Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language by Douglas Baynton

Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language, written by Douglas Baynton, writes about the history of ASL (America Sign Language) in the United States, and the power that the hearing population welded over the education of the Deaf. Baynton provides evidence how ASL, when it was first brought to USA by Thomas H Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc, was accepted and thought as a very useful language for the Deaf. Somehow towards the end of the 1800's, oralism became more popular.

Oral female teachers began to take over the teaching jobs that were once held by male signing instructors and Deaf teachers. By 1900 oralism was firmly in place and dominated deaf education for the next seventy years. The author debates about how the hearing people choose to perceive the deaf, and addresses this role directly: ""Paternalism was what nineteenth-century manualists and oralists had in common.

Both of them saw deafness through their own cultural biases and sought to shape deaf people in accordance with those biases. Both used similar clusters of metaphors to forge images of deaf people as fundamentally flawed, incomplete, isolated, and dependent, and both used that imagery to justify not only methods of education but also the authority of the hearing over the deaf.

This was constant." By 1919, 80% of Deaf students were educated by oralist methods, although in their own social circles, Deaf people continued to sign ASL In most cases, the oralist method produced poor results, yet the method was popular and used in most schools up until the 1970's. In the 1970's there were intense debates about ASL as a true language, and the need to educate the deaf in sign language instead of orally. Many students now are mainstreamed in public schools and use interpreters who translate speech into sign language, generally in ASL or coed English, others attend schools for the deaf that rely on ASL or Signed English for communication.

Yet to this day there are still deaf children who are raised and schooled orally. The author provides information on how people viewed sign language through-out the years, and how many manualists associated sign language as a language that was closer to God and nature. While oralists associated sign language to be no better than the wagging of a dog's tail to express it's feelings. This book is a must read for anybody, hearing or Deaf, that are interested in the history of ASL and the Deaf people who grew up in America.