In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Fall 1985 WILL IT EVER? A Review of When the Mind Hears by Harlan Lane David F. Armstrong The rise and fall Admirers of Harlan Lane's earlier of signing schools. work dealing with the history of deaf education (The Wild Boy of Aveyron, 1976) will not be disappointed by this attempt to capture the lives and times of Laurent Clerc, T. H. and E. M. Gallaudet, and A. G. Bell. First a word about the title. It comes from a translation of a lovely quotation attributed to Victor Hugo and directed to Ferdinand Berthier, the great deaf teacher of the deaf: What matters deafness of the ear, when the mind hears? The one true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind. I present the full quotation here because it aptly expresses the humanitarian spirit that informs the entire book. The book is about the struggle of deaf people to educate their minds in the ways that they find most efficacious, and about the (apparently incurable) mind deafness of hearing people who have refused to listen to their side of the story. The book is divided into two major sections. The first, comprising more than three-fourths of the text, is presented as an autobiography of Clerc (well timed to coincide with the bicentennial of Clerc's birth); the second is told from the point of view of Lane himself. 1985 by Linstok Press, Inc. See inside front cover. ISSN 0302-1475 SLS 48 Review, DFA : 224 There is also an extensive bibliography of material related to the history of deaf education that will prove useful for years to come to the students of this subject. The book warrants serious consideration from two distinct points of view: first as literature; second as scholarship. I will consider it first from what I feel is its strongest aspect, the literary one. Lane is extremely successful in presenting Clerc's point of view and brings several important qualifications to his work -- considerable knowledge of the French language and the literature in that language on the history of deaf education as well as experience in basic research on the psycholinguistics of American Sign Language. The writing is uniformly excellent and at some points quite moving, as in the section recounting the deaths of Alice and Mason Cogswell. At this point I must express one major disappointment: this book was not written by a deaf person. Lane rightly acknowledges that this is a problem and lays the blame at the feet of hearing "benefactors" of the deaf, who have refused to view them as a distinct social group but insist that they are a defective group within the larger hearing society: 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. (p. xiv) Here Lane refers to the publication in 1981 of Deaf Heritage: A Narrative History of Deaf America by Jack R. Fall 1985 SLS 48 Review, DFA : 225 Gannon, a deaf administrator at Gallaudet College. I will return at several points to Gannon's book because I think it provides interesting counterpoint to Lane's. I intend to proceed with this review by first presenting a synopsis of Lane's major arguments, followed by some initial comments on those arguments. In the first section of the book, Lane weaves the facts and events of Clerc's life into the fabric of the evolving system of deaf education in France during the early years of the nineteenth century. There is a description of the accident that led to Clerc's deafness in early childhood and the circumstances that brought him at the age of twelve to Jean Massieu at the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes on the rue St. Jacques in Paris. Clerc at this point receives his first introduction to instruction through the media of sign language and...

pdf