Hearing People in Deaf Education

The Byzantine Emperor Justinian (482–565), in the Justinian Code, correctly identified deafness and muteness as two separate traits, and accorded deaf Byzantine with certain limited rights. While this seems a small achievement today, it would be a thousand years before most of Europe accepted what Justinian knew, and the view that Deaf people could neither speak nor think persisted, and significantly delayed the spread of schools for the Deaf.

The Italian mathematician and philosopher Geronimo (or Girolamo) Cardano (1501–1576) was one of the first to argue that the deaf were capable of thinking. The popular imagination, then even more than now, linked speech with thought inextricably, and few even understood that profound deafness did not always mean muteness. No effort was made to educate the deaf so long as people believed they were incapable of being taught.

A contemporary of Cardano’s, Pedro Ponce de León (1520–1584), is widely considered the first teacher of the Deaf, and established a school for the Deaf at the San Salvador Monastery in Spain. Most of his pupils were the children of the wealthy, and he dealt with only a small number of students at a time, focusing on helping them speak and articulate, if they were capable, and to write and make simple gestures. The gestures he taught were not sign language, but rather basic pantomime to extend the situations in which a simple gesture could communicate some necessary meaning rather than taking the time to write a message on a slate. However, he may have taught some of his students a manual alphabet based on the one used by monks who had taken vows of silence.

The modern history of sign language for the Deaf begins in Spain, whether with Ponce de León or Juan Pablo Bonet (1573–1633), who in 1620 published the first book on Deaf education, which focused on teaching a manual alphabet, though there was some oralist content (teaching the Deaf to articulate) as well. Like Ponce de León, Bonet taught the sons of wealthy families.

Modern Deaf education begins with the Abbé Charles-Michel de l’Épée (1712–1789), who had been denied entrance into the priesthood because of his commitment to the Jansenist heresy. Like other Jansenists, l’Épée was especially concerned with original sin and saving grace, and after witnessing two deaf sisters communicate with one another in sign language, he committed himself to the education of the Deaf in order that they could be converted to the Catholic faith, receive the sacrament, and avoid the flames of hell. He formed the first free school for the Deaf in the world, learning Old French Sign Language (as we now call it) from his pupils. In the classroom, he focused on methodical signs, or “Signed French,” which manually spells words through sign, because he thought it would be more useful in settings like courtrooms, and easier for translation for the hearing. French Sign Language nevertheless developed in his schools, in part as a result of the intermixture of various dialects of Old French Sign and in part as his students developed new signs for the new concepts (largely religious) that he introduced them to.

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