1989 - Seeing Voices

by Oliver Sacks

  This indeed has always been evident, if only implicitly, to all native signers, but has always been denied by the hearing and speaking, who, however well intentioned, regard signing as something rudimentary, primitive, pantomimic, a poor thing. De l’Epee had this delusion—and it remains an almost universal delusion of the hearing now. On the contrary, it must be understood that Sign is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic—to philosophical analysis or to making love—indeed, with an ease that is sometimes greater than that of speech. (Indeed, if learned as a primary language, Sign may be used and maintained by the hearing as a continuing and at times preferred alternative to speech.)

  The philosopher Condillac, who at first had seen deaf people as ‘sentient statues’ or ‘ambulatory machines’ incapable of thought or any connected mental activity, coming incognito to de l’Epee’s classes, became a convert, and provided the first philosophic endorsement of his method and of sign language: 30

  30. Lane, 1984b, p. 195.

  From the language of action de l’Epee has created a methodical, simple, and easy art with which he gives his pupils ideas of every kind, and, I daresay, ideas more precise than the ones usually acquired with the help of hearing. When as children we are reduced to judging the meaning of words from the circumstances in which we hear them, it often happens that we grasp the meaning only approximately, and we are satisfied with this approximation all our lives. It is different with the deaf taught by de l’Epee. He has only one means for giving them sensory ideas; it is to analyze and to get the pupil to analyze with him. So he leads them from sensory to abstract ideas; we can judge how advantageous de l’Epee’s action language is over the speech sounds of our governesses and tutors.

  From Condillac to the public at large, who also flocked to de l’Epee’s and Sicard’s demonstrations, there came an enormous and generous change of heart, a welcoming of the previously outcast into human society. This period—which now seems a sort of golden period in deaf history—saw the rapid establishment of deaf schools, usually manned by deaf teachers, throughout the civilized world, the emergence of the deaf from neglect and obscurity, their emancipation and enfranchisement, and their rapid appearance in positions of eminence and responsibility—deaf writers, deaf engineers, deaf philosophers, deaf intellectuals, previously inconceivable, were suddenly possible.

  When Laurent Clerc (a pupil of Massieu, himself a pupil of Sicard) came to the United States in 1816, he had an immediate and extraordinary impact, for American teachers up to this point had never been exposed to, never even imagined, a deaf-mute of impressive intelligence and education, had never imagined the possibilities dormant in the deaf. With Thomas Gallaudet, Clerc set up the American Asylum for the Deaf, in Hartford, in 1817. 31

  31. In When the Mind Hears, Harlan Lane becomes a novelist-biographer-historian, and assumes the persona of Clerc, through whom he recounts the early history of the deaf. Since Clerc’s rich and long life spanned the most crucial developments, in many of which, indeed, he played a leading part, his ‘autobiography’ becomes a wonderfully personal history of the deaf.

  The story of Laurent Clerc’s enlistment and coming to America is a cherished piece of deaf history and folklore. As the Reverend Thomas Gallaudet (so the story goes) was watching some children playing in his garden one day, he was struck by the fact that one of them did not join in the fun. He found out that her name was Alice Cogswell—and that she was deaf. He tried to teach her himself and then spoke to her father, Mason Cogswell, a surgeon in Hartford, about setting up a school for the deaf there (there were no schools for the deaf in the United States at this time).

  Gallaudet sailed for Europe, looking for a teacher, someone who could found, or help found, a school in Hartford. He went first to England, to one of the Braidwood schools, one of the ‘oral’ schools that had been set up in the previous century (it was a Braidwood school that Samuel Johnson had seen, on his journey to the Hebrides), but was given a cold welcome there: the oral method, he was told, was a ‘secret.’ After this experience in England, he went on to Paris, and there found Laurent Clerc teaching in the Institute of Deaf-Mutes. Would he—himself a deaf-mute, who had never ventured from his native France; nor indeed, much beyond the confines of the Institute—would he be willing to come and bring the Word (the Sign) to America? Clerc agreed, and the two of them set sail; and on the fifty-two-day journey to the United States, he taught Gallaudet Sign, and Gallaudet taught him English. Soon after their arrival, they started raising funds—both public and legislature were excited and generous—and the next year, with Mason Cogswell, they opened the Asylum in Hartford. A statue of Thomas Gallaudet, giving a lesson to Alice, stands on the grounds of Gallaudet University today.

  As Paris—teachers, philosophes, and public-at-large-was moved, amazed, ‘converted’ by de l’Epee in the 1770’s, so America was to be converted fifty years later.

  The atmosphere at the Hartford Asylum, and at other schools soon to be set up, was marked by the sort of enthusiasm and excitement only seen at the start of grand intellectual and humanitarian adventures. 32

  32. This atmosphere breathes from every page of a delightful book, The Deaf and the Dumb by Edwin John Mann, Late Pupil of the Hartford Asylum, published by Hitchcock in 1836.

  The prompt and spectacular success of the Hartford Asylum soon led to the opening of other schools wherever there was sufficient density of population, and thus of deaf students. Virtually all the teachers of the deaf (nearly all of whom were fluent signers and many of whom were deaf) went to Hartford. The French sign system imported by Clerc rapidly amalgamated with the indigenous sign languages here—the deaf generate sign language wherever there are communities of deaf people; it is for them the easiest and most natural mode of communication—to form a uniquely expressive and powerful hybrid, American Sign Language (ASL). 33

  33. We lack sufficient direct knowledge of the evolution of ASL, especially in its first fifty years, when a far-reaching ‘creolization’ occurred, as French Sign Language became Americanized (see Fischer, 1978, and Woodward, 1978). There was already a wide gulf between French Sign and the new creole ASL by 1867—Clerc himself commented on this—and this has continued to grow in the past hundred and twenty years. Nonetheless, there are still significant similarities between the two languages—sufficient for an American signer to feel somewhat at home in Paris. In contrast, American signers have great difficulty understanding British Sign Language, which has quite different indigenous origins of its own.

  A special indigenous strength—presented convincingly by Nora Ellen Groce in her book, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language—was the contribution of the Martha’s Vineyard deaf to the development of ASL. A substantial minority of the population there suffered from a hereditary deafness, and most of the island had adopted an easy and powerful sign language. Virtually all the deaf of the Vineyard were sent to the Hartford Asylum in its formative years, where they contributed to the developing national language the unique strength of their own.

  One has, indeed, a strong sense of pollination, of people coming to and fro, bringing regional languages, with all their idiosyncrasies and strengths, to Hartford, and taking back an increasingly polished and generalized language. 34

  34. Indigenous sign dialects may be extremely different: thus prior to 1817, a deaf American traveling across the States would encounter sign dialects incomprehensibly different from his own; and standardization was so slow in England that until quite recently signers in adjacent villages might be mutually unintelligible.

  The rise of deaf literacy and deaf education was as spectacular in the United States as it had been in France, and it soon spread to other parts of the world.

  Lane estimates that by 1869 there were 550 teachers of the deaf worldwide and that 41 percent of the teachers of the deaf in the United States were themselves deaf. In 1864 Congress passed a law authorizing the Columbia Institution for the Deaf and the Blind in Washington to become a nation
al deaf-mute college, the first institution of higher learning specifically for the deaf. Its first principal was Edward Gallaudet—the son of Thomas Galtaudet, who had brought Clerc to the United States in 1816. Gallaudet College, as it was later rechristened (it is now Gallaudet University), is still the only liberal arts college for deaf students in the world—though there are now several programs and institutes for the deaf associated with technical colleges. (The most famous of these is at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where there are more than 1,500 deaf students forming the National Technical Institute for the Deaf.)

  The great impetus of deaf education and liberation, which had swept France between 1770 and 1820, thus continued its triumphant course in the United States until 1870 (Clerc, immensely active to the end and personally charismatic, died in 1869). And then—and this is the turning point in the entire story—the tide turned, turned against the use of Sign by and for the deaf, so that within twenty years the work of a century was undone.

  Indeed, what was happening with the deaf and Sign was part of a general (and if one wishes, ‘political’) movement of the time: a trend to Victorian oppressiveness and conformism, intolerance of minorities, and minority usages, of every kind—religious, linguistic, ethnic. Thus it was at this time that the ‘little nations’ and ‘little languages’ of the world (for example, Wales and Welsh) found themselves under pressure to assimilate or conform.

  Specifically, there had been for two centuries a counter-current of feeling, from teachers and parents of deaf children, that the goal of deaf education should be teaching the deaf how to speak. Already, a century earlier, de l’Epee had found himself in implicit if not explicit opposition to Pereire, the greatest ‘oralist’ or ‘demutizer’ of his time, who dedicated his life to teaching deaf people how to speak; this was a task, indeed, for which dedication was needed, for it required years of the most intensive and arduous training, with one teacher working with one pupil, to have any hope of success, whereas de l’Epee could educate pupils by the hundred. Now, in the 1870’s, a current that had been growing for decades, fed, paradoxically, by the immense success of the deaf-mute asylums and their spectacular demonstrations of the educability of the deaf, erupted and attempted to eliminate the very instrument of success.

  There were, indeed, real dilemmas, as there had always been, and they exist to this day. What good, it was asked, was the use of signs without speech? Would this not restrict deaf people, in daily life, to intercourse with other deaf people? Should not speech (and lip reading) be taught instead, allowing a full integration of the deaf into the general population? Should not signing be proscribed, lest it interfere with speech? 35

  35. The old terms ‘deaf and dumb’ and ‘deaf-mute’ referred to a supposed inadequacy of those born deaf to speak. They are, of course, perfectly capable of speech—they have the same speech apparatus as anyone else; what they lack is the ability to hear their own speech, and thus to monitor its sound by ear. Their speech, therefore, may be abnormal in amplitude and tone, with many omitted consonants and other speech sounds, sometimes so much so as to be unintelligible. Since deaf people cannot monitor their speech by ear, they have to learn to monitor it by other senses—by vision, touch, vibration-sense, and kinesthesia. Moreover, the prelingually deaf have no auditory image, no idea what speech actually sounds like, no idea of a sound-meaning correspondence. What is essentially an auditory phenomenon must be grasped and controlled by non-auditory means. It is this which poses great difficulties, and which may require thousands of hours of individual tuition to achieve.

  It is for this reason that the voices of the pre-and postlingually deaf are usually quite different, and distinguishable at once; the postlingually deaf remember how to speak, even though they can no longer readily monitor their speech; the prelingually deaf must be taught how to speak, without any sense or memory of how it sounds.

  But there is the other side of the argument. If the teaching of speech is arduous and occupies dozens of hours a week, might not its advantages be offset by these thousands of hours taken away from general education? Might one not end up with a functional illiterate who has, at best, a poor imitation of speech? What is ‘better,’ integration or education? Might one have both, by combining both speech and Sign? Or will any such attempted combination bring about, not the best, but the worst, of both worlds?

  These dilemmas, these debates, of the 1870’s seem to have been gathering force beneath the surface throughout a century of achievement—an achievement that could be seen, and was seen, by many, as perverse, as conducive to isolation and a set apart people.

  Edward Gallaudet himself was an open-minded man who traveled extensively in Europe in the late 1860’s, touring deaf schools in fourteen countries. He found that the majority used both sign language and speech, that the sign language schools did as well as the oral schools as far as articulating speech was concerned, but obtained superior results in general education. He felt that articulation skills, though highly desirable, could not be the basis of primary instruction—that this had to be achieved, and achieved early, by Sign. Gallaudet was balanced, but others were not. There had been a rash of ‘reformers’—Samuel Gridley Howe and Horace Mann were egregious examples—who clamored for an overthrow of the ‘old–fashioned’ sign language asylums and for the introduction of ‘progressive’ oralist schools. The Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, was the first of these, opened in 1867. (It was the model and inspiration of the Northampton School in England, founded by the Reverend Thomas Arnold the following year.) But the most important and powerful of these ‘oralist’ figures was Alexander Graham Bell, who was at once heir to a family tradition of teaching elocution and correcting speech impediments (his father and grandfather were both eminent in this), tied into a strange family mix of deafness denied (both his mother and his wife were deaf, but never acknowledged this) and, of course, a technological genius in his own right. When Bell threw all the weight of his immense authority and prestige into the advocacy of oralism, the scales were, finally, overbalanced and tipped, and at the notorious International Congress of Educators of the Deaf held at Milan in 1880, where deaf teachers were themselves excluded from the vote, oralism won the day and the use of Sign in schools was ‘officially’ proscribed. 36

  36. Although Bell has been seen as something of an ogre by the deaf (George Veditz, a former president of the National Association of the Deaf, and a hero of the deaf, called him ‘the most to be feared enemy of the American deaf’), it should be noted that Bell said on one occasion:

  I think that if we have the mental condition of the child alone in view with out reference to language, no language will reach the mind like the language of signs; it is the method of reaching the mind of the deaf child.

  Nor was he himself ignorant of Sign; he was, on the contrary, ‘a fluent signer on his fingers—as good as any deaf-mute…[he] could use his fingers with bewitching grace and ease,’ in the words of his deaf friend Albert Ballin. Ballin also called Bell’s interest in the deaf ‘a hobby’—but it bears many of the marks, rather, of a violent and conflicted obsession (see Gannon, 1981, pp. 78-79).

  Deaf pupils were prohibited from using their own ‘natural’ language, and thenceforth forced to learn, as best they might, the (for them) ‘unnatural’ language of speech. And perhaps this was in keeping with the spirit of the age, its overweening sense of science as power, of commanding nature and never deferring to it.

  One of the consequences of this was that hearing teachers, not deaf teachers, now had to teach deaf students. The proportion of deaf teachers for the deaf, which was close to 50 percent in 1850, fell to 25 percent by the turn of the century, and to 12 percent by 1960. More and more, English became the language of instruction for deaf students, taught by hearing teachers, fewer and fewer of whom knew any sign language at all—the situation depicted by David Wright, at his school, in the 1920’s.

  None of this would have mattered had oralism worked. But the
effect, unhappily, was the reverse of what was desired—an intolerable price was exacted for the acquisition of speech. Deaf students of the 1850’s who had been to the Hartford Asylum, or other such schools, were highly literate and educated—fully the equal of their hearing counterparts. Today the reverse is true. Oralism and the suppression of Sign have resulted in a dramatic deterioration in the educational achievement of deaf children and in the literacy of the deaf generally. 37

  37. Many of the deaf are now functional illiterates. A study carried out by Gallaudet College in 1972 showed that the average reading level of eighteen-year-old deaf high school graduates in the United States was only at a fourth-grade level, and a study by the British psychologist R. Conrad indicates a similar situation in England, with deaf students, at graduation, reading at the level of nine-year-olds (Conrad, 1979).

  These dismal facts are known to all teachers of the deaf, however they are to be interpreted. Hans Furth, a psychologist whose work is concerned with cognition of the deaf, states that the deaf do as well as the hearing on tasks that measure intelligence without the need for acquired information. 38

  38. Furth, 1966.

  He argues that the congenitally deaf suffer from ‘information deprivation.’ There are a number of reasons for this. First, they are less exposed to the ‘incidental’ learning that takes place out of school—for example, to that buzz of conversation that is the background of ordinary life; to television, unless it is captioned, etc. Second, the content of deaf education is meager compared to that of hearing children: so much time is spent teaching deaf children speech—one must envisage between five and eight years of intensive tutoring—that there is little time for transmitting information, culture, complex skills, or anything else.