Moot Thoughts & Musings

bust of Laurent Clerc

By request, I'm posting a bit more about our stop at the American School for the Deaf in Hartford on the way home from our fabulous Maine Vacation. This was our first trip up through New England, and I thought that it was kind of cool how close everything is. Driving through Massachusetts is like reading an American History textbook as you pass each exit. We drove by the exit for Walden Pond and though, 'hey, we should go there on the way home!' Over vacation, though, Chris had been reading When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf by Harlan Lane. So when we started talking about Walden Pond again, he suggested that we stop in Hartford instead and check out deaf history sites. (It also worked out at the last minute to see one of my best college friends, who just happened to be teaching violin like 2 miles away from ASD! Woohoo!)

Unfortunately we could drive all over Hartford visiting everything or make it in time to ASD to check out their little museum, but we did get to see the bust of Laurent Clerc. Ellis was thrilled to see the ASL letters sculpted at the bottom. He's obsessed with letters lately. He gets most English letters, but he's a bit stronger with ASL letters. :-) So he had a lot of fun spelling out Clerc's name.

We also took a photo op with Gallaudet and his neighbor girl Alice Cogswell.

I haven't read the history yet, though read a chapter of it on the way to Hartford to be familiar with what we were visiting. Gallaudet was a minister in Hartford, late 18th/early 19th century. The story goes that one day he was watching the neighbor children play. He knew that one of the daughters was deaf and got it into his head to teach her the word Hat by associating the written word with the object. Whether or not she learned it, his passion for deaf education was sparked. Along with Alice's father, an eminent doctor in the city, as well as his good friend, enough support was raised to send Gallaudet to deaf education establishments in Europe to seek assistance in establishing the first deaf school in America. In England, primarily an oralist country, he was met with secretism and general unhelpfulness.

But while he was there, he bumped into Laurent Clerc, a Frenchman who was also in London at the time. Gallaudet finally gave up on England and went to Paris. Clerc was a deaf man, educated at a school that used French Sign Language to teach the students language and knowledge content. Rather than spending long (futile?) hours learning how to speak, their primary motive was restoring their students to knowledge using their natural language. (This was also the time of the Enlightenment in France; it would be interesting to flush this out a bit more.) Gallaudet was excited to start learning sign language but overwhelmed at the thought of how long it would take him to be proficient enough to teach the students in America. He finally persuaded Clerc to come back with him, and together they opened the first school for the deaf in the United States in Hartford, Connecticut. Clerc remained the U.S. for the rest of his life.

So that's the short story. And as we begin our journey with our deaf son, it seemed like the birthplace of deaf culture in the United States was a good place to stop.