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Uncommon Schools: Institutionalizing Deafness in Early-Nineteenth-Century America
- University of Michigan Press
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jane berger Uncommon Schools Institutionalizing Deafness in EarlyNineteenth -Century America In Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (1988), Carol Padden and Tom Humphries begin their exploration of the experiences of the contemporary Deaf community in the United States with a discussion of the way in which young Deaf children learn to assign meaning to the words deaf and hearing. One anecdote that the authors offer is particularly striking. A Deaf friend of ours, Howard, a prominent member in his community, made a revealing comment to a mixed audience of hearing and Deaf people . All members of his family—his parents and brother as well as aunts and uncles—are Deaf. He told the audience that he had spent his early childhood among Deaf people but that when he was six his world changed: his parents took him to a school for Deaf children. “Would you believe,” he said, pausing expertly for effect, “I never knew I was deaf until I ‹rst entered school?” (16–17) In Padden and Humphries’ discussion of Howard’s anecdote, they use the capitalized term Deaf and the lowercase term deaf to signify two distinct meanings of deafness. The capitalized term refers to the de‹nition of deafness that Howard learned before he entered school. As one of only a small minority of Deaf people who have Deaf family members, Howard learned at home that deafness was commonplace and certainly not cause for alarm: it simply re›ected membership in a larger American Sign Language–using community, many of whose members consider themselves part of a cultural and linguistic minority, rather than a disabled population. At school, however , Howard encountered an alternative way of understanding deafness that Padden and Humphries designate with the lowercase word deaf. He 153 became aware of what members of the Deaf community describe as the “pathological perspective” of deafness that posits deaf people as physically impaired by hearing loss, and thus in need of remediation and professional intervention (Kannapell 1991). This understanding of deafness differed radically from the one that Howard had taken to school with him and had shared with his peers. The Deaf/deaf convention originates in the late twentieth century, and I will not use it in this chapter to describe nineteenth-century deaf Americans . Nevertheless, Howard’s insights that “deafness” has multiple meanings and that schools (or, institutions as they were called in the nineteenth century) are sites of both production of, and contestation over, the meaning of deafness are central to the discussion of this chapter. My argument is designed in the following way: ‹rst, I describe the iterations of deafness that were created by institution founders, educators, and others who supported the schools. I show how these groups assigned to deafness an array of meanings that were signi‹cantly in›uenced by intellectual, cultural, and religious trends of their time, as well as by the spread of market relations and emerging articulations of state sovereignty and liberal individualism. Then, I trace the responses of deaf alumni to the meanings of deafness that they encountered in schools, responses that were shaped by the new antebellum ideas about deafness. My primary concern is to indicate how hearing and deaf Americans communicated meaning about deafness through the ways that they organized space, movement, and time. In Discipline and Punish (1977), Foucault argues that the organization of space, movement, and time in institutions such as prisons, hospitals, and schools has the effect of disciplining inmates, patients, and pupils. In schools, for example, classrooms are organized so that students face the teacher and, therefore, learn to control their behavior in compliance with rules. Furthermore, the routinization of students’ movements and time accustoms them to relinquishing control over their schedules and bodies. Foucault explains that this regime primes pupils for political obedience and economic utility. While institutional organization during the early nineteenth century had these disciplining effects on deaf students, it served an additional function. As I show in this chapter, disciplinary effects were also produced by the messages that institutional organization conveyed to deaf students about what it meant for them to be deaf. I make these claims about early institutions mindful that many scholars and members of the Deaf community consider the antebellum period to be the golden age in the history of deaf education. By 1860, there were twentythree residential schools for the deaf in the United States (Fay 1893). In the 154 Foucault and the Government of Disability [3.239.149.56] Project MUSE (2024-03...