A school was established in Edinburgh in 1760 by Thomas Braidwood, who taught by the oral method. He taught the sounds first, then syllables, and finally words, teaching their meaning. In 1783 Braidwood came to Hackney, whence he moved to Old Kent Road, and in 1809 there were seventy pupils in what was lately the Old Kent Road Institution. Braidwood’s method was practically a development of Wallis’s. We must regard him as the founder of the first public school for the deaf in England.
It was only at the beginning of the 19th century that a brighter day dawned on the deaf as a class. With the sole exception of de l’Epée no teacher had yet undertaken the instruction of a deaf child who could not pay for it. Now things began to be different. Institutions were founded, and their doors were opened to nearly all.
Dr Watson, the first principal of the Old Kent Road “Asylum,” taught by articulation and lip-reading, reading and writing, explaining by signs to some extent, but using pictures much more, according to Addison, and composing a book of these for the use of his pupils. From Addison (Deaf Mutism, pp. 248 ff.) we learn what developments followed. In Vienna, Prague and Berlin, schools had been founded in rapid succession before the 19th century dawned, and in 1810 the Edinburgh institution opened its doors. Nine years later the Glasgow school was established and, under the able guidance of Mr Duncan Anderson (after several other headmasters had been tried) from 1831, taught pupils whose grasp of English was equal to that of the very best educated deaf in England to-day, as has been proved by conversation with the survivors. Mr Anderson’s great aim was to teach his pupils language, and we might look almost in vain for a teacher in England to succeed as well with a whole class in the beginning of the 20th century as he did in the middle of the 19th. He wrote a dictionary, used pictures and signs to explain English, and apparently paid little or no attention to most of the numerous subjects attempted to-day in schools for the deaf, which, while excellent in themselves, generally exclude what is far more important from the curriculum.
Addison further mentions Mr Baker of Doncaster, a contemporary of Anderson, as having compiled many lesson books for deaf children which came to be used in ordinary schools also, and Mr Scott of Exeter as having, together with Baker, “exercised a profound influence on the course of deaf-mute education in this country.” “Written language,” explained by signs where necessary, was the watchword of these teachers.
Moritz Hill is credited with being principally responsible for having evolved the German, or “pure,” oral method out of the experimental stage to that at which it has arrived at the present day. Arnold of Riehen is also honourably mentioned.
The great “oral revival” now swept all before it. The German method was enthusiastically welcomed in all parts of Europe, and at the Milan conference in 1880 was almost unanimously adopted by teachers from all countries. Those in high places countenanced it; educational authorities awoke to the fact that the deaf needed special teaching, and came to the conclusion that the “pure” oral method was the panacea that would restore all the deaf to a complete equality with the hearing in any conversation upon any subject that might be broached; many governments suddenly took the deaf under the shelter of their own ample wings, and the “bottomless pocket of the ratepayer,” instead of the purse of the charitable, became in many cases the fount of supply for what has been a costly and by no means entirely satisfactory experiment in the history of their education. The “pure” oral method has had a long and unique trial in England in circumstances which other methods have never enjoyed.
Meanwhile in the United States Dr Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was elected in 1815 to go to Europe to inquire into the methods of educating the deaf in vogue there. This was at a meeting held in the house of a physician named Cogswell, in Hartford, Connecticut, and was the result of the latter’s discovery that eighty-four persons in the state besides his own little girl were deaf. Henry Winter Syle, himself deaf, tells how “four months were spent in learning that the doors of the British schools were ‘barred with gold, and opened but to golden keys,’” and how, disappointed in England, Gallaudet met with a ready response to his inquiries in Paris. With Laurent Clerc, a deaf teacher, he returned to the United States in 1816, and the “Connecticut Asylum” was founded a year after with seven pupils. The name was changed to “The American Asylum” later, when it was enlarged. This was followed by the Pennsylvania, New York and Kentucky institutions, with the second of which the Peet family were connected. Dr Gallaudet married one of his deaf pupils, Sophia Fowler, and, after a very happy married life, Mrs Gallaudet accompanied her youngest son, Edward Miner Gallaudet, to the Columbia institution for the Deaf and Dumb, Washington, D.C., founded in 1857 by Congress and largely supported by Amos Kendall, and to the National Deaf Mute College, which was founded in 1864, was renamed the Gallaudet College, in honour of Dr T. H. Gallaudet, in 1893, and with the Kendall School (secondary), now forms the Columbia Institution. This college is supported by Congress.
The following account of the work done at the National Deaf-Mute College at Washington is worth attention, as the results are unique, and are often strangely ignored.
Here is a statement of the course for the B.A. degree:—
First year: Algebra, grammar, punctuation, history of England, composition, Latin grammar, Caesar.