evolutionary thought was that progress became inherent in human bodies. This was a new and exhilarating idea in the late nineteenth century, and there was a tremendous concern with encouraging and fostering evolutionary progress. There was also a powerful fear of decline, of devolution, and this was where you saw the rise of the eugenics movement, the effort to maintain and improve the race through controlled breeding. This had a tremendous and often devastating impact on people with disabilities generally. For deaf people, it resulted in attempts to prevent deaf people from marrying and reproducing, since it was (mistakenly) believed that deaf marriages were more likely to produce deaf offspring. The campaign to eliminate sign language was meant to encourage deaf people to associate with, and therefore marry, hearing people rather than other deaf people. Another impact of this new evolutionary worldview was that attitudes toward sign language changed. For example, the earlier manualist teachers had been fascinated by the fact that, like deaf people, American Indians also used sign language. They thought of it as one universal language. They knew that the sign languages of deaf people and American Indians were different. But for various reasons I explore in my book, they still spoke of it as a universal language that manifested itself differently in different places. This association of sign language with American Indians did not disturb them, because they did not have the idea of evolutionary progress that would then become dominant later in the century. Oralist educators later in the century, on the other hand, under the sway of a rather simplistic and popularized understanding of evolutionary theory, thought sign language belonged to primitive people lower on the evolutionary ladder. They saw American Indians as living fossils, leftovers from an earlier stage of evolution. Sign language, then, was a rudimentary language that held deaf people back. Educators would say that it was morally wrong to leave deaf people thousands of years behind the vanguard of the human race. Learning to speak would supposedly bring them up to the level of hearing people. The effort to eliminate sign language, then, was not just about deaf education. It invoked all sorts of larger issues, such as the meaning of progress, the direction of history, and the place of human beings in the world. At the end of the nineteenth century, the whole emphasis of deaf education - and I think education for people with disabilities generally -- shifted from adapting to disability to overcoming disability. For deaf people, the nineteenth-century approach to disability meant using sign language, which was described as God's gift to relieve the burden of deafness. Overcoming, however, meant attempting to speak and read lips, so that they could better keep pace the with their "normal" competitors. It reflected a very different worldview. |
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