Manualism, Philosophy and Models of

Manualism refers to the educational philosophy for the Deaf that grew out of 19th century Western discourse that prioritized the use of gesture, fingerspelling, and signs over the practice of teaching deaf students speech and lipreading. Manualists understood the power of deaf people’s sensory orientation and realized that the visual nature of manual communication was both more natural and more easily accessible to them.While some oralists did not object to the use of writing or manual alphabets as a means to teach speech, manualists asserted the capacity of sign language to be a sufficient and even more natural means of communicating ideas and effectively capable of expressing abstract thoughts than any spoken language.

While oralism became dominant in latter half of the 19th century, the spread of manualism predates it. Historically, manualism has its roots in the Romantic period, which is generally understood as the late eighteenth to the mid-19th century. To an extent, this period was a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, both of which emphasized science and reason. Instead, the Romantic turn titled its attention to the emotion, nature, and aesthetics. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Étienne de Condillac both thinkers of this time period, had significant impact in education discussed the human capacity for language. They recognized that language—the communication of ideas—could be expressed in two different modalities, either by voice or by movement. They also acknowledge that both spoken and manual languages are equally natural languages and they both have their strengths in terms of what sorts of ideas they are equipped to express. Manualism rose in [Page 674]popularity during this period insofar as it appealed to the attention toward aesthetics and visual imagery. It became clear that manual languages are capable to communicating ideas in ways that spoken language cannot insofar as it plays on the human body and iconic images. The decline of Romanticism saw the spread of nationalism, which effectively laid the groundwork for oralism to become the dominant education method for the deaf.

Frenchman Abbé de l’Épée is widely regarded as the first public advocate of manualism. Effectively, he created an artificial system of signs known as Methodical Signs. As the story goes, he picked up signs from two deaf pupils; unaware of its internal structure, he imposed written French grammar on their signs in an attempt to systematize signs. Integral to de l’Épée was the use of signs in order to convey thoughts and allow deaf students to express ideas. However, he was not cognizant of the fact that there was already a systematized sign language in place in the Parisian Deaf community. Pierre Desloges, the first Deaf published writer, made this reality apparent in “A Deaf Person’s Observations about An Elementary Course of Education for the Deaf” in 1779 which he comments on the universal qualities that sign language has. For him, it is a grave misstep for humankind to relegate manual communication to the margins when it is capable of expressing thoughts and emotions in ways that spoken language is incapable.

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