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Sarah Fuller To Alexander Graham Bell, March 29, 1890
IntroductionWhile studying at the Perkins Institution in Boston, Massachusetts, in March 1890, Helen Keller discovered that a Norwegian deaf-blind girl, Ragnhild Kaata, had learned to speak. The nine-year-old Keller was transfixed by the news. She immediately told her teacher, Anne Sullivan that she wanted to learn to speak too. Sullivan knew that she was not qualified to teach Keller how to speak and therefore turned to Sarah Fuller, the director of the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston. The Horace Mann School was one of the first oralist deaf schools in the United States. Instead of communicating with deaf children in sign language (and teaching them English via sign language), oralist teachers focused on teaching deaf children to speak and lip-read English. Like other oralist programs, teachers at Horace Mann banned deaf students from using sign language and punished them when they used it. The oralist approach reflected a dramatic shift in the goals and practice of deaf education spearheaded by Alexander Graham Bell. During the first half of the nineteenth century, deaf educators had celebrated American Sign Language as a beautiful language even more natural than spoken language—a language that deaf children could easily grasp and which would allow them to learn the Christian Gospel. After the Civil War, growing interest in evolution and concern over high rates of immigration and increased ethnic and linguistic diversity led a new generation of deaf educators to turn against sign language. This second generation believed that American Sign Language was a primitive, even savage, form of communication. In oralists’ minds, sign language isolated deaf people and encouraged them to develop an insular community. In theory, oral education would make deaf people more normal and help them assimilate into American society. | ||||||||||
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| 1 | Newton Lower Falls, | |
| 2 | March 29, 1890. | |
| 3 | My dear Mr. Bell, | |
| 4 | I am greatly obliged to you for allowing me to take the reports. Yours gives me great satisfaction. I think the remarks of Dr. G upon day-schools will have less influence now that you have spoken in their defense. | |
| 5 | Mr. Chickering is much pleased with your publications. Did you intend to have him keep them; or do you wish them returned? I will take care that your reports are not injured and will return them soon. | |
| 6 | I have a pleasant bit of information that I have been quite impatient to give to you, but until now have not found time to write. Last Wednesday, Helen Keller's teacher brought her to see me and told me that Helen had spelled to her a few days before, "I must speak." and that she had come to ask me to tell her how to teach her. It is not necessary to say that from that moment until she went away our thoughts were given to her. Her voice is sweet and natural, and her ability to produce the sounds of the elements of speech is quite equal to that of any deaf child. By allowing her to feel the position of my lips, tongue and teeth she gave the sounds represented by -phonetic symbols-, and combined them to pronounce the words water, arm, butter, mamma, papa. Before coming to see me she had attempted to say butter, mamma, papa. She caught the idea of prolonging a syllable to give the accent, very quickly; -- and so the words were almost echoes of my own voice. She is to come to me again on Monday and I hope to be able to help her teacher to do as good work in giving speech to the child as she has in giving written language. Perhaps you will remember that Miss Sullivan came to see our work before going out to Alabama to teach Helen. Is it not pleasant to have the work with this marvelously bright mind associated with a school that bears the name of Horace Mann? -- His labors were those of Dr. Howe are unitedly bearing fruits they would cordially approve. You shall hear more of our progress. Just now I am very busy. | |
| 7 | Sincerely yes, | |
| 8 | Sarah Fuller | |
