When the H.D.Guyot school was founded in 1790, it was very clear that...
...if they would want to educate deaf children, they were going to have to use signs. That was self-evident.
No one debated whether they should sign or speak.
They had to sign, because the child couldn't speak.
It's very difficult to deduce what daily life was like in practice from written sources.
What we do get from them are clear expressions of Guyot: if a student wasn't learning anything, it was the educator's fault.
That was a clear stance. If a child can't learn, it's the educator's fault. Then he made a mistake.
That would mean he wasn't proficient at signing, didn't understand the child's way of thinking and couldn't make contact with the child. In short, his fault.
That was so definitive. Nowadays that's different. Now it's become more and more: a child can't learn? Then there's something wrong with the child.
That wasn't the case with Guyot, back then. If a child couldn't learn, it was the educator's fault. That was quite nice.
I saw mention of a discussion somewhere from the period in which Guyot introduced the oral system in... 1860... yeah.
The discussion was on the playground. If the children were playing, were signs allowed then? Yeah, that was fine.
But also a discussion about whether the educator should be able to sign, yes or no?
Some educators said, it was written, that the children found it pleasant if the educator was able to sign as well.
Because it meant better contact with the educator.
So that was the debate.
Basically, the issue remains contact. And signing apparently leads to having contact.
But there's not much more we can take from the written sources.
It's difficult to deduce the daily practice, daily life, from those sources.
It's all still very vague.
Added to that is the fact that if people write something for the outside world to read, they make it into a nice story.
Like: the children are speaking well, the children are happy. And: they're learning to speak the oral way. That was all on there.
That might have been very different in practice, but no one is going to write such a negative piece for the outside world to see.
So in such documented reports to the government it said that the children were learning well and were able to speak well.
No one ever made mention of, for example: the children are having difficulty learning, or such things.
That's very difficult in documentary research, it's always...
Okay, this is a wonderful story, but where are the awful stories? Those are hard to find.