Advances in Cognition, Education, and Deafness

Introduction

Introduction David S. Martin The Roman god Janus had two faces; he could look both backward and forward. His name is the root word for January, a connection with our impulse to look back on the past and forward to the future when the new year arrives. As we begin the 1990s, it is appropriate that we look back and forward in the same way. We need to see how our views of the deaf learner's cognitive achievement and potential have changed, not over just one year but throughout history, and we need to look at where the field of cognition and deafness may be headed. Moores (1982), in a review of deafness in history, indicated that the attitudes of persons in the ancient world toward handicapped people were ambivalent. While the ancient Jews showed charity toward deaf people, the book of Leviticus in the Old Testament admonishes against cursing the deaf, suggesting that at least some people were acting negatively toward handicapped persons. We also know that the legal rights of deaf people were limited in some of the same ways as those of helpless and mentally retarded persons. Because of the high value placed on the spoken word throughout ancient history, little improvement is seen in attempts to educate deaf children when one looks at ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and then ancient Rome. The Romans appear to have been more harsh and cruel towards deaf people than either the Egyptians or the Greeks (Moores 1982). The interaction between language and thought has been and continues to be a topic of great interest and debate. In the ancient world, the Greek philosophers believed that spoken words were the necessary means by which a person conceived thought. Aristotle designated the ear as the organ of instruction and believed that 3 4 Introduction hearing was the greatest contributor to intelligence; consequently, he has been accused of keeping the deaf in ignorance for two thousand years (Deland 1931). A number of important events occurred in Europe more than 350 years ago which, in retrospect, can be considered the start of the first revolution in deafness. Two events in this revolution stand out. First, it was established that in spite of the inability to hear, deaf persons could, depending on the nature of their hearing loss and the application of the appropriate educational technique, learn to articulate and speak with varying degrees of intelligibility. Although we know today that there is no relationship between speech articulation ability and thinking ability, the discovery of this speech articulation potential served to change the attitudes of some hearing people toward deaf persons' intellectual potential. At the same time, a breakthrough was underway in the recognition and development of the language of signs-communication through movements of the hands and body. These two developments, pioneered simultaneously in Spain (by Pedro Ponce de Leone and Juan Pablo Bonet), France (by Charles Michel Abbe de l'Epee), Germany (by Samuel Heinicke), Italy (by Girolamo Cardano), and later in England (by George Dalgarno), demonstrated for the first time that deaf people were not retarded and were capable of intelligent thought and communication. The debate over thought and language was still going on in the nineteenth century. William James (1890) and both Binet and Simon (1910) took the position that thought developed before language in deaf persons; James reported abstract and metaphysical concepts in two deaf persons even when pantomime was the only language used (Moores 1982). On the other hand, Booth (1878) took the position that thought was independent of the mode of expression, and said that thought and language were separate processes, allowing a person to use one or the other alone. In 1924-1925, the National Research Council reported that deaf subjects were between two and three years "retarded" in comparison to hearing subjects in their responses to the Pintner Non-Language Mental Test (Myklebust & Brutton 1953). Pintner and others reviewed the available information on the intelligence of deaf persons and, in spite of sometimes contradictory results, concluded that deaf children had inferior intelligence (Pintner, Eisenson & Stanton 1941). The work of Myklebust has been generally cited as another milestone in the history of research in deafness and attitudes toward the deaf population. His studies attributed a "concrete" nature to the intelligence of deaf persons, indicating that deafness restricts the deaf learner to a world of "concrete objects and things" (Myklebust & Brutton 1953). The influence of this attribution has been far-reaching in that educators of deaf children...