Speech or sign language?

As early as ancient Greece and Rome, the ability to speak and think were thought to be connected. It was commonly thought that people who could not speak lacked the ability to think. According to Aristotle, hearing played the main role in learning and gaining knowledge and voice was a tool for thinking. Even though he actually never said that deaf people could not be taught, that is how his words were interpreted until the Middle Ages.

The view of the church in the Middle Ages was based on Paul the Apostle’s statement, whereby faith develops through hearing, and on a misinterpretation of Saint Augustine’s words. This gave rise to the idea that deaf people were not able to express themselves. During the Renaissance, views of the connection between deafness and mutism gradually changed.

The Benedictine monk, Pedro Ponce de León, is thought to be the first teacher to teach his pupils to speak and write. In a monastery in Oña, he tutored two deaf brothers. It is believed that he was used to signing in his classes because Benedictine monks, for whom silence is an important aspect of monastic life, had developed signs and finger spelling systems for communication. It is also generally thought that Pedro Ponce de León’s pupils already used a language based on signs to communicate with one another.

After this, the main goal in deaf education was considered to be learning speech. Johann Konrad Amman, a Swiss physician and teacher, appealed to the Bible, saying that God had created people in his image and therefore people should also speak in his manner. Amman was influential particularly in Germany, where using speech in tuition became the dominant teaching method.

The first schools for the deaf were founded in Europe in the 18th century. From the perspective of teaching methods, the most important of these were the school for the deaf in Paris, founded by the Catholic theologian and lawyer Abbé Charles-Michel de l’Épée in the 1760s and the school in Leipzig, which was founded by the German organ player and teacher Samuel Heinicke.

Abbé de l’Épée used a combination of speech, lipreading and finger alphabets in his teaching. In addition, he used signs. During L’Épée’s period, the French deaf community already used French sign language but L’Épée began to develop signs that could be used to teach French grammar, for example. L’Épée’s goal was to teach his pupils to become bilingual in written French and French sign language. For L’Épée, speech was just one of the ways to communicate thoughts.