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“Oralism or Manualism” The Voice of the Deaf What a glorious day, you’re having a child. The day you couldn’t wait to arrive. But then the doctor comes in and says there were some complications at birth, your baby’s fine but will be deaf for the rest of their life. Something you feared but never expected to deal with. A million things are running through your head, why me? What do I do? is my child going to be a vegetable for the rest of their life? No. In fact there are options parents can take to raise their deaf child in a hearing environment but what is the best way for your child. The child can either learn the studies of Oralism or Sign Language. Early teachers who used sign language were known as manualists. Those who, later in the century, opposed the use of sign language and wanted to limit deaf people to speech and lip-reading called themselves oralists. The terms are somewhat misleading because manualists, at least later in the century, did not oppose oral training. They incorporated speech lessons and lip-reading lessons into their schools and actually usually referred to themselves then as combinists in order to reflect this change. They combined both manualism and oral training. (Baynton) Oralists on the other hand were not simply concerned with teaching speech and lip reading. They also were stubbornly opposed to the use of sign language in any form. Oralism functioned as an ideology that, in part, depicted sign language as primitive and repugnant. The eradication of sign language was as important to their mission as the teaching of oral communication. Oralist educators later in the century thought sign language belonged to primitive people lower on the evolutionary ladder because the American Indians used sign language and Oralist saw them as living fossils, leftovers from an earlier stage of evolution. (History). Sign language, at that time, was an undeveloped language that held deaf people back. Educators would say that it was morally wrong to leave deaf people thousands of years behind the vanguard of the human race.
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