She draws on participant observation and historical sources, as well as interviews with former and current deaf students, to describe the early European, American, and Australian colonial histories of deaf education; deaf education in New South Wales, including
oralism as an educational method during the 1940s to the 1960s; the integration of children with disabilities within general education and the introduction of Total Communication in the 1970s; developments in deaf education during the 1980s, particularly mainstreaming; accessible and inclusive education in the 1990s, the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, and the introduction of bilingualism; diversity and the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities during the 2000s; and the year 2000 and beyond.
However, the issue is much more complex at the level of language policies, since the historical debate between
oralism and signing continues nowadays.
The issue of pain and discomfort involved with the activation of cochlear implants as well as overarching issues of speech training and
oralism are fodder for the ongoing debate between the Deaf community and cochlear implant advocates.
Next, the nineteenth-century battle between
oralism and sign language occupies the center of Diana Archibald's well-researched article on "Dickens's visit to the Perkins School and 'Doctor Marigold.'" Archibald finds in Dickens' visit to Laura Bridgman, the famed blind girl in Boston's Perkins School for the Blind, his firm conviction that signing was for the blind the best mode of communication.
Besides supporting eugenics, Bell also endorsed
oralism to integrate students into general education and prevent people who were deaf from intermingling.
(22) Buildings were large, opulent monuments to modern educational science and state legitimacy, and remained so throughout the post-Civil War period, a period characterized by the growth of
oralism, or the outlawing of sign language in many American schools.
"It is more than interesting that the word that sends young Moritz Stiefel on his downward spiral is none other than the word 'fail.' It was a culture that people attempted to eradicate, in a way, through
oralism."
In her book, Esmail delineates the cultural situations that led to "
oralism's overwhelming success in Victorian Britain" (3) and illuminates the broader issue of how Victorians understood language, or misunderstood it, "as a product of the voice" (4) and used it to define humanness.
Reading Victorian Deafness 'traces the cultural conditions that led to
oralism's overwhelming success in Victorian Britain' (p.
Electric rhetoric: Classical rhetoric,
oralism, and a new literacy, Cambridge.
This absence reflects educational practices at the time Bowen was writing: from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s, the oralist movement dominated educational theory and practice for deaf children;
oralism advocated banning signed languages from deaf schools and replacing them with training in lip-reading and speech (Baynton 4-5).
He was in favor of
oralism in the education of deaf students and against sign language--as an advocate for integration, he believed societal acceptance of deaf people would be fostered by
oralism.