Oralism, Philosophy and Models of

Oralism refers to the educational philosophy for the deaf that insisted on the use of the oral method. The oral method, in its purest form, rejected any use of gestures, fingerspelling, or sign language in favor of teaching deaf students speech and lipreading. The intention then was to prevent any manual communication either between teachers and students, and perhaps more importantly between students themselves. In effect, deaf teachers were largely replaced by hearing ones under the guise of oralism since deaf teachers were deemed ineffectual at teaching proper articulation, and the number of deaf teachers dwindled significantly during the period of oralism. The staunchest advocates of the oral method believed that the practice of using speech and lipreading ought to be pursued by deaf students in and out of the classroom. Otherwise, they believed that deaf students would use sign language as a crutch.

Historically, the emergence of the oral method did not arise spontaneously during the 19th century. Education for the deaf has been documented at least since 16th century Spain with Pedro Ponce DeLeón as a private tutor for Spanish deaf noble children. There tended to be high rates, which resulted in increased numbers of deaf children among the nobility. At the time, Spanish law necessitated that a person be able to speak if he or she would inherit or pass on the family’s inheritance. For monetary reasons, the oral method was used here to teach deaf children in order that they continue their family’s legacy.

The oral method did not maintain popularity throughout time, but sustained ups and downs as ideological currents shifted. Oralism then signifies a period in history in which the most effective method of educating the deaf was deeply contested. While remnants of the oral method remain within deaf education today, the concept of oralism is a specific pedagogical movement that reached its height in the West during the late 19th and 20th centuries. The oralist movement is most commonly marked by the Second International Congress on the Education of the Deaf in Milan, Italy, in 1880. The 164 delegates, one of whom was deaf, ultimately resolved that the oral method ought to be used for the instruction of the deaf in contrast to either manualism or the combined method. The foundations of their conclusions were derived largely from the ideological underpinnings of this historical moment in the West. The United States was gripped with notions of normalcy and progress that fed into the success of oralists over manualists. It is this discourse that had begun to sweep the United States in the 1840s, while the Congress in Milan acts as a symbol of oralism’s becoming the dominant educational method in the West for the following century.

Oralists’ perception of sign language and manual communication, more broadly, was such that they believed it to be an insufficient method to teach or express abstract thoughts in the way they understood spoken language to be capable. Moreover, they advocated that the use of signs would interfere with deaf people’s acquisition of the dominant spoken language.

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