Essay/Term paper: Never the twain shall meet book report

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Cliff Notes

Throughout the ITP program and the lower level ASL classes the name Gallaudet is driven into our heads. We know of the University named after him and how he was the man to bring education to the Deaf in America. What was not before mentioned is that there were two Gallaudets. The first thing I learned from this book is the importance of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and his son Edward Miner Gallaudet. I fact I had believed for some time now that E.M. Gallaudet was this extraordinary man that everyone loved and the named a university after him. It is unfortunate that this was not made clearer in the past. Now all I see is a man who took the only path that he knew how to take.

E.M. Gallaudet had very little choice but to instruct in the way that he did. It is true that it was ultimately his choice but I believe that nurture is much more powerful than nature. E.M."s mother was taught sign and communicated in sign to her husband and child. Naturally E.M. would think this is the best method of instruction. To think other wisely would be to say that his mother was inadequate. In turn this would mean that his upbringing was inadequate which would lead to the conclusion that he himself was an inadequate person. For his own salvation and peace of mind E.M. was given his path at birth. For him to have strayed from this would have ended up being a long and lonely road cutting all ties with the past.

So E.M. like any normal man of that time chose to follow the path that was set out for him. T.H. Gallaudet was himself a teacher and I am sure passed on many of these traits to his son if not genetically then in his upbringing. It was no surprise to me after finding out that T.H. was himself a teacher that E.M. would be a teacher. This was further specializing in that T.H. was a teacher of the Deaf, which was to be the life long profession for E.M.

In the beginning E.M. wanted to be a business man and make lots of money. This is probably attributed to the life he must have had with his father living the lifestyle of a minister. His dreams were of course cut short when his father died. E.M. tried his hand at some business in the bank but deciding on an education went to college. To pay for this venture E.M. did the only thing that he knew how to due and that was work in the Deaf world. In the book it is mentioned that he received the job through family ties. I can accept the obvious in that his father used to run the school. Looking more deeply into that sentence I believe that the underlying meaning holds more information.

The ties to E.M."s family lied not in the school board but rather in him. I believe that he felt tied to the Deaf world and in a sense felt that by his fathers early death E.M. needed to carry on the family name in educating the Deaf. I sense that E.M. was finishing what his father had started. E.M. did find a way to differ himself from the past in one distinct way.

In his first marriage the author made it clear that E.M. was not all too involved. With his second wife he apparently loved her but still he was not so devoted to her. With the amount of time they were separated and their odd relationship. I wonder, wether or not this was a desired union as well. The book mentioned E.M. possible homosexuality I propose that E.M. wanted to be with the Deaf and not the hearing. Perhaps he wanted at the same time to educate and become more intimately involved with the Deaf. As his father before him was.

One thing I found surprising was that E.M. did not enter religion. In a way though he learned to proper method of preaching. In that preaching is a method to bring others to see and agree with your point of view. E.M. demonstrated this with his exceptional talent in dealing with congress and procuring funds for the school.

Alexander Graham Bell before I read this book was nothing more than the inventor of the telephone. Which that too, has been diminished. I once had a science teacher that said once all the information exists the inevitable conclusion must be reached and many times by more than one person at various locations. The book touched briefly that Bell was not the only person to have created this invention. That was the only mention of this claim to fame for Bell the rest of the book describing Bell was new information to me. Unfortunately or maybe fortunately for Bell he was stuck in the same predicament that E.M. was stuck in. Bell Like E.M. had a deaf mother and Bell like E.M. had an instructor for a father. Bell differed from E.M. in that his family was focused on speech. For the same reason Bell had to Follow oralism to save his own self image. This is an odd reason but if thought about and placed in their time it is a sound reason. Men had to believe in themselves and Bell was a man.

The man that Bell had to model himself after was his father. This is slightly different from E.M. in that Bell did not lose his father early on. The reasons for him following in his fathers foot steps is demonstrated in the mentioning of Bell"s Grand father. There must have been enormous pressure for Bell to enter the field of Speech therapy in one form or another.

Bell unlike E.M. was a genius, he had many different ventures in the world that he participated in. Bell shooting to be who he wanted to be made good money. Were as E.M. shooting to make good money ended up being where he wanted to be.

I was not aware as I am sure most are not that Bell played such a large role in the education of the Deaf. When First I read the topic of the book, I imagined it to be a logical progression from one philosophy to another. As shown in human history when a new philosopher reads the works of another than modifies it to include the present knowledge and this person becomes the father of a new philosophy. This was what I imagined the communications debate to be. With Bell starting off with oralism then years later E.M. modifies this to include sign and a few people fight to maintain the old but the new and obviously improved method wins out and all is fine. Imagine my surprise when I found that both philosophies emerged at the same time. Rather than one established method being modified, the process became the attempt for dominance by two apparently different methods

This Debate that still rages on today. I cannot attribute this to either Bell or E.M. but rather I must attribute this to their parents. It was mere circumstance that both of them were brought to the forefront of the battle between oralism and sign language. I think that Bell in the beginning was for both sign and speech as he himself learned to sign and use it to deliver a speech at E.M. school. I believe also that E.M. would have gone for both methods as he was a main advocate for speech therapy in schools for the deaf. If only Bell had lived, I think that schools today would be taught in sign with the mandatory education in speech therapy. This is very similar to what we call partial main streaming in today"s public schools where they are beginning to adopt the Bi-Bi method. In turn I think that if E.M. were the only person to battle for Deaf education than the schooling would be the same. The problem is that neither man was given the opportunity to explore fully the other half of their profession as they were forced to take sides and fight a battle.

Bells battle for speech really built it self from an unlikely place. The courthouse is were Bell learned that man cannot be trusted. I think that bell was more mad at himself for not keeping better records to prove that he was the first to invent the telephone. Bell learned here that one needs to pick a topic and argue for it directly. This was the beginning of the end for Bell.

E.M. had his down fall in his inability to commit. E.M. may have believed that a man"s word was all that was needed but in truth this is not so. I agree with Bell in that if E.M. was not willing to state it in front of congress then he was probably not willing to hold true to his word.

The debate in congress for E.M. to establish a school for teachers of the Deaf is where I would mark the beginning of the battle between oralism and sign. Up until this down fall between friends I think that each was beginning to see the importance of what the other was saying. These two men let their differences in one matter cloud their judgment in other matters.

At this point in their lives I think that E.M. chose to battle for sign because Bell was battling for oralism and the same goes for the reciprocal. These two men could have been both the great founders of modern Deaf education both using speech and sign while still maintaining a normal public atmosphere. This would have allowed the debate to be where to instruct the Deaf rather than how to instruct them. It is apparent from modern research and was probably apparent to both men of the past that the best method of instruction is not one or the other but both which would eventually develop into the Bi-Bi method. The education for the Deaf could have become something great if these two men had stopped their arguing before it started and allowed what they knew was right to win out over their pride. All the information had been gathered and they were both heading to the same and only conclusion until they stopped caring and started bickering. Looking back at both men"s past, I can see where the down fall was. Both of them had to start on their road to educating the Deaf because their pride showed them the starting point. Either man, given no competition would have arrived at the obvious conclusion for using both methods. Both men once entered into competition were driven to rely on their instincts and revert back to what they knew best which unfortunately for us today were opposing views. Still, the battle rages on.

Winefild, Richard, Never The Twain Shall Meet, Gallaudet University Press, Washington ,D.C. 1949