Alexander+Graham+Bell

People in Communications

Communication media type="youtube" key="paxsaGLatqM" height="360" width="640" Telephone

Alexander Graham Bell (March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922)



The telephone and other innovations like the microphone were reportedly developed By Alexander Graham Bell in part to assist people with hearing loss. Most Americans know Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but few are aware that the central interest of his life was deaf education or that he was one of the most prominent proponents of oralism in the United States. Like his father before him, Bell spent his life studying the physiology of speech. He once said that “to ask the value of speech is like asking the value of life.” After emigrating from England to Canada in 1870 and to the United States a year later, Bell began to teach speech to deaf students using a universal alphabet invented by his father called “Visible Speech.” In 1872 he opened a school in Boston to train teachers of deaf children. Another major accomplishment was to conduct the first national census of the deaf, in 1890. His mother was hard of hearing, and while she had enough hearing to use an ear tube for one-on-one conversations, Bell often used the British, two-handed manual alphabet to communicate with her. He also knew the sign language used in the United States. His wife was a deaf woman, a former speech pupil, Mabel Hubbard. Bell befriended Helen Keller, the deaf-blind woman famous in that era.

Through articles, papers, speeches, and teaching, Bell's support of oral education profoundly changed the way deaf children were taught. Bell taught deaf students at schools for the deaf (a school in London, Boston School for Deaf Mutes, the Clarke School for the Deaf, and at the American Asylum for the Deaf). He also opened a school for deaf and hearing students together, but the school had to be closed after just two years.



Bell was a pragmatist who was willing to use sign language or other means to communicate with deaf adults. However, With children he advocated a strictly oral education, without any signing. This put him in opposition to the well know Deaf educator Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, the founder of Gallaudet University. Gallaudet and Graham Bell agreed on the point that deaf individuals should not be denied an education. However, the two disagreed strongly on how one should go about educating. While Gallaudet embraced deafness, Bell wanted to eradicate it. Bell’s position was that ASL should be avoided. Regardless of the fact that his wife was deaf, Bell strongly opposed intermarriage among deaf people. Bell feared "contamination" of the human race by the propagation of deaf people even though most deaf people statistically are born to hearing parents. He was and was a supporter of the eugenics movement (believing deaf couples should not marry and that deaf people were appropriate candidates to be sterilized).

Gallaudet and Bell personified the debate between manualism and oralism. The educational conflict between proponents of oralism and manualism heightened after 1865. Social Darwinism, cultural imperialism, and the rise of scientific "answers," including eugenics, led to the gradual displacement of ASL by oralism. It was not until the 1960's that ASL gained recognition as a true language and recognized by many as the best way to educate Deaf children.