A review of A Silent
Minority: Deaf
Education in Spain,
1550-1835, by
Susan Plann.
Berkeley: University
of California Press,
1997. 323 pages,
$40.
Reviewed by Robert
Lee Williams
Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do
it again and again and again? Have we no
choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending
sequence of rise and fall? . . . Spain, France,
Britain, America—burned into the oblivion of
the centuries. And again and again and again.
Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the
pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless
to halt its swing?
—A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller,
Jr.
Susan Plann's remarkable book, A Silent
Minority: Deaf Education in Spain, 1550-1835,
is an education in itself. It is a scholarly and
yet wonderfully readable book that details the
true beginnings of deaf education. Those of
you hoping to see how the discussions related
to deaf education we are engaged in now are
so much more advanced since the Middle Ages
are in for a disappointment. It's all here:
manualism vs. oralism, natural languages vs.
manually coded languages, even an early
version of Cued Speech and myriad examples
of hearing people who "know what's best for
deaf people," 400 years ago.
The serpentine history of deaf education begins
at the monastery at San Salvador at Ona in
Spain where the Benedictine monk Pedro Ponce
de León has agreed to begin tutoring two deaf
brothers, Francisco and Pedro Fernandez de
Velasco y Tovar. It was common at that time
for deaf children of privilege to be sent off to
monasteries as a family's way of hiding its
"defective" children. Plann's narrative
interweaves Spanish history with the history of
deaf education, showing the broad picture
without losing sight of the important and
sometimes fascinating individuals who bring
history to life. In one part she talks about how
a teacher of deaf children is sentenced to death
for being a traitor during the Spanish war of
independence with France. In another we learn
of the time in 1835 when deaf students, fed up
with the miserable quality of education they
were receiving, took matters into their own
hands and brought some gunpowder and a
small brass cannon with them to class.
In reading about the early education of deaf
people, it is easy to be derisive regarding the
outlandish techniques and antiquated theories
used to teach deaf people long ago--the use of
a "leather tongue" to teach articulation, the
steam cleaning of deaf people's ears in an
attempt to cure deafness, or the practice of
carrying around a fruit pit in one's mouth to
help "loosen the ligaments" and improve
speech. At the same time, one must remember
that these people were a product of their time,
and Plann clearly traces the evolution of
thought in understanding deafness. The change
from a belief that deafness was a curse from
God to the notion that deafness was merely a
physical defect to the idea that deaf people
could actually have their own productive lives
and culture is chronicled over a period of
almost three centuries.
During the early times, many scholars believed
that speech was an indication of the soul and if
one had no speech, one had no soul. People
later believed that speech was the source of
reason and without speech one could have no
thought. For this reason, an enormous amount
of energy was spent trying to teach deaf people
to talk. As one might expect, there was a
strong belief on the part of some that allowing
children to use sign language would interfere
with their learning to speak, but over the years
more and more educators turned to using sign
language as a mode of instruction. Some used
manually coded versions, while others availed
themselves of the natural language that deaf
people brought with them to school.
The whole discussion of the relationship
between language and thought governed deaf
education for centuries. The old saying, "Speak
that I might see thee," is a classic example of
the misguided notion that a person's worth is
gauged by the quality of his or her speech.
People of the time would have been better
served if they had known of the admonition
from Chuang Tzu: "Words exist for meaning.
Once you have the meaning, you no longer
need the words. Where is a man who has
forgotten words so that I may have a word
with him?"
This book is also a sad depiction of how
although deaf education began in Spain, it
virtually disappeared from that country for
many years. In fact, teachers from Europe
co-opted De León's methods to such an extent
that for a long time most people believed that
deaf education had its beginnings in France,
not Spain. This wonderful culture, once the
very wellspring of deaf education, is only today
coming to grips with the needs, rights, and
future of deaf people.
Robert Lee Williams, Ph.D., is a professor of
psychology at Gallaudet University and former
dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
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