A silent minority

This timely, important, and frequently dramatic story takes place in Spain, for the simple reason that Spain is where language was first systematically taught to the deaf. Early experiments involved a colorful cast of characters - a Benedictine monk, a secretive schoolteacher turned tutor to the aristocracy, an ambitious secretary to a noble household, a scholarly Jesuit in exile, an intellectual abbe inspired by the philosophy of the European Enlightenment, a liberal lawyer, and an award-winning artist - who set aside other pursuits to teach deaf children. This instruction is thought to have begun in the mid-sixteenth century in Spanish monastic communities, where monks under vows of silence employed a well-established system of signed communications. Early in the 1600s, deaf education entered the domain of private tutors, laymen with no use for manual signs who advocated oral instruction for their pupils. As a result, deaf children were taught to speak and lip-read, and this form of deaf education, which has been the subject of controversy ever since, spread from Spain throughout the world. A Silent Minority focuses on what Susan Plann calls the preprofessional era of deaf education, up to and including the early decades of Madrid's Royal School for Deaf-mutes. The questions raised by Plann's narrative extend well beyond the history of deaf education in Spain: they apply to other minority communities and deaf cultures around the world. At issue are the place of minority communities within the larger society and, ultimately, our tolerance for human diversity and cultural pluralism.