1989 - Seeing Voices (24 page)

When Clerc founded the American Asylum at Hartford with Thomas Gallaudet in 1817, he not only introduced Sign as the medium of all deaf schooling in the United States but also introduced a remarkable school system—one that has no exact parallel in the speaking world. Other residential schools for the deaf soon opened throughout the country, all using the Sign that had evolved at Hartford. Virtually all the teachers in these schools were educated at Hartford, and most had met the charismatic Clerc. They contributed their own indigenous signs and later spread an increasingly polished and generalized ASL in many parts of the country, and the standards and aspirations of the deaf continually rose.

The unique pattern of transmission of deaf culture relates equally to the deaf’s language (Sign) and to their schools. These schools acted as foci for the deaf community, passing down deaf history and culture from one generation to the next. Their influence went well beyond the classroom: commonly, deaf communities would spring up around the schools, and graduates would often remain close to the school, or even take jobs working in the school. And crucially, most of these schools for the deaf were residential schools, as Carol Padden and Tom Humphries point out:
146

146. Padden and Humphries, 1988, p. 6.

The most significant aspect of residential life is the dormitory. In the dormitories, away from the structured control of the classroom, deaf children are introduced to the social life of deaf people. In the informal dormitory environment, children not only learn sign language but the content of the culture. In this way, the schools become hubs of the communities that surround them, preserving for the next generation the culture of earlier generations…This unique pattern of transmission lies at the heart of the culture.
147

147. Such considerations should be taken into account in relation to the current controversies about ‘special’ schools or ‘mainstreaming.’ Mainstreaming—educating deaf children with the non-deaf—has the advantage of introducing the deaf to others, the world-at-large (at least, this is the supposition); but it may also introduce an isolation of its own—and serve to cut the deaf off from their own language and culture. There is much pressure, in the United States, Canada, England, and elsewhere at this time, to shut down residential and other special schools for the deaf. Sometimes this is done under the aegis of civil rights for the handicapped, giving them the right to ‘equal access’ or to the ‘least restrictive’ educational environment. But the deaf—at least the profoundly and prelingually deaf, whose native and communal language is Sign—are in a very special, indeed unique, category. They cannot be compared with any other group of pupils. The deaf do not regard themselves as handicapped, but as a linguistic and cultural minority, who have the need, and indeed the right, to be together, to go to school together, to learn in a language which is accessible to them, and to live in the company and community of others of their kind.

Legislation for the handicapped, with its emphasis on equal access, takes no note of these special needs and requirements; even worse, it threatens the dissolution of a unique educational system which has also been fundamental in providing linguistic and cultural continuity for the deaf. Very recently (1989) the state of Connecticut threatened to close the American School for the Deaf, the Hartford Asylum which was founded by Clerc and Gallaudet in 1817, which was not only the founder, but has been the guardian of deaf education in the United States for 173 years. Fortunately what would have been a rash and irrevocable move was postponed at the very last moment—but similar actions continue to threaten residential schools across the country.

The deaf student population, of course, is not homogeneous: it includes many postlingually deaf pupils, who are not native signers, and who do not identify themselves with the deaf community or with Sign; pupils such as these may indeed prefer to be mainstreamed. But there will always be prelingually deaf students whose early education and enculturation will be best accomplished in residential schools, and who must have at least the option to going to such schools, and not be mainstreamed by force. But such schools, founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, may have an anachronistic, Dickensian atmosphere. They need to be preserved, one feels—but modified, made more open, made less Victorian. Thus the old via Nomentana school in Rome, modified, is now enjoying a new lease of life, not only as a school, but as a club, an arts and theater center, and a research center for the deaf—and one to which, now, some hearing pupils and their parents also come (Pinna et al., 1990).

Thus, with great rapidity, in the years after 1817, there spread throughout the States not just a language and a literacy, but a body of shared knowledge, shared beliefs, cherished narratives and images, which soon constituted a rich and distinctive culture. Now, for the first time, there was an ‘identity’ for the deaf, not merely a personal one, but a social, cultural one. They were no longer just individuals, with an individual’s plights or triumphs; they were
a people
, with their own culture, like the Jews or the Welsh.
148

148. There is nothing quite equivalent, in the hearing world, to the crucial role of residential deaf schools, deaf clubs, etc.; for these, above all, are places where deaf people find a home. Deaf youngsters, sadly, may feel deeply isolated, even estranged, in their own families, in hearing schools, in the hearing world; but they can find a new family, a profound sense of homecoming, when they meet other deaf people. Schein (1989) cites these words from a young deaf man:

My sister told me about the Maryland School for the Deaf…My immediate reaction was one of anger and rejection—of myself. I reluctantly accompanied her to the School one day—and at long last began to come
home
. It was literally a love experience. For the first time, I felt less like a
stranger
in a strange land and more like a member of a community
.

And Kyle and Woll (1985) cite a contemporary account of Clerc’s visit to a deaf school in London in 1814:

As soon as Clerc beheld this sight [the children at dinner] his face became animated: he was as agitated as a traveller of sensibility would be on meeting all of a sudden in distant regions, a colony of his countrymen…Clerc approached them. He made signs and they answered him by signs. This unexpected communication caused a most delicious sensation in them and for us was a scene of expression and sensibility that gave us the most heartfelt satisfaction
.

By the 1850’s it had become clear that higher education was also needed—the deaf, previously illiterate, now needed a college. In 1857, Thomas Gallaudet’s son, Edward, only twenty years old, but uniquely equipped through his background (his mother was deaf, and he learned Sign as a primary language), his sensibilities, and his gifts, was appointed principal of the Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and the Dumb and the Blind,
149
conceiving and hoping from the start it could be transformed into a college with federal support. In 1864 this was achieved, and what was later to become Gallaudet College received its charter from Congress.

149. There was soon a division of the ways, with blind pupils being educated separately from the ‘deaf and dumb’ (as the congenitally deaf, with little or no speech, used to be called). Among the two thousand deaf students at Gallaudet now, there are about twenty students who are both deaf and blind (most with Usher’s syndrome). These students, of course, must develop astonishing tactile sensibility and intelligence, as Helen Keller did.

Edward Gallaudet’s own full and extraordinary life
150
lasted well into the present century and spanned great (though not always admirable) changes in attitudes to deaf people and their education.

150. See Gallaudet, 1983.

In particular, gathering force from the 1860’s and promoted to a large extent in the United States by Alexander Graham Bell was an attitude that opposed the use of signing, and sought to forbid its use in schools and institutions. Gallaudet himself fought against this, but was overborne by the climate of the times, and by a certain ferocity and intransigence of mind that he himself was too reasonable to understand.
151

151. The protagonists in this struggle, Bell and Gallaudet—both the sons of deaf mothers (but mothers with completely different attitudes to their own deafness), each passionately devoted to the deaf in his own way, were about as different as two human beings can be (see Winefield, 1987).

By the time of Gallaudet’s death, his college was world famous and had shown once and for all that the deaf, given the opportunity and the means, could match the hearing in every sphere of academic activity—and for that matter, in athletic activity, too (the spectacular gym at Gallaudet, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and opened in 1880, was one of the finest in the country; and the football huddle was actually invented at Gallaudet, for players to pass secret tactics among themselves). But Gallaudet himself was one of the last defenders of Sign in an educational world that had turned its back on signing, and with his death the college lost—and because the college had become the symbol and aspiration of the deaf all over the world, the deaf world also lost—its greatest and last proponent of Sign in education.

With this, Sign, which had been the dominant language at the college before, went underground and became confined to a colloquial use.
152

152. There has been one realm where sign language always continued to be used, all over the world, despite the changed habits and proscriptions of educators—in religious services for the deaf. Priests and others never forgot the souls of their deaf parishioners, learned Sign (often from them), and conducted services in Sign, right through the endless wrangles over oralism and the eclipse of Sign in secular education. De l‘Epee’s concern was religious in the first instance, and this concern, with its prompt perception of the ‘natural language’ of the deaf, has remained steadfast despite secular vicissitudes for two hundred years. This religious use of Sign is discussed by Jerome Schein:

That sign has a spiritual aspect should not surprise anyone, especially if one considers its use by silent religious orders and by priests in the education of deaf children. What must be seen to be fully appreciated, however, is its singular appropriateness for religious worship. The depth of expression that can be achieved by signing defies accurate description. The Academy Award won by Jane Wyman in 1948 for her portrayal of a deaf girl in Johnny Belinda undoubtedly owed much to her beautiful (and accurate) rendering of the Lord’s Prayer in Ameslan
.

It is perhaps in the church service that the beauty of sign becomes most evident. Some churches have sign choirs. Watching the robed members sign in unison can be an awe-inspiring experience (Schein, 1984, pp. 144-145
).

In October of 1989 I visited a deaf synagogue in Arleta, in Southern California, for the solemn Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) services. More than 200 people had gathered there, some coming from hundreds of miles away. A few people spoke, but the entire service was in Sign; the rabbi, the choir, and the congregants all signed. At the reading of the Law—the Hebrew Torah is written on a scroll, and portions of this are read by different congregants—this ‘reading aloud’ took the form of signing, a fluent translation of biblical Hebrew into Sign. Some extra, special prayers had been added to the service. At one point, where there is a communal atonement, of the form ‘We have done this, we have done that; we have sinned through doing this, we have sinned through doing that…‘ an extra ‘sin’ was added: ‘We have sinned through being impatient with the hearing when they failed to understand us.’ And an extra prayer of thanksgiving was thrown in: ‘Thou hast given us hands, that we might create language.’

The Sign choir was especially astonishing; I had never before seen such large sweeping signs, or signs in unison—nor had I seen signing not in the usual sign-space used for human, social discourse, but high up, above the shoulders, towards Heaven, to God. (There was an atmosphere of great devotion, although, just in front of me, there was a middle-aged woman gossiping on the hands with her daughter, nonstop, a Sign yenta who reminded me of the murmuring and nattering of synagogues at home.)

The congregants gathered long before the service, and stayed till long after—it was an important social and cultural, as well as religious, event. Such congregations are exceedingly rare, and I could not help wondering how it would be for a deaf child to be brought up in Montana or Wyoming, without a deaf church or deaf synagogue in thousands of miles.

The students continued to use it among themselves, but it was no longer considered a legitimate language for formal discourse or teaching. Thus the century between Thomas Gallaudet’s founding of the American Asylum and Edward Gallaudet’s death in 1917 saw the rise and fall, the legitimation and de-legitimation, of Sign in America.
153

153. This happened not only in the United States, but throughout the world—even de l’Epee’s school, when I visited it in 1990, had become rigidly ‘oral’ (de l’Epee, I felt, was surely turning in his grave).

The suppression of Sign in the 1880’s had a deleterious effect on the deaf for seventy-five years, not only on their education and academic achievements but on their image of themselves and on their entire community and culture. Such community and culture as did exist remained in isolated pockets—there was no longer the sense there had once been, at least the sense that was intimated in the ‘golden age’ of the 1840’s, of a nationwide (even worldwide) community and culture.