who was the deaf person who traveled to america in 1817 to help set up a school for the deaf 1.1
History of deaf education in the United States In 1812 in New England, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet met a little girl named Alice Cogswell, who inspired him to create a school for the deaf in the United States. In 1815, he traveled to Europe to gain insight on their methods of teaching deaf students.[11] He attempted to learn from the Braidwood system, but the administrators wanted him to sign a contract, remain at the school for several years to be trained in oralism, and agree to keep the teaching methods of the school a secret; Gallaudet refused this.[11] He attended a lecture in France by Abbé Sicard showcasing two successful pupils of Paris' National Institution for Deaf-Mutes, Jean Massieu and Laurent Clerc. Gallaudet spent several months at the school, and he convinced Clerc, a thirty-year-old assistant teacher, to return with him to Hartford, Connecticut. Back in America, they established the Connecticut Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, which was later named the American School for the Deaf, in 1817. Gallaudet was the director, and Clerc was the first deaf teacher in America. Alice Cogswell was one of the first seven students.[12]
American Sign Language Up to the 1950s, the predominant method in deaf education was oralism â€“ acquiring oral language comprehension and production.[19] Linguists did not consider sign language to be true "language", but rather something inferior.[19] Recognition of the legitimacy of ASL was achieved by William Stokoe, a linguist who arrived at Gallaudet University in 1955 when this was still the dominant assumption.[19] Aided by the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Stokoe argued for manualism, the use of sign language in deaf education.[19][20] Stokoe noted that sign language shares the important features that oral languages have as a means of communication, and even devised a transcription system for ASL.[19] In doing so, Stokoe revolutionized both deaf education and linguistics.[19] In the 1960s, ASL was sometimes referred to as "Ameslan", but this term is now considered obsolete.[21]