Ideologies driving oralism

Teaching speech at the schools for the deaf was logical but, in contrast, using spoken language to teach and banning sign language seems unreasonable. It seems the teachers realised that using sign language in tuition would have been easier and more effective. Even though they were aware of how natural and important sign language was to their deaf pupils, they considered it to be an unsatisfactory alternative..

The basic idea was that people who were different lived in the dark and teaching could raise them to the level of human beings. This was something that oralists and advocates of sign language tuition agreed on. Where they differed was the question of whether education should encompass one language or two. The goal of the oralists was to make deaf people more like their hearing peers, because they would struggle in life without the ability to speak.

During the early 20th century, attitudes became stricter and the oral method expanded into outright opposition to sign language. This resistance toward sign language was justified by saying that it was a less developed language with deficient grammar, and it was therefore only suited to teaching the pupils with the lowest level of aptitude.

This attitude partly stemmed from the ideology of evolutionism in which sign languages were the predecessors of spoken languages and formed a link between animals and humans. According to Darwinian linguistics, these less evolved forms of language were superseded by the more developed languages. Spoken language was seen as a human activity whereas signing was animal-like behaviour. It was common to compare deaf people to apes if they remained within the deaf community. The goal was to get the deaf community to change the language they used.

The evolution theory also paved the way for eugenics. Alexander Graham Bell, who became known as the inventor of the telephone, was worried about the increase in the number of deaf people. Bell had connections to the deaf community both professionally and personally. His father was an educator for the deaf and several members of his family had reduced hearing. Bell was also an educator for the deaf and one the most prominent oralists in the US.

He also participated in the activities of the eugenics movement. According to him, deaf couples had more deaf children. Therefore, deaf people should not socialise with one another and marriages between them should not be encouraged. It was said that deaf people married one another because boarding schools brought them together and they were also connected by sign language. According to Bell, this could be solved by setting up day schools that used the oral method and stopping the use of sign language. As ideologies, eugenics and oralism had the same goal, reducing the number of people who were flawed. In Finland, the most visible effect of eugenics was the marriage ban that came into force in 1929.