The Deaf History Reader

6. The Academic Integration of Deaf Children: A Historical Perspective

6 The Academic Integration of Deaf Children: A Historical Perspective John Vickrey Van Cleve Editor’s Introduction The following essay argues that deaf adults historically have opposed the mainstreaming of deaf children in public schools, and yet hearing parents, school administrators, and politicians have successfully lobbied for mainstream programs, ignoring the collective voice of the American deaf community . Detailed historical examination of the development of coeducation for deaf and hearing students leads to several conclusions about it. First, mainstreaming has a long history in the United States. By 1920, twice as many deaf children were mainstreamed in the state of Wisconsin, for example , than attended the state residential school. Second, a consistent reason for mainstreaming’s popularity is that it is seen as being cheaper than the residential school alternative. Finally, mainstreaming also has been driven by strong ideological beliefs. Among these are the propositions that putting deaf children in public schools serves society by encouraging cultural homogeneity , by strengthening parent-children relationships, and by stressing the overall goal of “normality” for deaf children. Theoretically considered,” Alexander Graham Bell wrote in 1905, “the best school for a deaf child, is a school with only one deaf child in it . . . one deaf child with an environment of hearing children.”1 Bell was not alone in this belief. Attempts to separate deaf children from each other 116 Originally published in Renate Fischer and Harlan Lane, eds, Looking Back: A Reader on the History of Deaf Communities and Their Sign Languages (Hamburg, Germany: Signum, 1993). “ and integrate them with hearing children during their school years have formed a consistent theme in the history of deaf education. Within 50 years of the first public attempts to educate deaf children, schools in various German-speaking European states were endeavoring to educate together deaf and hearing children.2 By the end of the 20th century, support for academic integration— termed “mainstreaming” in the United States—was nearly ubiquitous.3 In 1990 almost three-fourths of all deaf school children in the United States, for example, attended classes in an integrated setting. The numbers for the state of Illinois are illustrative: in 1990, 1200 deaf students were enrolled in Chicago’s public schools, but only 270 attended the state residential institution.4 Even American state-supported residential schools, such as Illinois’, however, are so overwhelmed by the ideological and political imperatives of deaf-hearing coeducation that nearly all offer mainstreaming programs for their students.5 Yet, ironically, the benefits of academic integration have been and remain a chimera. The first major study of such attempts made this point unequivocally. Joseph C. Gordon, a professor at the National Deaf-Mute College (today’s Gallaudet University) and later superintendent of the Illinois School for the Deaf, carefully reviewed the literature related to German, French, and English endeavors to co-educate deaf and hearing children. In 1884 and 1885 he reported his findings. Gordon discovered that European parents, educators, philanthropists, and government officials in the early 19th century all “advocated the education of the deaf in more or less intimate connection with the public schools.” Almost no one defended residential institutions that segregated deaf from hearing students.6 Nevertheless, Gordon concluded, “disappointment and failure” of coeducation programs were so uniform that “systematic and organized efforts in this direction [were] abandoned” in Europe by the mid-1880’s.7 Gordon’s study was well-known in the United States. He presented it orally at an unusual session of the convention of the National Education Association (NEA) in 1884. The following year he published an extended version in the American Annals of the Deaf, at that time an authoritative and widely-read journal. Gordon, moreover, was an intimate of Bell, the most articulate and forceful American proponent of academic integration. Bell was at the NEA convention; yet neither he nor anyone else ever tried to refute Gordon’s findings directly, choosing to ignore European experience and the conclusions Gordon drew from it. There is no evidence that Deaf people themselves have advocated coeducation with hearing children, either. To the contrary, those who have articulated a position have nearly always supported separate educational facilities for deaf children.8 Academic Integration of Deaf Children 117 The following account places this seemingly paradoxical situation— the unremitting pursuit of the academic integration of deaf and hearing children despite abundant evidence of its failure as an educational model—into historical perspective by examining closely the...