If it is not necessary, it is obviously not advisable, that deaf children should acquire, and use, as their ordinary and habitual means of communication — their vernacular in fact — a language that is not understood by the people among whom they live.
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"The greatest achievement is to rise above yourself."
"Observe, Remember, Compare."
"We are all too much inclined, I think, to put off until tomorrow the things that we ought to do today."
"Before you can achieve anything, you must know what you want. And you must be prepared to sacrifice your comfort to get it."
"You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth. Ideas do not reach perfection in a day, no matter how much study is put upon them. It is perseverance in the pursuit of studies …"
From a letter regarding the use of sign language in deaf education.
Date: 1894
PhilosophicalFound in 1 providers: gemini
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Bell argues that deaf children should not adopt sign language as their primary everyday communication because the hearing majority around them cannot understand it. He frames this as practical advice for social integration — a vernacular only intelligible to other signers creates a barrier to participating in broader society. The quote advocates oral methods (speech and lip-reading) over sign language, prioritizing inclusion in the hearing world over deaf cultural identity.
Bell's mother Eliza and his wife Mabel were both deaf, profoundly shaping his career as a speech teacher before he invented the telephone. He founded organizations to advance oral education for deaf people and actively lobbied against sign language in schools. Bell genuinely believed oralism offered deaf people a better path to social participation, though historians now recognize his campaign caused significant harm to Deaf culture and linguistic identity.
The 1880 International Congress on Education of the Deaf in Milan voted to ban sign language from deaf schools worldwide, endorsing oral methods — a ruling that devastated Deaf communities for nearly a century. Bell was a prominent American voice for this oralist movement. The era's broader cultural emphasis on assimilation and erasing difference from disabled populations gave oralism moral authority it lacked in earlier decades.
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