Words Made Flesh

by Edwards, R. A. R.

• ISBN13: 9780814722435
• ISBN10: 0814722431
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-03-26
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

During the early nineteenth century, schools for the deaf appeared in the United States for the first time. These schools were committed to the use of the sign language to educate deaf students. Manual education made the growth of the deaf community possible, for it gathered deaf people together in sizable numbers for the first time in American history. It also fueled the emergence of Deaf culture, as the schools became agents of cultural transformations. Just as the Deaf community began to be recognized as a minority culture, in the 1850s, a powerful movement arose to undo it, namely oral education. Advocates of oral education, deeply influenced by the writings of public school pioneer Horace Mann, argued that deaf students should stop signing and should start speaking in the hope that the Deaf community would be abandoned, and its language and culture would vanish. In this revisionist history,Words Made Fleshexplores the educational battles of the nineteenth century from both hearing and deaf points of view. It places the growth of the Deaf community at the heart of the story of deaf education and explains how the unexpected emergence of Deafness provoked the pedagogical battles that dominated the field of deaf education in the nineteenth century, and still reverberate today.

Author Biography

R. A. R. Edwards is an associate professor of history at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc: A Yale Man and a Deaf Man Open a School and Create a World	p. 11
Manual Education: An American Beginning	p. 33
Learning to Be Deaf: Lessons from the Residential School	p. 51
The Deaf Way: Living a Deaf Life	p. 89
Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe: The First American Oralists	p. 143
Languages of Signs: Methodical versus Natural	p. 161
The Fight over the Clarke School: Manualists and Oralists Confront Deafness	p. 183
Conclusion	p. 205
Notes	p. 211
Index	p. 249
About the Author	p. 255
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