Monica has taught college-level courses in Tourism, HR and Adult Education. She has a Master's in Education and is three years into a PhD.
It's amazing what inspires people. Today, there are over 100 deaf schools in the U.S. thanks to the passion of a little girl's neighbor. Back in 1814, the United States of America was just 38 years old. There were no states, just thirteen colonies. A man by the name of Dr. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was intrigued by his neighbor's daughter who was deaf. He tried to teach her how to read and write but was not making any progress. So, he raised funds, travelled to Paris, France (at that time, it took around eight weeks to sail between America and Europe) to learn from Educator Abbe Sicard and his deaf students, Jean Massieu and Laurent Clerc.
Dr. Gallaudet eventually returned to the U.S. with a new language, American Sign Language (ASL). We'll talk more about this later on, but sign language is incorrectly described as a universal language. That's right, there is American Sign Language, British Sign Language, and so on. Dr. Gallaudet also brought back Laurent Clerc, and, in 1817, they opened the first school for deaf children, the American School for the Deaf . Clerc and Gallaudet's son, Edward Gallaudet, continued to expand deaf education well after Gallaudet retired and after he died. Nearly fifty-years later, there were 22 schools and the first deaf college, the National Deaf-Mute College in Washington D.C. Later, they would change the name to Gallaudet University.
Do you remember learning about Alexander Graham Bell when you were a kid? Well before he invented the telephone, Bell, a teacher and scientist, moved to Boston, MA to teach Deaf students in 1871. That same year he invented the Visible Speech teaching method because he believed the Deaf should speak and not sign. Where did his interest in the Deaf come from? Well, his mother was Deaf and he fell in love and married a Deaf student, Mabel Hubbard in 1877. A year before that, he invented the telephone. Coincidence?
Bell was such a strong believer in speech and lip reading that at a Deaf Education conference in Italy, he convinced Deaf school leaders to ban sign language in 1880. At first, educators in Italy banned sign language and later, some schools in America banned it. Deaf people, on the other hand, did not agree. So they started the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) to fight the ban. This fight would last for 90 years. NAD is still an active civil rights organization today. You can follow one of their awareness programs #NADHandwave that recognizes game changers in Deaf education and development.
ASL was steadily banned from schools, and oral education became the new norm. However, many schools taught ASL secretly to their students.
In the 1960s, Deaf educator, William Stokoe tried to debunk the belief that ASL was bad English or not a real language. He started out by transcribing movies of Deaf people signing to prove that the Deaf had rules of grammar and word creation. Stokoe believed that ASL could be recognized as an official language through scholarly research. So he established a Linguistic Research Laboratory at Gallaudet University that published several books and articles on the linguistic nature of ASL, and he eventually published an ASL dictionary.
During Stokoe's development, innovation in oral education thrived. Teletypewriters (telephone for the Deaf) were invented, close captioning was now on national television, and the biggest invention, in 1984, was cochlear implants. So now it's the 1980s and 1990s, and together oral education and ASL were transforming Deaf culture through awareness and development. For example, actress Marlee Matlin became the first Deaf woman to win an Academy Award. In 1994, Heather Whitestone became the first Deaf woman crowned as Miss America.
Now Deaf education looks completely different and so does ASL. While there are plenty of Deaf schools and colleges, Deaf children can attend public schools, and, by law, children and parents can receive many resources including interpreters, real-time captioning (CART), and assistive listening devices. Earlier we mentioned a cultural difference in sign language. Because Gallaudet learned sign language in France, ASL is still very similar to French Sign Language (LSF). Other countries and regions adapted LSF including Holland, Ireland, Belgium, Russia and the Quebec. The Ethnologue, a language dictionary, lists sixty-nine different sign languages! To make make things even more interesting, ASL has it's own subculture.
You see, up until the 1960s, public schools were segregated; Blacks and Whites could not attend the same schools. That also meant that Deaf Black children had their own schools. The Black Deaf schools had fewer resources and, in general, Blacks and Whites were culturally and linguistically different. As a result, Deaf education for Blacks was and still is different in some aspects. So different, that there is Black ASL.
ASL has also become very digitized. There are several laws in place like the Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act to ensure the ASL users can have access to government resources like Center on Disease Control (CDC) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) through videos. Video Remote Interpreting (VRI) is also making waves in technology by extending different services to Deaf people.
The discovery of American Sign Language established the need for Deaf education. Over the years, both hearing and Deaf people transformed ASL to become an important language in American history and improved the quality of life for Deaf people and their families.
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