deaf history

deaf history, the experience and education of deaf persons and the development of deaf communities and culture through time. The history of deaf people (those affected by varying degrees of deafness) has been written as a history of hearing perceptions of deaf people, as a history of the education of deaf people, and as the history of the lives and communities of deaf people. This history embodies some of the major strands of disability studies scholarship: the reactions of outsiders to those with a physical difference, shifting understandings of normalcy, and the existence of a community of people who create lives based on a different sensory universe than that of those around them.

Early deaf communities

Deaf people are unique among individuals with a sensory difference in that they are also a linguistic minority. They have long formed communities whenever they come together in a specific geographic location. Most scholars attribute the development of deaf communities to the establishment of schools for the deaf and the desire of alumni to associate with one another afterward. But there is also evidence that whenever a significant number of deaf people exist in one geographic location, they will form social relationships with one another and with hearing people who use sign language. The island of Martha’s Vineyard, off the Massachusetts coast in the United States, was an example of such a community (see deafness on Martha’s Vineyard). From the 17th to the mid-20th century, a significant population of deaf people coexisted alongside their hearing counterparts in certain towns on the island. In those towns, nearly everyone was able to use some form of sign language, and deafness was an accepted, unremarkable fact of daily life.

Communities such as that found on Martha’s Vineyard are likely rare. There were few, if any, politically organized European communities of deaf people in the early modern era (the 16th and 17th centuries). There were, however, early small-scale attempts by European religious orders to educate the deaf children of rich noble families. Spanish Benedictine monk Pedro Ponce de León was the most prominent of those early teachers. In the 1540s he taught the deaf brothers Don Francisco de Velasco and Don Pedro de Velasco, as well as 10 to 12 other deaf people, at his monastery. Ponce’s work would be replicated in other small-scale schools throughout Europe, but state sponsorship of deaf education would begin only in the 18th century.

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The 18th century

In Europe the Enlightenment brought about a new faith in reason and a new curiosity on the part of scholars about the ability of deaf people to achieve rational and abstract thought. In that period the education of deaf people attracted prominent attention, and historians have generally pointed to Paris as the crucible of deaf education in the modern era. In Paris, Charles-Michel, abbé de l’Épée, founded what would eventually become the first state-supported school for deaf children, later known as the Institut National des Jeunes Sourds (INJS). Beginning with a class for two deaf sisters, de l’Épée’s school served as a model and a source of inspiration for the establishment of other European schools. Those schools generally followed the INJS’s use of a signed language to teach deaf children in their national spoken and written language. A school established in Leipzig, Germany, in 1778 by Samuel Heinicke exemplified the oral method (oralism), a method emphasizing training in speechreading (or lipreading) and articulation as a means for deaf people to learn their national language.

The respective methods used by de l’Épée and Heinicke became touchstones in a centuries-long “methods debate” in the field of deaf education. Within that debate, one side supported the use of sign language to teach deaf children both subject matter and written language, while the other side saw the use of sign language as hindering deaf people’s ability to learn speechreading and orally spoken language. (That latter claim has been disproved. Linguists have recognized that the use of sign language actually enhances second-language acquisition in both deaf and hearing children.) In general, both sides supported teaching deaf people to speak; the difference lay in how much sign language would be used and how much emphasis would be given to speech training. The users of sign method (or manual method) decried what they felt was an overemphasis on speech training to the exclusion of academic content. De l’Épée and Heinicke entered a correspondence in the 1780s debating the merits of their respective methods, a debate judged by the rector and fellows of the Academy of Zürich to have been won by de l’Épée. That was hardly the end of the matter, and the “methods debate” has figured prominently in nearly every history of deaf people to date.

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As with any ideological debate, the true positions taken by historical actors varied considerably across time. Those who supported the use of sign language also sometimes sought to minimize its use, and those who supported oral teaching also used some sign language. The popularity of one or another method at different points in history has not been contingent solely on internal factors in the field of deaf education or the wishes of deaf people themselves (which have generally been supportive of sign language); the surrounding social and cultural contexts in which deaf people lived had a significant influence on their methods of communication.