When the Mind Hears by Harlan Lane

Author:Harlan Lane [Lane, Harlan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-87471-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

What did Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe have to say with their views thus repudiated and their falsehoods revealed? Mann said not a word further concerning the deaf to the day he died ten years ago. If only Howe had followed Mann’s example! The Massachusetts legislature had defeated his proposal to arrogate the education of the deaf, the Mann report had failed to recoup his loss, and hearing and deaf people alike had assailed the document and its author, Howe’s friend. All this, smoldering in him for twenty years, burst into flame three years ago, seven years after Mann’s death. By this time there were more than 13,000 deaf people in the United States, some two dozen residential schools, a tried and effective system of education, a longer period of schooling extending up to some eight years, and an earlier age of admission, as low as six at the New York school. There was a national college for the deaf, several high classes, and distinguished deaf Americans in countless walks of life. Nevertheless, “The deaf person’s lack of an important sense,” Howe wrote in a widely publicized report of the Massachusetts Board of State Charities, “not only prevents the entire and harmonious development of mind and character but it tends to give morbid growth in certain directions; as a plant checked in its direct upward growth grows askew…. We should, in providing for the instruction and training of these persons, have association among them as little as is possible… There should be no attempts to build up permanent asylums.… A society has recently been formed here among the mutes for public religious worship in the sign language. Now such an association surely is not accord ing to sound sociological principles…. It promotes their segregation and thus their formation into a special class … The constant object should be to fashion them into the likeness of common men…. If our mutes educated at Hartford had been taught as well as children are taught in the German schools, they might attend public worship in our churches.” Having calumniated our minds, our characters, and our associations, Howe goes on to vilify our language: “The rudimentary and lower parts of language or pantomime are open to mutes; but the higher and finer part, that is, speech, is forever closed; and any substitute for it is at best imperfect.”68

All of this is a prelude to “a plan for a change in our system of educating mutes.” This time, rather than naming Perkins directly as the proper alternative, Howe proposed that the governor name three commissioners for the education of deaf-mutes, who in turn would have the authority to contract with any organization within the state to educate the Massachusetts deaf. He gave three arguments for withdrawing pupils from Hartford in favor of some organization in Massachusetts: repatriation, dispersion, and economy. The care of these “wards” would fall upon the citizens of our state, he argues, which would be instructive and the children would be closer to home.

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