Deaf Education:
Laurie Boggs
11/26/07
THE METHOD DEBATE
"In order to communicate effectively and fluently, people
must feel at home in their language, and the deaf are no
exception." (Gannon, 1981, page 360) This quote was written by
Robert F. Panara: poet, professor, and a founder of the National
Theatre of the Deaf. It doesn’t appear that parents and
educators of deaf children have always shared his sediment over
the years. In early times, different groups of parents and
educators had varying opinions of what "feeling at home" must
have meant to a deaf child. The debate over which method of
teaching a child to communicate: manualism or oralism continued
for centuries.
The controversy over the most appropriate education of
deaf children plagued this country from the 18th to the 20th
century. The two methods heatedly debated were oralism and
manualism. Oralism was the education of deaf children using the
spoken language, while manualism was the education of deaf
children using sign language.
Perhaps the primary reason for the debate stemmed from
the fact that "deafness" was an unseen handicap. Deaf children
looked "normal," and the only way the deaf child could be
identified as being handicapped was by an external show of
his/her disability, i.e. the use of sign language or the wearing
of hearing aids.
No parent wants to admit that
their child is different from "normal" children. (Gannon, 1981)
In Marcia Forecki’s 1985 book Speak to Me! she writes of
this fear of evident "handicap" when speaking of her child,
diagnosed with a profound hearing impairment at 18 months of
age, upon receiving his hearing aids: "Charlie’s’ handicap was
now obvious to anyone, even without their trying to talk to him.
I felt sick. I could not wrench from my mind the memory of a
picture I had seen in a history book of a blind man begging
during the Depression. He wore a placard around his neck, which
read "BLIND." My son now wore the indisputable proof of his
abnormality. His sign read "DEAF" and it was just as repugnant
to me as the blind man’s label." (Forecki, 1985, page 32) This
is a prime example of the emotional turbulence shared by many
parents in the 18th century. Proponents of the oral philosophy
of teaching gave these parents the hope and affirmation that
their child could learn to talk and lipread, and with those
skills he or she would fit into a hearing society as a "normal"
child. (Gannon, 1981) Oralists warned parents that using signs,
or allowing their children to use signs, would be a detriment to
speech development. They stated that the child would depend
solely on the signs and would neglect speech and speechreading.
In the mid-1800’s, educators of oralism attempted to provide
pure oral atmospheres in their schools. They prohibited the use
of any signs from their students, telling them that signs would
prevent them from growing up "normal" and living in a "hearing
world." (Gannon, 1981) Oralists, such as Horace Mann and
Alexander Graham Bell, argued that using sign language would
allow a deaf person to "talk" only to other deaf people;
therefore, the deaf must learn to speak and to lip-read. (Wolkomir,
1992)
The oralists’ obsession against the use of signing
infuriated proponents of manualism, who felt that forbidding a
child to use their natural means of communication and trying to
make a "hearing" person out of a deaf child was cruel and
unnatural. They stated that the same people who were taking
signing away from deaf students would never dream of taking
glasses away from a sight-impaired student or a wheelchair away
from a physically impaired student. (Gannon, 1981) Manualists
felt that a method of communication should be fitted to the
child, as opposed to the child being fitted to the established
method. (Gannon, 1981) Many educators expressed repeated
concerns regarding the heavy emphasis placed on teaching
articulation at the expense of a good education. A popular
slogan during this time was heard as "What good is it to be able
to talk if you have nothing to say?"(Gannon, 1981) In the early
1900’s, National Association of the Deaf President James L.
Smith stated that "We are friends and advocates of speech and
speech-training, but not for all the deaf. In order that the
deaf may get the highest measure of intellectual, social, and
moral happiness in this world, an adaptation and combination of
methods is necessary." (Gannon, 1981, page 361) Manualists noted
that the oralists’ sole emphasis on lipreading was flawed, in
that it is a skill that few people master. They argued that the
many hours required to teach a deaf child to mimic speech should
be spent on real education. (Wolkomir, 1992) Marcia Forecki
parrots this feeling in her book Speak to Me! when she
states that "even the best speechreaders lose between 50-60% of
what they see." She further stated that using gestures was
something that had developed very naturally between her and her
son and abandoning this natural form of communication in favor
of the "rigors of strict oral training seemed unreasonable." (Forecki,
1985, page 35)
In the early 1960’s, following centuries of debate, a
California teacher and mother of a deaf child became frustrated
with the lack of progress her daughter, using the oral approach,
was making in school. She began using a multi-approach to
teaching deaf children in her school. She was very influential
in the movement to learn sign language. In her classes, deaf
children were exposed to speech, lip reading, auditory training,
fingerspelling, and sign language. She called her approach "The
Total Approach." (Gannon, 1981) Several years later Roy Holcomb
became the first supervisor of the program for deaf students at
James Madison Elementary School in California. It was his
philosophy that good communication was of utmost importance to
the success of the child’s learning process. Under his
supervision, teachers were interested in providing all students
with a barrier-free communicative environment. They used "The
Total Approach" at all levels in their school. Holcomb began
referring to this method as "Total Communication," and he became
knows as the "Father of Total Communication." (Gannon, 1981).
The advent of this approach to communication, in which a child
is provided opportunities to learn multiple modes of
communication and to communicate in the method(s) they find the
most comfortable, ended centuries of debate and perhaps finally
gave children a language they could "feel at home" with.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Forecki, M. (1985). Speak to Me! Washington, DC:
Gallaudet University Press.
Gannon, J. (1981). Deaf Heritage. Silver Spring,
Maryland: National Association of the Deaf.
Wolkomir, Richard. (1992). American sign language: ‘it’s not
mouth stuff – it’s brain stuff.’ Smithsonian Magazine,
10-40.
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