Sorry if this is a stupid question, but what exactly is oralism??
No need to apologize, nonny! It’s not a stupid question at all. It’s not really something people generally know unless they’re connected to the Deaf community in some way.
Anyways, basically, there are many many approaches to educating Deaf children, but the two main ones are manualism and oralism.
Manualism is the method of teaching using the local sign language. This method focuses on the fact that as far back as human society extends, Deaf people have always used signs to communicate with each other, and sign languages are complex and fully mature languages in their own rights, just like spoken languages are. Deaf children who are exposed to sign language from a young age develop language skills at the same rate as their hearing peers, while children who do not have access to it have trouble learning language. The Deaf community has asserted their preference for this method time and time again.
Oralism, on the other hand, is the method of teaching Deaf children to speak and lip-read. The philosophy behind this method is that Deaf people who only learn sign are “isolated” in the Deaf community, and outcast from the wider hearing population (or “real society” as some might say). The problem here is that with lip-reading, you can only understand about 30% of what someone is saying - it’s an incredibly imprecise practice, and is really taxing on the Deaf person. Not to mention that even if a Deaf person does learn how to lip-read and speak, they’re still going to be treated as outcasts in the hearing community because they’re still Deaf. The only difference is that now they don’t have sign language either, so they’re cut off from the Deaf community too.
The oralism method is pretty oppressive, and up until quite recently, a lot of Deaf schools in America and Canada had the oralist approach. Deaf children were forbidden to use their local sign language in the Deaf residential schools (they all hated this, and still continued to sign amongst each other when their teachers weren’t around).
The reason for the prevalence of the oralist method in the Americas is largely blamed on the Milan conference of 1880, in which Alexander Graham Bell played a really big role. He had a lot of really shitty views, in that he thought that Deaf children should go to mainstream (i.e. hearing) schools, and that they should be included in the hearing world by learning to mimic the way hearing people interacted and communicated with each other.
All this being said, I just want you guys to keep in mind that I am hearing myself, and still in the process of learning more about the Deaf community. If any Deaf people read this and notice any mistakes, I’m sorry and please feel free to correct me!
