the 19th century dawned, and in 1810 the Edinburgh institution
opened its doors. Nine years later the Glasgow school was
established and, under the able guidance of Mr Duncan
Anderson (after several other headmasters had been tried) from
1831, taught pupils whose grasp of English was equal to that of
the very best educated deaf in England to-day, as has been
proved by conversation with the survivors. Mr Anderson’s great
aim was to teach his pupils language, and we might look almost
in vain for a teacher in England to succeed as well with a whole
class in the beginning of the 20th century as he did in the
middle of the 19th. He wrote a dictionary, used pictures
and signs to explain English, and apparently paid little or
no attention to most of the numerous subjects attempted
to-day in schools for the deaf, which, while excellent in themselves,
generally exclude what is far more important from the
curriculum.
Addison further mentions Mr Baker of Doncaster, a contemporary of Anderson, as having compiled many lesson books for deaf children which came to be used in ordinary schools also, and Mr Scott of Exeter as having, together with Baker, “exercised a profound influence on the course of deaf-mute education in this country.” “Written language,” explained by signs where necessary, was the watchword of these teachers.
Moritz Hill is credited with being principally responsible for having evolved the German, or “pure,” oral method out of the experimental stage to that at which it has arrived at the present day. Arnold of Riehen is also honourably mentioned.
The great “oral revival” now swept all before it. The German method was enthusiastically welcomed in all parts of Europe, and at the Milan conference in 1880 was almost unanimously adopted by teachers from all countries. Those in high places countenanced it; educational authorities awoke to the fact that the deaf needed special teaching, and came to the conclusion that the “pure” oral method was the panacea that would restore all the deaf to a complete equality with the hearing in any conversation upon any subject that might be broached; many governments suddenly took the deaf under the shelter of their own ample wings, and the “bottomless pocket of the ratepayer,” instead of the purse of the charitable, became in many cases the fount of supply for what has been a costly and by no means entirely satisfactory experiment in the history of their education. The “pure” oral method has had a long and unique trial in England in circumstances which other methods have never enjoyed.
Meanwhile in the United States Dr Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was elected in 1815 to go to Europe to inquire into the methods of educating the deaf in vogue there. This was at a meeting held in the house of a physician named Cogswell, in Hartford, Connecticut, and was the result of the latter’s discovery that eighty-four persons in the state besides his own little girl were deaf. Henry Winter Syle, himself deaf, tells how “four months were spent in learning that the doors of the British schools were ‘barred with gold, and opened but to golden keys,’” and how, disappointed in England, Gallaudet met with a ready response to his inquiries in Paris. With Laurent Clerc, a deaf teacher, he returned to the United States in 1816, and the “Connecticut Asylum” was founded a year after with seven pupils. The name was changed to “The American Asylum” later, when it was enlarged. This was followed by the Pennsylvania, New York and Kentucky institutions, with the second of which the Peet family were connected. Dr Gallaudet married one of his deaf pupils, Sophia Fowler, and, after a very happy married life, Mrs Gallaudet accompanied her youngest son, Edward Miner Gallaudet, to the Columbia institution for the Deaf and Dumb, Washington, D.C., founded in 1857 by Congress and largely supported by Amos Kendall, and to the National Deaf Mute College, which was founded in 1864, was renamed the Gallaudet College, in honour of Dr T. H. Gallaudet, in 1893, and with the Kendall School (secondary), now forms the Columbia Institution. This college is supported by Congress.
The following account of the work done at the National Deaf-Mute College at Washington is worth attention, as the results are unique, and are often strangely ignored.
Here is a statement of the course for the B.A. degree:—
First year: Algebra, grammar, punctuation, history of England, composition, Latin grammar, Caesar.
Second year: Algebra (from quadratics), geometry, composition, Caesar (Gallic War), Cicero (Orations), Allen and Greenough’s Latin Grammar, Myer’s General History, Goodwin’s Greek Grammar (optional), Xenophon’s Anabasis (optional).
Third year: Olney’s or Loomis’s Plane and Spherical Trigonometry, Loomis’s Analytical Geometry (optional), Orton’s Zoology, Gray’s Botany, Remsen’s Chemistry, laboratory practice, Virgil’s Aeneid, Homer’s Iliad (optional), Meiklejohn’s History of English Literature and Language (two books), Maertz’s English Literature, Hadley’s History, original composition.
Fourth year: Loomis’s Calculus (optional), Dana’s Mechanics, Gage’s Natural Philosophy, Young’s Astronomy, laboratory practice, qualitative analysis, Steel’s Hygienic Physiology, Edgren’s French Grammar, Super’s French Reader, Demosthenes on the Crown (optional), Hart’s Composition and Rhetoric, original composition, Hill’s-Jevon’s Elementary Logic.
Fifth year: Arnold’s Manual of English Literature, Maertz’s English Literature, original composition, Guizot’s History of Civilization, Sheldon’s German Grammar, Joynes’s German Reader, LeConte’s Geology, Guyot’s Earth and Man, Hill’s Elements of Psychology, Haven’s Moral Philosophy, Butler’s Analogy, Bascom’s Elements of Beauty, Perry’s Political Economy, Gallaudet’s International Law.
Even in 1893 we were told that of the graduates of the college “fifty-seven have been engaged in teaching, four have entered the ministry; three have become editors and publishers of newspapers; three others have taken positions connected with journalism; fifteen have entered the civil service of the government,—one of these, who had risen rapidly to a high and responsible position, resigned to enter upon the practice of law in patent cases, in Cincinnati and Chicago, and has been admitted to practise in the Supreme Court of the United States; one is the official botanist of a state, who has correspondents in several countries of Europe who have repeatedly purchased his collections, and he has written papers upon seed tests and related subjects which have been published and circulated by the agricultural department; one, while filling a position as instructor in a western institution, has rendered important service to the coast survey as a microscopist, and one is engaged as an engraver in the chief office of the survey; of three who became draughtsmen in architects’ offices, one is in successful practice as an architect on his own account, which is also true of another, who completed his preparation by a course of study in Europe; one has been repeatedly elected recorder of deeds in a southern city, and two others are recorders’ clerks in the west; one was elected and still sits as a city councilman; another has been elected city treasurer and is at present cashier of a national bank; one has become eminent as a practical chemist and assayer; two are members of the faculty of the college, and two others are rendering valuable service as instructors therein; some have gone into mercantile and other offices; some have undertaken business on their own account; while not a few have chosen agricultural and mechanical pursuits, in which the advantages of thorough mental training will give them a superiority over those not so well educated. Of those alluded to as having engaged in teaching, one has been the principal of a flourishing institution in Pennsylvania; one is now in his second year as principal of the Ohio institution; one has been at the head of a day school in Cincinnati, and later of the Colorado institution; a third has had charge of the Oregon institution; a fourth is at the head of a day school in St Louis; three others have respectively founded and are now at the head of schools in New Mexico, North Dakota, and Evansville, Indiana, and others have done pioneer work in establishing schools in Florida and in Utah.”
Later years would unfold a similar tale of subsequent students; in 1907 there were 134 in the college and 59 in the Kendall School.
There is a normal department attached to the college, to which are admitted six hearing young men and women for one year who are recommended as being anxious to study methods of teaching the deaf and likely to profit thereby. Their course of study for 1898–1899 included careful training in the oral method, instruction in Bell’s Visible Speech, instruction in the anatomy of the vocal organs, lectures on sound, observation of methods, oral and manual, in Kendall School, lectures on various subjects connected with the deaf and their education, lectures on pedagogy, lessons in the language of signs, practical work with classes in Kendall School under the direction of the teachers, correction of essays of the introductory class, &c. But the greatest advantage of the year’s course is that the half-dozen hearing students live in the college, have their meals with the hundred deaf, and mix with them all day long—if they wish it—in social intercourse and recreation. We are very far indeed from saying that one such year is sufficient to make a hearing man a qualified teacher of the deaf, but the arrangement is based on the right principle, and it sets his feet on the right path to learn how to teach—so far as this art can be learned. The recent regulation of the board of education in England, prohibiting hearing pupil teachers in schools for the deaf, is deplorable, retrograde and inimical to the best interests of the deaf. It shows a complete ignorance of their needs. The younger a teacher begins to mix with that class the better he will teach them.
