I’ve wanted to learn sign language for a while now, and recently began a course through Stack Social. Before teaching signs, the instructor provided a brief history of American Sign Language (ASL). It was equal parts fascinating + heartbreaking + inspirational to me.

In the early nineteen century, a group of parents of deaf children sent Thomas Gallaudet to Europe to survey the various educational models there. He set out to gather information that would help them start a school for the deaf in America.

Traveling to London, he observed schools run by the Braidwood family. These schools practiced oralism, meaning they prohibited signing and all instruction depended on lip reading and speech. Gallaudet was unimpressed. He found the model disheartening and ineffective. While in England he stumbled across French deaf instructors giving demonstrations of deaf education utilizing signs. The French school was closed at the time, and the instructors had fled to England for safety during the Napoleonic Wars. He was inspired by their exhibitions. After the war he traveled with them back to France to learn more. After observing the flourishing of their students, he knew this was the model he wanted to bring back to the United States. But how?

Gallaudet convinced one of the French instructors, Laurent Clerc, to travel back with him and start a school. In 1817 they founded what is now known as the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, CT.

Clerc eagerly began educating the deaf of the United States. Anticipating receptivity, he was surprised to find them less than eager learners for the sign language he provided. The reality was, the deaf in the United States had already developed sign language to communicate with one another. But due to the lack of education, the vocabulary was limited to daily life and their immediate home environments. It lacked vocabulary for important historical people, places, and events. There was no finger spelling system, or complex number system needed for mathematics.

But Clerc continued to teach. And as he did, he observed a creole language developing. The existing language of the American deaf blended with the more complex language that Clerc brought with him from France. The deaf in America were birthing American Sign Language (ASL). Deaf education flourished and expanded in the following fifty years. Schools opened in almost every state. The United States even saw the founding of deaf higher education, with what is now Gallaudet University.

Until. In 1867 two new schools opened in the United States that practiced oralism. (Remember the Braidwood model?) Deaf education shifted from signing to oralism in the following century. Educators chose oralism over signing, which fell out of use and was prohibited. The deaf community suffered a huge loss. Previous education through sign had enabled the deaf to integrate into society. They held jobs and pursued careers like their hearing counterparts. As oralism dominated, education suffered. Deaf people found themselves increasingly marginalized, unemployed, underemployed, and forced to be more dependent on the hearing.

People still used sign language, but it was excluded from academics. Even Gallaudet University, which had once been the birthplace of ASL, relegated signing to outside of the classroom.

Until. During the 1960’s William Stoke, Professor of English at Gallaudet University, took it upon himself to study the language he observed students using with each other outside of class. In 1965 he published the findings of his research. His thorough and careful linguistic research irrefutably demonstrated that ASL is as full and complete a language as any other, and so entirely appropriate as a medium for education.

ASL began to make its way back into deaf education. As the deaf regained their language in education, their position in society started to shift as well. The marginalization created by oralism began to decline. ASL created a pathway to integrate the deaf into mainstream society and culture. It is still a work in process, but things have begun to improve.

So that’s the story. And I’m left with lots of feelings. I’m inspired by the human resiliency to persevere against all odds. I feel grief at the way we, the hearing, made things so much harder than they needed to be. I can’t shake the chill of witnessing the human tendency to try to control one another.

And I couldn’t help thinking about other manifestations of language control. I recently wrote about this in respect to LGBTQ+, and the way many Evangelical leaders try to control how queer people language their experience. It’s not an exact corollary, of course, but there is important overlap. Whatever the conscious intentions of those attempting to control… in either case I think language control is cruel and unnecessary.