Deaf Identity and Social Images in Nineteenth-Century France

C H A P T E R 4

68 C H A P T E R 4 5 The Varieties of Deaf Education, 1830 to 1900 We can say, without exaggeration, that instruction produces a true moral redemption on incomplete beings; an educated deaf person is one more man capable of functioning in society.1 In 1846, Laurent Clerc, who had once studied at the Paris Deaf Institute and then became one of its remarkable teachers, made a trip to France and England. Clerc was now in his early sixties and had lived in the United States for thirty years. His younger son accompanied him on the trip, some twenty-two days aboard ship from New York to Le Havre. Clerc hoped to leave his son with some family members in Lyon for several years to improve his use of French and also to place him in a special school where he could learn about silk manufacturing.2 Meanwhile, Clerc wanted to visit different schools for deaf children in France and England to study the situation and progress of deaf education. In some ways, primary schooling for deaf youth in France had modestly improved since Clerc’s departure for America in 1816. There were definitely more schools for deaf children, and some government officials and social critics were giving more attention to their economic plight.3 However, deaf children remained under the control of the Ministry of the Interior, not the Ministry of Public Instruction, which was gradually expanding its reach in policy and pedagogy among the country’s primary schools.4 Not surprisingly, it was difficult for deaf schools to escape the association with philanthropy and hospice care. The cultural images of deaf people were so powerful that the hearing community was constantly preoccupied with how the untamed deaf child could be made to learn obedience and discipline.5 Though education for hearing children became embroiled in the controversy over religious versus secular control of public education during the nineteenth century,6 deaf education was more improvised and, for a time, less regulated. The schools for deaf children used a variety of methods for both teaching and communicating. However, the fascination with oralist pedagogy, which began during the early nineteenth century , grew with each passing decade, so that by 1880, authorities in France completely eliminated sign language in all schools for deaf children in France.7 A Network of Schools for Deaf Children In 1833, the French government passed an education law named after its incumbent education minister, François Guizot, which required each commune (administrative district) in France to set up its own primary school for boys.8 Along with that requirement, the government became interested in teacher training and producing a constant flow of schoolteachers for the countryside.9 The Guizot Law was a turning point in French educational history, for it defined the government’s role in the education of its citizens. That public role would only grow stronger by the end of the nineteenth century, as the national government committed more funds to public instruction and its teacher corps. One estimate for the period 1837 to 1907 indicates that the French national government expenditure on elementary education increased twenty-five fold, compared with the overall national budget growth of four times for the same period.10 Through the early 1870s, the main goal for the national government was the creation of a universal system of public primary education that would reach all school-age children in France. With the formation of the Third Republic after 1870, the national government became more interested in the professional training of its male and female teachers , and in the condition of its school facilities. In all domains, the national government consistently spent more on programs that, in turn, encouraged more centralization of elementary schooling.11 Though the national government increasingly became the key benefactor for primary The Varieties of Deaf Education 69 education, especially with the Third Republic, the initial interest in making education available to the average French child was a local activity. In that local experience, religious orders played an important role, especially from the 1830s through 1860s, to spur growth in primary schooling . Priests and nuns traveled to far away places to evangelize; instruct in reading, writing, and calculating; and draw new recruits to their orders.12 How did schools for deaf children fit into this larger pattern of universal education in France? In some basic ways, the...