History Note
Each month of 2007,
Access Press will feature an important person in disability history:
local, regional or national
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet
Pioneer of deaf education in the
U.S.
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet,
LL.D., (1787-1851) was a renowned American pioneer in the education
of the deaf. He helped establish the first institution for the education
of the deaf in the United States in 1817. When the Connecticut school
opened, it was called the “Hartford
School for the Deaf,” but it is now known as the American School for the
Deaf. Gallaudet was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He attended Yale University,
earning his bachelor’s degree in 1805 and master’s degree in 1810.
He wanted to do many things, such as study law, engage in trade, or study divinity.
But it was a chance
encounter with a little deaf girl, Alice Cogswell, that changed
the course of Gallaudet’s life. Although she was
an intelligent 9-year-old girl, there were no teachers who knew how
to work with deaf children in Hartford, Connecticut. But there were
schools in France and England. Alice’s father, Dr. Cogswell,
approached Gallaudet for help.
Gallaudet and Cogswell began to ask people for money to help pay
for a trip to Europe. Gallaudet would go and find out how to teach
deaf children, and he would start an American school for deaf children
in Hartford,. After they raised enough money, Gallaudet left for
Europe.
Traveling in Great Britain,
he met Abbé Sicard, head of the
Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets in Paris, and two of the institution’s
deaf faculty members, Laurent Clerc and Jean Massieu. Sicard invited
Gallaudet to Paris to study the school’s method of teaching
the deaf using manual communication. Impressed with the manual method,
Gallaudet studied teaching methodology under Sicard, learning sign
language from Massieu and Clerc, who were both highly educated graduates
of the school.
Having persuaded Clerc to accompany him, Gallaudet sailed back to
America. The two men toured New England and successfully raised private
and public funds to found a school for deaf students in Hartford.
In 1864, Gallaudet’s youngest son, Edward Miner Gallaudet,
helped start the world’s first college for deaf students and
became the college’s first president. The college was later
called Gallaudet University, after the elder Gallaudet. ![]()
Source: Information
taken from Wikipedia and Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education
Center of Gallaudet University
