A Silent Minority: Deaf Education in Spain, 1550-1835.

Susan Plann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xvi plus 323pp. $40.00/cloth).

During the last decade, historians, linguists and anthropologists have increasingly focused on the origins and composition of deaf communities throughout the world. Each group has necessarily posed different questions according to the academic discipline, but a common thread of inquiry has revolved around the interconnection between culture and language. Susan Plann's A Silent Minority: Deaf Education in Spain, 1550-1835 is one of these carefully researched studies that straddles history and language. Plann writes about a part of deaf history that has until recently remained hidden from the deaf in Spain and from the hearing community in the United States and Europe. Her research, spanning almost three centuries, analyzes the gradual attempts to educate deaf people in Spain and the linguistic disputes about the best method to employ. For Plann, who is a linguist herself, all questions return to language - its use and the power that it implies. From the first pages of her study, Plann tells her readers, "As a linguist, I am especially interested in the deaf community and its spacial language, and I am persuaded that its members are best regarded as a linguistic minority who are handicapped only when they are educated in a mode that is to them inaccessible, namely, oral language."(p. 2) Thus, Plann honestly informs her readers that she will cast a very critical eye upon those educators who supported articulated speech over signed language for the deaf. What follows in her book is a well-written and carefully documented study of the linguistic methods and the individual personalities who developed the earliest types of deaf education.

A Silent Minority is divided into six historically chronological chapters followed by a conclusion and epilogue which bring the reader to the contemporary era. Plann begins her study of deaf education with the work of the Benedictine Pedro Ponce de Leon, a sixteenth century monk who dedicated much of his adult life to the instruction of aristocratic deaf boys inside the San Salvador monastery at Ona. Because Pedro Ponce did not leave many written records of his teaching, Plann carefully assembled what information we do have about him. One of the most important facts about Ponce was that he apparently used a mixed method of instruction which included writing, sign language and the spoken word. Other educators of the deaf would eventually adopt this methodology, though not directly from Pedro Ponce. These Benedictines offered a privileged educational environment for a handful of aristocratic children whose families could afford to pay the monks a sizable stipend for their care. (p. 32) Plann speculates about whether or not this monastery created the nucleus of the first deaf community in Spain, but any conclusions must be tentative because of the paucity of sources.

In subsequent chapters, Plann presents other educators who formulated their own approaches to deaf instruction. Some teachers like Juan Pablo Bonet in the seventeenth century turned to articulated speech or oralism as the best way to educate deaf children. Plann argues that "when deaf education moved outside the silent, signing monastery, it was no longer tailored to the needs of the student. Instead, an attempt was made to force deaf signers into a speaking and hearing mold, and this entailed suppressing their sign language."(p. 49) As Plann correctly notes, this oral method of instruction would later be called the German method, but in actuality it originated in Spain a century earlier. (p. 81)

With the success of deaf education through the efforts of Abbe de l'Epee in France during the late eighteenth century, Spanish deaf education benefited from increased royal patronage and closer pedagogical contact with its neighbor to the north. The first school for the deaf was created in Madrid by mandate of Charles IV in 1795. The methodical sign language developed by Abbe de l'Epee would become the basis of education at the Royal School for the Deaf in Madrid, at least until the rejection of all French influence during the war of independence. While this was a "signed language," Plann points out that its intent was to transcribe the Castilian Spanish of the day into "a manually encoded version of the official language."(p. 121) Thus, the Spanish deaf were still being instructed in a foreign language.

In the years before Spain's war of independence, the Royal School was functioning reasonably well. In her account, Plann brings to life the contributions of two educators of the deaf during this period who are usually absent from history. Roberto Pradez, deaf from birth, would eventually join the school's faculty as an art instructor and would remain there for more than three decades. Pradez actually kept the school going when the war forced a move to another location and austerity on the pupils. Another contributor to the early development of the Royal School was Jose Miguel Alea, who was an abate, "an unbeneficed clergyman of minor orders."(p. 128) Plann portrays Alea as more of a linguistic theorist than a teacher of the deaf. Alea's writings, however, are important to deaf history because he wrote about the relationship among language, thought, and speech. Alea recognized that sign language functioned as speech for the deaf allowing them the tools for abstract thought. He also concluded that sign language could reach a level of complexity akin to spoken language. (p. 140) These observations, while commonplace today, represented a fundamental shift in thinking about the deaf for the early nineteenth century.

In the conclusion to her study, Plann looks ahead to some of the developments for Spanish deaf education in the nineteenth century. Special schools for the deaf emerged in the principal towns of Spain so that more children of the lower class would have an opportunity for some schooling. But the role of the deaf in their own education remained extremely limited. Plann only briefly mentions these restrictions which are outside the scope of her own study. In her epilogue, she returns to the problem of linguistic minorities in contemporary Spain. Current educational policy favors mainstreaming deaf children in hearing schools. As in this country, the integration of deaf and hearing school children is a complicated matter which involves political choices, deaf identity, and learning skills.

Plann's study, A Silent Minority, fills a crucial gap in deaf history and the history of western education. Her carefully researched and documented book with its excellent bibliography will be a point of departure for all future researchers.

Anne T. Quartararo U.S. Naval Academy