December 1, 2023

America is at an inflection point. In our politics, this is obvious, but now as in the past, education reflects the social goals and political interests of those who involve themselves in the public sphere. Originally the province of idealists who believed in the perfectibility of man and who sought to uplift both the individual and society, the goal of education shifted to the isolation and repression of those deemed unworthy. These historical examples offer critical lessons for the educators of today and a choice about what type of nation we want to uphold. Examples proliferate throughout American history, marking cultural and ideological shifts.

In the first generation after the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, a young Yale graduate, Thomas Gallaudet, came across his young, deaf neighbor, which led to him becoming the founder of Deaf education in the United States. The girl, Alice Cogswell, fortunately, had a wealthy father who sent Gallaudet to Europe to research methods of teaching the Deaf. Gallaudet first went to England and met the Braidwoods, a family of charlatans who were teaching deaf children of wealthy families just enough to be able to sign their names and maintain familial wealth. They offered to train Gallaudet in their “secret methods” but the cost—his entire stake and seven years as an apprentice—was impossible. He then met Abbe Sicard, the head of a real school for the Deaf in Paris. There he encountered Deaf teachers and began to learn sign language. He poached one of Sicard’s best teachers, Laurent Clerc, and with him founded The American School for the Deaf, one of the first publicly funded schools in the newly minted United States of America. The success of this school quickly spawned similar schools in other regions and states. Students of Gallaudet soon found themselves in demand as teachers. So rapid was the change from the forgotten underclass that there was a general belief that Deaf people would soon be occupying nearly every profession. The schools themselves became community centers as well as sources of academic expertise, proof of the power of education to change not just individual lives but improve society. 

A challenge soon arose. The French Revolution and its excesses, followed by the rise and fall of Napoleon, brought all things French into question. By 1840 schools in England and Germany boasted methods that would make the Deaf “normal.” American activists agitated for abandoning public support of “monkey gestures” in favor of these superior methods, for “in Germany, the deaf speak.” A commission, including Deaf and hearing educators, went to Germany to investigate the claims. What they discovered was students near graduation had vocabularies as small as a few dozen words. Nowhere did they find students with the ability to discuss any topic in any significant depth. The German method was simply an attempt, one commissioner said, to turn deaf children into “parrots.” With the help of Thomas Gallaudet and his son Edward, now the primary voice of deaf education, this challenge was beaten back. For the time, expertise and logic prevailed. This reprieve would last for half a century.  

By the 1880’s America had gone through a dramatic and traumatic transformation. The idealism that supported the abolitionist movement had given way to the reality that force was the way to achieve even noble ends. A debate over the “Indian question” would rise and rage again and again. Expulsions, treaties, violations of treaties, massacres, and wars would lead America to open discussion of the extermination of Native Americans. The progressive solution was the temporary containment of Indians on reservations while their youth were transformed through forced “education” into an acceptable facsimile of European Americans. Cultural genocide became official U.S. policy. Indeed this was clearly spelled out in iron above the gate of the first Indian boarding school, The Carlisle School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, “Kill the Indian to Save the Man.” The horrors of this era are touched upon in the HBO series 1923, but they deserve much more attention, as the ideology that created them still lingers. 

A similar movement was afoot in deaf education. For most Americans, Alexander Graham Bell was a genius inventor and the perfect example of how intelligence and hard work pay off. At the time, he was much more. The impact of the telephone on American society and the world is comparable to the internet. How many people will read or listen to this article on a modern descendant of Bell’s invention? Unlike the internet, this transformative device was associated with one name. He was a rock star which is why his opinions carried so much weight and why he was so effective in destroying the lives and livelihood of most Deaf Americans. 

One of the first and most ironic impacts was that public education made deaf people some of the most educated in the country. Many had found jobs as secretaries. Once the telephone entered the workplace, however, the role of secretary changed almost instantly and hearing became a prerequisite for the job. Alexander Graham Bell was a eugenicist. He, like all eugenicists, took Social Darwinism to its logical conclusion, that suppression or elimination of inferior races was logical and even a moral imperative. He supported these ideas with his money and fame, and they would outlive him and form the ideological basis of fascist movements of the 1930s through to today. He also believed that people who could hear were superior to those who couldn’t. He accurately believed that schools for the Deaf, as cultural centers, allowed deaf people to meet, marry, and have offspring. In his book On the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race, he inaccurately concluded that Deaf education would lead to a deaf “race”. That his own data showed that most people who are deaf have hearing parents, was irrelevant. He advocated for the closing of schools for the deaf, nearly all of which were boarding schools, in favor of small day schools, and that all teaching of Deaf students to take place exclusively in spoken language. His rock star status, his money, and his position as an important “scientist” gave his assertions and conclusions all the necessary weight to transform educational policy nationwide. Sign language was banned. Deaf teachers were fired, even from Gallaudet University. What had been a well-educated, prosperous community was instantly relegated to second-class citizenship. 

Simultaneously, an ironic and telling situation developed in the South. During the brief period when Black men could vote and white men couldn’t, newly freed Black men occupied state legislatures and used that power to create public education. Instead of limiting this new boon to just themselves, however, it was available to all. By the 1880s, however, white men had regained power and began to legislate segregation. On the surface, this may seem to parallel the structure of Deaf and Indian education. The 1954 Brown case would accurately demonstrate that “separate… [is] inherently unequal” and there was real psychological harm being done—for instance, the inferiority complex for Black children and the arguably more dangerous superiority complex being created in the white children. In Black schools, as one would expect, the facilities fell somewhere between subpar and appalling. The books were hand-me-downs from white schools. The students at those schools were apparently told where their old books were going, as racial epithets were scrawled throughout. As a result, Black children sat in cold rooms in falling down buildings, often with no running water, but they were also in a protective bubble, with parents and teachers who were determined to make sure that when opportunities presented themselves, those children would be ready to seize them. This only happened because those who were trying to sabotage the life chances of Black people didn’t understand that just being separated from white people was not, in itself, a detriment. Indeed, the brave souls who integrated white schools in the South endured tremendous suffering, both emotionally and physically. Desegregation was a tremendous benefit to the country, but the cost was mostly borne by Black people. Black teachers from the era remember with pride the hours spent scouring the books, erasing those racial epithets before their students received them. Black children were being educated by Black teachers, who were among the best-educated Black people in the country. Teachin’ and preachin’ were the only commonly available jobs for well-educated Black people in the South and it wasn’t much better in the North. 

The lessons here are many. First, education is only beneficial when its goals are the uplift of both individuals and all of humanity. When conceived of as a tool to transform someone into something they are not, education becomes a cudgel. Second, inflection points are easy to see in hindsight but difficult to recognize in the present. I believe that the most obvious sign that we are in one now is that education practices and materials are part of the public discourse and political debate. People with political agendas are stepping forward, not just to offer opinions, but to dictate to professionals about topics in which they clearly have no background or novel insight. Moreover, these people are regurgitating fascist and pseudo-scientific dogma that has been discredited and rejected again and again, but not before horrific damage has been done to the lives and livelihoods of millions. The term fascist is not used lightly. Moms for Liberty embraced Hitler in their newsletter, revealing that they are ideologically aligned with neo-Nazis in an effort to indoctrinate young people—to cudgel them into conformity rather than foster individual growth. They and groups like theirs claim to want to protect the young but seek to deny students a thorough, thoughtful education, much like Bell. Politicians like the governor of Florida cite critical race theory (CRT) as a threat to the status quo and critical thinking even though this approach to understanding the role of race in America is only used in a limited number of graduate programs. Still, fear of something few understand allowed him to dictate the adoption of an ahistorical curriculum that limits knowledge of the past and minimizes the enduring impacts, harming the prospects of all Florida’s students. This straw man tactic worked for Bell just as it is likely to work around the nation if educators and an educated populace can’t stem the tide. Additionally, the ideologically-driven takeover of New College in Florida has encouraged the exodus of students and professors, and demonstrates one of the dangers of forcing education to conform.

With the complex, often overwhelming, knowable problems facing us, an educated, capable populace that can analyze, apply, and act may be the best chance we have to avoid the fate of democracies that have fallen into fascism. One of the first challenges for us, then, is to foster an environment where this is possible. This requires brave people to stand up against ideologically driven content whether it be from the fearful and ignorant or friends pushing well-meaning but flawed elements of DEI programs. Clearly some, like Anthony Crawford and Hampshire College have taken up the challenge. Others, too, like the voters who defeated Mom’s for Liberty candidates in their efforts to take over school boards, are working to safeguard an honest education in their communities. Perhaps it’s even time to acknowledge that those who have repeatedly attempted to turn American educational institutions into tools of repression have taken a political stance, thus those who stand for the America of the Declaration of Independence and the dreams of a free people are engaged in a political act.

You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Byron Turner for Intrepid Ed News.