Decoding Deaf Education Through the Ages

For most of history, reports Jonathan Ree, a professor of philosophy at Middlesex University in England, people who were born deaf in the Western world were treated “like animals, if not worse.” This was more than a matter of simple ignorance or cruelty. An instinctive identification of the human voice with the soul, a belief that speaking is a necessary part of thinking, also contributed. Those who couldn’t hear couldn’t speak; those who couldn’t speak were deemed incapable of abstract thought or a spiritual life--in short, subhuman.

In the 16th century, however, enterprising teachers proved that the deaf could speak. They were “mute” only insofar as they couldn’t imitate others’ speech; nothing was intrinsically wrong with their vocal apparatus. This first triumph of science over metaphysics led to others. Still, progress in the education of the deaf during the next four centuries (like the evolution of treatments for insanity, as described by Michel Foucault in “Madness and Civilization,” or for stuttering, by Benson Bobrick in “Knotted Tongues”) was agonizingly slow. Ree tries to explain why.

“The experience of the deaf at the hands of their educators has been like a vast philosophical experiment concerning the relations of voice, language and the senses,” he says. “A huge metaphysical battle broke out” between teachers who encouraged sign language and those who suppressed it in the interest of getting the deaf to speak aloud. Each side brought to the dispute not only ego and professional jealousy, but also assumptions about the primal authenticity of gestures, on one hand, and “a link between spoken language and human spirituality” on the other.

“Advocates of each approach managed to bring joy and enlightenment to a good number of deaf people,” Ree says, “but they also, on occasion, deprived the deaf of their childhoods, their friendships, their families and their cultures--perhaps even of any life worth living. Philanthropic goodwill was repeatedly subverted by bad science and metaphysical confusion.”

Not surprisingly, the heroes of the story are those who, now and then, were able to take a fresh look at the problem. In 18th century Paris, the Abbe de l’Epee, developing a system of signs to teach his students French, noticed that they already had their own sign language--and encouraged its use. Two centuries later, at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., William C. Stokoe drew on the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure (which showed that all languages, gestural or oral, are structured the same way) to do what had been considered impossible: Write signs down. The result was American Sign Language as we know it today.

Ree, however, isn’t too hard on those who got muddled and lost their way because “when our delusions are part of our habitual interpretation of ourselves, we can become as attached to them as to our finest truths.” Nor is the story of educating the deaf the only story he has to tell. “I See a Voice” is like a sandwich. The central narrative, which he calls a “history of science,” is preceded by a “history of metaphysics,” detailing the folk assumptions that produced the muddle, and followed by a “history of philosophy,” outlining the great thinkers’ contradictory views on the same topics.

Philosophy, Ree concedes, has fallen greatly from the all-embracing theories of Plato, Kant and Hegel to 20th century linguistic tinkering. He sees a middle role for it: A modest but persistent peeling away of the cultural cataracts that cloud our view of perennial human problems leads to bad science and blinds us to the baggage attached to our ideas of science itself. This lucid and often witty book is his way of showing us how this can be done.