Oral Education as Emancipation
After the Civil War, education reformers urged schools for deaf children to fundamentally change their teaching methods. Reformers wanted eliminate "manualism," the use of sign language, and replace it with "oralism," the exclusive use of speech and lipreading. Residential schools, from their beginnings, had conducted classes in sign language, fingerspelling, and written English. Lessons in lipreading and speech had been added to the curriculum at many schools in the 1860s, but for advocates of oralism this was not the crux of the issue. They opposed sign language, believing that it slowed the development of speech and set deaf people apart from society.