SEEING VOICES
A Journey into the World Of the Deaf
Oliver Sacks
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989
171 pp., $15.95
By coincidence, Oliver Sacks' book about the revolution, or better the revolutions, of the deaf has appeared in the same year that the French are celebrating the bicentennial of their revolution. I mention this coincidence for two reasons. First, the student revolt at Gallaudet in March 1988 assumes for many in the American deaf community much of the epochal character that the American and French revolutions have assumed for a large part of the Western World. Second, the roots of the Gallaudet protest are to be found in the French Enlightenment.
In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks brilliantly evokes the historical roots of what I alluded to above as the "revolutions of the deaf." Sacks identifies three such revolutions, and these are dealt with sequentially in the three long chapters that make up the book. Sacks is well known as a neurologist and author of several immensely popular, but uncompromisingly scholarly, books such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, which concerns the effects of neurological disorder. He is also a regular writer for the New York Review of Books; in fact, two of the three chapters are adapted from material originally appearing in that publication. Sacks' interest in deafness and the deaf community began when he was asked to review Harlan Lane's monumental history of the American deaf community, When the Mind Hears, and it is his review of this book that forms the first chapter of Seeing Voices.
The first chapter of Seeing Voices, then, chronicles the origins of deaf education in the France of the enlightenment and its introduction into North America, early in the nineteenth century, by an American clergyman, Thomas H. Gallaudet, and a deaf French teacher, Laurent Clerc. This constitutes the first revolution in the history of the American deaf community. Gallaudet, a clergyman in Hartford, Connecticut, was urged by Mason Cogswell, the father of a deaf child, to go to Europe to see what progress had been made there in the education of the deaf. Upon arriving in Europe, in 1816, Gallaudet was confronted by two completely divergent philosophies and methods for educating deaf students.
In England, Gallaudet visited a school for the deaf conducted according to the "oral" method, in which all teaching was done through speech and lipreading and in which sign language was not allowed. However, he was given the cold shoulder by the director of the school, who informed him that the method was proprietary and that he would not be allowed to observe and learn it. Gallaudet's next stop was Paris, where he first encountered instruction in sign language at the National Institute for the Deaf, under the direction of the Abbe Sicard. It was here that Gallaudet met Laurent Clerc, a brilliant young deaf teacher of the deaf. Gallaudet invited Clerc to return to America to assist in the founding of a school for the deaf at Hartford. This school, now the American School for the Deaf, became the first school of its kind in North America. What is most important about this story, from the point of view of the deaf community, is that Gallaudet brought back with him instruction by the method of signs and not the oral approach that was being employed in Britain and elsewhere in
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