Damned for Their Difference: The Cultural Construction of Deaf People as Disabled

5. The "Great Confinement" of Deaf People through Education in the Nineteenth Century

5 The “Great Confinement” of Deaf People through Education in the Nineteenth Century [W]e have the historical testimony of the British schools, forcibly summed up by Professor Baker, as follows, in correcting an error into which I had fallen: “You are wrong,” says he, “in considering the English system as being based on articulation. I will go further, and state that, as a system, it never was based on articulation . . . “. . . In the earliest days of the institution at Birmingham . . . articulation was the exception . . . at present in [the London institution] . . . articulation is by no means the exclusive vehicle of instruction. . . . “At . . . Edinburgh, . . . articulation . . . early gave way to means more universally applicable. Of the other institutions in these isles, (about twenty,) not one has adopted articulation, except in the cases of those pupils who could hear a little, or who had become deaf after they had acquired speech.” —Edward Miner Gallaudet quoting Charles Baker (Gallaudet 1867, 49–50) The nineteenth century was a time of radical educational change throughout the Western world and its colonies. The education of the masses and not of only the privileged few became an essential ideological 121 practice as a democratic polity asserted its control over the coordination of newly industrialized economies. Here were the beginnings of those normalizing strategies that we discussed in part one. To quote Foucault, the school, like other disciplinary institutions . . . traces the limit that will define difference in relation to all other differences , the external frontier of the abnormal. . . .The perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes. (Foucault 1979, 183) Through the nineteenth century, the practice to contain children who were poor and deaf in asylums for the purpose of their education was even more complex as an ideological practice because, although it was overtly oriented toward normalization, this containment was designed in ways that, like the special schools discussed in chapter 2, never allowed for complete normalization. Rather, through apparent normalizing strategies, it ensured the opposite—the ongoing cultural construction of deaf people as “the pathological,” as “disabled.” The expansion or rapid development of schools for the deaf, which were usually referred to as “asylums” or “institutions,” radically transformed the general orientation toward deaf people and toward their treatment. Unlike the children of wealthy parents, the children of poor parents were dependent and vulnerable. Their bodies and souls were free game. To varying degrees depending on the national, religious, and cultural context, missionaries and surgeons became as much a part of their education as the teachers themselves. In the process, their otherness was culturally constructed in tune with the dominant ideologies of the nineteenth century. Ideological commitment to reason; to scientism; to the imperial domination of those deemed less “civilized,” less human, abnormal; and to the achievement of social honor through the performance of good works all influenced the lives of deaf people. In this chapter, we examine the philosophical and pedagogical developments that took place in the education of people who were deaf through the nineteenth century. Initially, we will examine the way the large-scale, institutionalized education of deaf people developed in Britain and America. In the previous chapter, we have already commented on events in France. Although equally important developments occurred throughout the rest of Europe and beyond, the case studies described here lay the ground for understanding the way relatively idio122 a sociological history of discrimination syncratic national developments in the first half of the nineteenth century gave way, by the end of the century, to relative uniformity throughout the Western world. These national developments were not independent of one another but, rather, were formed and transformed in response not only to national pressures but also to international pressures. In the process, we will also question many of the interpretations of the history of deaf education that have become virtually sacred writ in the field of deaf studies: interpretations about manualism and oralism, the so-called English System, the Milan Congress, the combined system, and the varied use of signing. The French and American stories have been told many times, but the British story tends to have been caricatured because of scant research. Basing her conclusions on available secondary sources, Crickmore states that “by the mid-19th century, in Britain, the oral German method had been almost totally overcome by the use of the manual...