The History of Teaching the Blind
For centuries, the blind were considered not capable of learning to read and write. Fortunately, a joint commitment by the sighted and the sightless, combined with technical ingenuity, produced techniques that have allowed the blind to achieve literacy and express their unlimited learning potential.
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Early History
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In ancient times, there was no effort to educate the blind, mainly due to the widely held belief that the blind had limited mental capacities. However, in the fourth and fifth centuries, hospices that taught religion to the blind began to appear in Israel and Syria. Early in the seventh century a hospice for the blind was built in northwest France, and in the 11th century four such establishments were founded by William the Conqueror, also in France. Around 1260, Louis IX, the king of France, established the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts, which housed 300 blind persons. Another French king, John the Good, built a similar institution around 1350. Around this time other such facilities began to spring up in Belgium, Italy and Germany. Inmates at these hospices received religious instruction and were also taught simple handicrafts, but concerted efforts to educate the blind were still 200 to 300 years away.
European Roots of Learning
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By 1501, Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardano came up with a way to teach the blind to read and write through the sense of touch. The method involved dragging a stylus over the outline of letters that had been engraved on metal. In 1575, a similar method was created in Rome using letters that were carved in wood. Neither of these methods--as well as others that were developed--dealt with the issue of how the blind could reproduce these letters with uniform height and spacing. About 75 years later, an Italian Jesuit came up with a system of dots within parts of a square to signify letters, which prompted other code-like techniques to be developed. These methods did away with the need for the blind to learn all the letters of the alphabet; instead they could just memorize the codes.
In 1711, a blind mathematician named Nicholas Saunderson introduced the first tablet that allowed the blind to do mathematical calculations. Between 1772 and 1784, maps for the blind were developed that relied on raised lines and letters. It was in the latter year that Valentin Hauy--a Frenchman sometimes called “the father of the education of the blind”--launched the first unofficial school for the blind, teaching his students reading, writing, math, handicrafts and music. Starting with one blind 17-year-old boy who supported himself and his family by begging, the Paris school’s enrollment soon swelled to 50, and the school became the model for many others in both hemispheres. Because of Hauy, schools and industrial training centers for the blind were established in all civilized countries in the world. In fact, by the end of the 18th century, four such schools had sprung up in Great Britain alone.
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The Advent of Braille
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The first school for the blind in the U.S. was Perkins School for the Blind. Samuel Howe, the first director of the school, made it his mission to adapt all educational methods to the needs of the blind. He devised his own system of printing and reading and began publishing books on campus. However, Howe’s systems could not be used without employing heavy equipment, and his handwriting methods, though readable by the sighted, could not be read by the blind. In the 1820s, a 15-year-old student at the Paris school for the blind, Louis Braille, invented a writing system that solved both of these problems. Braille’s system, based on a dot-writing system invented by an army officer for use by soldiers in battle, used six dots within cells to correspond with the letters of the alphabet. Braille could be read quickly with the fingertips and written with the use of a stylus and a punch frame that clamped around a piece of paper. The system was completed by 1834, and in the following decades was widely adopted by European schools for the blind. In 1854, France adopted Braille as its official communication system for the blind. In 1860, the Missouri School for the Blind became the first U.S. school to use Braille’s method for reading and writing. In 1892, Joel Smith, a teacher at the Perkins School, modified the Braille method, naming it American braille.
The Braille Typewriter Debuts
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In the same year that American braille appeared, Frank Hall, superintendent of the Illinois School for the Blind, invented a portable personal braille writer, which greatly improved the speed of writing, but its performance was unpredictable. Several decades passed before an improved braille typewriter surfaced, produced by the American Foundation of the Blind. However, this model also proved clumsy and was not too durable, which led to the invention in 1941 of a new brailler by David Abraham, a teacher at the Perkins School. In 1946, Perkins trustees decided to support the production of Abraham’s machine, naming it the Perkins Brailler. In 1951 the first 2,000 machines were produced at a cost of $70 apiece.
Educational Impact
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Despite the fact that Braille dots do not resemble print letters, the system has been adapted to nearly every language worldwide and remains the major medium of learning for blind people everywhere.
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