On the face of it, people are quite afraid of human diversity and look to their social institutions to limit or eradicate it. As a psychologist I am interested in learning more about that fear, and as a psychologist of language, more about the role of language policy in catering to it. The history of relations between the society of hearing-speaking people and the community of deaf-signing people is an excellent case study in the motives and means at work when fear of diversity leads majorities to oppress minorities. The attempt to force assimilation, to claim biological insufficiency when assimilation fails, to indoctrinate minority children in majority values through the schools—all this and much more will be familiar to readers interested in the predicament of other minority communities. In short, When the Mind Hears is a study in the anatomy of prejudice.
The hearing loss of most members of the signing community has proven disastrous for them because it has played into the hands of those who seek to dispose of social problems by medicalizing them. The two million or so men and women who use manual language in the United States are not handicapped in the usual sense; theirs is largely a problem of overcoming language barriers, not a problem of disability. So say my deaf friends, and the evidence bears them out. Then why do we hearing people consider the deaf disabled, defective? Why do we and our institutions class them not with groups such as Spanish-speaking Americans but with groups such as blind Americans? Why indeed?
Using the medical model, our society is irresponsibly tearing many deaf children from the social fabric of the signing community in which their lives are interwoven and casting them willy-nilly into “mainstream” schools, as if pretending that they spoke would make it so. Some hearing educators reply that proximity is the first step in integration, and integration—making others like ourselves—is a self-evident good. When no provision is made in “mainstreaming” for the language barrier, however, this proximity proves, in the words of a deaf educator, as productive as that between a dog and its fleas. The mainstreaming movement is proceeding with near total disregard of the wishes of the signing community, which has always been at odds with its hearing benefactors—otologists, audiologists, speech pathologists, special educators. As long as this establishment clings to the medical model, it cannot take the next step forward with the signing community, which is to supplant that model.
Thus it has become necessary for a student of language to tell the history of the deaf minority; hearing students of the deaf have been proceeding on the premise that there is no minority and hence no minority history to tell. Until recently, no deaf person had written a history of the deaf community either—bitter testimony to the effectiveness of the establishment in inculcating the medical model of deafness in deaf children.*
I expect there are many people, hearing and deaf, particularly outside the signing community, who will find my interpretation of the record unpalatable. Some reject the view that the signing community is foremost a linguistic minority; others contend that the first priority of minorities, sign-language, spoken-language, or otherwise, should be assimilation. The proper relations between a minority and the society in which it is embedded are generally the subject of heated dispute, and the proper relation between the signing community and hearing society has been the subject of an impassioned debate for over two hundred years. These readers and others with strongly held views at odds with those of this history may be tempted to dismiss the history for its strongly held views, preferring what they would choose to call a more impartial account, a statement of the hard facts.
A history cannot be written, however, without a point of view. Nor even, if that were possible, should it be. A history is bound to be an interpretation because, for one thing, it makes selections at every turn among an infinity of facts. It defines its domain, excluding some periods, nations, individuals, including others. Within the domain, the documentation is incomplete, and of those facts well documented the historian will cite some and not others, according to their significance. That is, the historian has a vantage point and he will arrange and subordinate his selected facts and describe them in a way that allows him to develop his interpretation.
Thus the history of a language community has some things in common with a grammar of that community’s language. Both are theories that attempt to account in insightful ways for a selection of facts, a selection motivated by the nature of the theory itself. There can be many histories of the signing community as there can be many grammars of American Sign Language, and we can choose among them. Theories are, of course, social artifacts, and the same cultural forces that so long delayed the linguistic description of American Sign Language have also delayed the history of the community that uses it. Just as hearing people assumed, and taught the deaf, that the deaf community had no language of its own but at best a manual variant of spoken language, so they assumed, and taught the deaf, that they had no history in their own right but only at best a chapter in hearing history (generally entitled “Educating the Deaf”).
Even if we could write history as documentation, we should not. If there is truth to Hegel’s claim that “people and governments have never learned anything from history,” this should motivate the historian who wants to have an impact on human affairs, as I do, to write in a way that commands general attention. If his subject, moreover, turns on sustained outrages against fundamental human values, as mine does, is he to deny his humanity and pretend indifference?
Since a history, then, must have a point of view and should have a point of view, the reader might like to have mine clearly posted, as follows. With the recent evidence from linguistics that American Sign Language is a natural language, the signing community is revealed to be a linguistic minority, and this history interprets the record of their struggle in that light.
The one hundred fifty years from the founding of the education of the signing community to the abandonment of that minority education—from mid-Enlightenment to 1900—seemed to me a coherent interval (to use Barbara Tuchman’s term) to study. In fact, nothing fundamental has changed in these matters since 1900 in most of the Western world, although there have been some recent stirrings here and there.* Furthermore, I have chosen to examine that interval, during which use of the language of the deaf made possible their education, from the vantage point and in the person of the central figure in the history of the deaf, Laurent Clerc.
When the distinguished chairman of the drama department at Gallaudet College, Gil Eastman, and I wished to present, to a symposium of the National Association of the Deaf, a brief historical sketch of the American deaf community (in English and American Sign Language concurrently), we began: “My name is Laurent Clerc”; and so I begin here. Clerc was the intellectual leader of the French and then the American deaf communities; he knew most of the important figures in my “coherent interval” personally or at one remove and he was the prime mover in that history. To learn what Clerc’s experiences and views were I consulted his published articles, addresses, diary, and autobiographical sketch, his book with Jean Massieu, the Clerc Papers at Yale University, the Gallaudet Papers at the Library of Congress, and numerous documents by others describing or quoting his opinions. Often I have been able to let Clerc speak for himself by taking sentences and paragraphs from these various sources (identified in the notes). When that was not possible, the views of Clerc’s contemporaries served as my guide (where there was no reason to believe Clerc would have seen things otherwise). Where the facts are known, I have remained faithful to the facts, and I have indicated in the notes when I was obliged to give rein to my imagination.*
I have dared to speak in Clerc’s name in order to present the views of the deaf themselves as clearly and cogently as possible. What are those views? They are stated throughout this history but epitomized by the words of Robert P. McGregor, deaf orator, writer, school principal, and first president of the National Association of the Deaf:
“By whom, then, are signs proscribed? By a few educators of the deaf whose boast is that they do not understand signs and do not want to; by a few philanthropists who are otherwise ignorant of the language; by parents who do not understand the requisites to the happiness of their deaf children and are inspired with false fears by the educators and philanthropists.
“These few have banded together and, backed up by unlimited wealth, send forth men and women who travel all over the country from Maine to California the year round, insidiously creating and fostering everywhere a false, a forced, an artificial sentiment against signs. They also have access to the public press and, making use of impecunious and sensational writers, seek to make what is old appear new and convince the uninitiated that what is white is black. And worst of all they ignore the deaf themselves in their senseless and mischievous propaganda against signs. Professing to have no object in view but the benefit of the deaf, they exhibit an utter contempt for the opinions, the wishes, the desires of the deaf!
“And why should we not be consulted in a matter of such vital interest to us? This is a question that no man has yet answered satisfactorily.
“The utmost extreme to which tyranny can go when its mailed hand descends upon a conquered people is the proscription of their national language, and with the utmost rigor several generations are required to eradicate it. But all the attempts to suppress signs, wherever tried, have most signally failed. After a hundred years of proscription in Germany and Austria, they still flourish, and will continue to flourish to the end of time.
“What heinous crime have the deaf been guilty of that their language should be proscribed?”
*The National Association of the Deaf has published Deaf Heritage: A Narrative History of Deaf America, by Jack R. Gannon.
*See chapter 11 and my Recent Perspectives on American Sign Language (with François Grosjean; Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1980).
*As in psychological research, the evidence marshaled by my theoretical perspective is open to independent inspection. Some 1, 200 reference notes give the sources for specific facts and claims; the 2, 000-odd sources are listed in the bibliography; and the appended guide (a counterpart to the method section of a psychological study) will aid the student of deaf history in gaining access to these sources among others.