During the early nineteenth century, schools for the deaf appeared in
the United States for the first time. These schools were committed to
the use of the sign language to educate deaf students. Manual education
made the growth of the deaf community possible, for it gathered deaf
people together in sizable numbers for the first time in American
history. It also fueled the emergence of Deaf culture, as the schools
became agents of cultural transformations.
Just as the Deaf community began to be recognized as a minority culture,
in the 1850s, a powerful movement arose to undo it, namely oral
education. Advocates of oral education, deeply influenced by the
writings of public school pioneer Horace Mann, argued that deaf students
should stop signing and should start speaking in the hope that the Deaf
community would be abandoned, and its language and culture would vanish.
In this revisionist history, Words Made Flesh explores the educational
battles of the nineteenth century from both hearing and deaf points of
view. It places the growth of the Deaf community at the heart of the
story of deaf education and explains how the unexpected emergence of
Deafness provoked the pedagogical battles that dominated the field of
deaf education in the nineteenth century, and still reverberate today.