Hearing People

In Britain the earliest record is supposed to be that of the Venerable Bede but the reference is only to someone who was dumb. Although there are organisations and institutions which take the name of St John of Beverley there s some doubt as to whether there was a clear association with deafness. Other early reports include the curing of a deaf person St Elizabeth of Hungary in the 13th century.

Leonardo da Vinci is supposed to have identified the idea of lipreading. Cardano in 1663 claimed that the deaf could hear by reading and speak by writing. But it was not really until Ponce de Leon (1520-1584) set up his school in Spain that deaf education was supposed to have started. He had pupils from all over Spain from the families who had enough money to pay. We do not know a great deal about this work. Bonet also from Spain published the first book on teaching deaf children in 1620. His work in Spain was also based on signing and fingerspelling although the main aim was to teach articulation and language. Other important figures in this period were:

Alberti in German published a monograph in 1591 which distinguished hard-of-hearing from deaf.

Schenck (around the same time) described hereditary deafness - passed on through families. But this was not as common as today since deaf people were kept apart and it was quite hard to marry.

Bulwer (1644, 1648) was the first published record of deafness and sign language in Britain. Extracts are in Resource room and are worth reading. You should try to understand it as it is written in an old form of English. He proposed to set up an academy where sign could be taught. Although he had all these ideas he never put them into practice and there was no direct progress from his writings. Philocophus (1648) is considered the first book which is really devoted to deafness.

Dalgarno (1626-87) was a head teacher of a grammar school who became interested in the issues of deafness and claimed that the deaf people could learn to read and write. He proposed the first use of the fingerspelled alphabet to teach deaf children. There were already alphabets available but Dalgarno’s is a little different from the one which was eventually adopted. This appeared in the pamphlet called Digit Lingua, in the late part of that century.

John Wallis (1616-1703) was a Mathematician who was interested in speech and grammar. He became involved with the teaching of deaf people as part of an academic debate.

William Holder (1616-98) taught a deaf boy, Alexander Popham, and he was probably the first oralist. He published a book which indicates how to teach speech.

Johann Konrad Amman (1969-1724) was Swiss but moved to Holland where he did most of his work. He was a medic who became interested in teaching deaf-mutes to speak. The Amman Foundation has special school. Although it was strongly oral it has begun to change and has signing classes as experiments.

Henry Baker (1698 -1774) also followed oral methods but tried to keep them secret as they were his way of earning a living[1]. He seems to be very similar to Amman in approach.

Jacobo Rodriguez Pereira (1715 - 1780) was Portuguese but he did most of his work in France. He took only small numbers of pupils and he used a one-handed alphabet.

The main advances according to Flint came with the arrival of two major enemies:

“Charles Michel de l’Epee (1712-1789) and .. Samuel Heinecke (1729 -1790) were both founders of schools that ultimately became the first state supported schools for the deaf in the word. It was with the establishment of these two public schools that the principle of free, universal education for the deaf was irrevocably embedded in the educational fabric of the world during the next two centuries.” Flint, 1979, p 26

De l’Epee set up the first public school in 1775 in Paris. He created the French method which was a system of standardised signs. This is a form of signed speech and was an attempt to regularise the signing so that tit could fit better with speech and written language. There was probably a bias towards the signing as de l’Epée felt there should be an exchange of skills and views rather than a simple transmitting of the ideas to the deaf person. The French was a much more human method.

Heinecke set up his school for the deaf in Leipzig in 1778. This was solely using the oral method. He felt that thought came from oral language and written language was a translation of the thought.

Heinecke and de l’Epee were entirely opposed in the their approaches and they were identified in terms of the French and the German method and this persisted well into the next century.

Sicard was a famous follower of de l’Epee who took over the Paris Institute in 1790, but the school became amalgamated with the blind school. This is thought to be the first time when this happened. It is sometimes said that Sicard was not so strong in his ideals and he was converted by people to allowing some oralism.

Thomas Braidwood (1715-1806) was the founder of the first school for deaf children in Edinburgh and then in London. His school started as a simple gathering of the pupils he had been teaching individually. It started in a single room and then later became more formal.

He tried to keep his approach a secret but it gradually it got out. Although there was an attempt to say it was a very fair decision - the use of the combined method, involving speech and signs - it has not been convincing. It does not seem likely that the teachers would suddenly learn sign language.

[1] This was very common because there was no formal education system, people had to advertise their skills and then to prove the skills by demonstrating the performance of the deaf children.

Hearing People who had an effect on Deaf People