hi i'm olivia welcome to my channel
this is going to be a very comfortable
raw unedited video because
i really needed this video um it's about
alexander graham bell
and his relation to the deaf community
and deaf people
so i am a blogger a mommy blogger
boy mom a teacher of basically
everything
and right now i'm making income by
making lesson plans for teachers pay
teachers
and i'm making a lesson plan right now
about the deaf community deaf culture
deaf awareness month and audism and
so i've been looking for videos about
alexander graham bell
and how about eugenics
and oralism and basically
every video that i've found on youtube i
just got tired of looking at them
because
they either completely skipped over the
part about
the dark side of alexander graham bell
or they were
way over the top like dramatic drastic
hateful inappropriate things that i
wouldn't show junior higher high school
students
so as unbiased as i can be about this
topic
i'm going to give you the basic rundown
so first of all
most of us know hopefully that
alexander graham bell invented the telephone
also he invented the metal detector
but not everyone knows about his
issues with the deaf community
deaf people deaf culture so
way back in the day in the 1800s
alexander graham bell his mother was deaf
his father taught elocution which is
like
that he taught speech like speech
teacher so
he taught people how to speak nice how
to
um if they had a lisp how to
speak without a lisp things like that
things that a speech teacher does
so because his mother was deaf and
because his father
taught speech therapy basically
um agb alexander graham bell decided
i'm really interested in teaching the
deaf
um his father definitely pushed him
towards that
so he became very interested
in oralism oralism is the opposite
of sign language oralism means
that a deaf person should learn to speak
this is the idea that a deaf person
should learn to speak
and not sign it's the idea that a deaf
person
will do better in society if they know
how to speak
and if they learn how to sign their
language
will be non-existent and they just won't
survive in the world
and so alexander graham bell was a huge
advocate of that because his mother
could speak
who and remember his mother was deaf so
he saw this great example of a person
which is a very rare thing that could
speak
however his mother i do believe
correct me in the comments if i'm wrong
because i'm not editing this video
um i do believe his mother was deaf
later in life so she already knew how to
speak i was going to try to not say
things that
i didn't know 100% were factual but
who knows what comes out of my mouth so
um another crazy thing that alexander
graham bell
advocated for was that he believed
that deafness was inherited which is
crazy because he had a deaf wife
so he married a deaf woman and
they had four children total two of them
survived infancy guess how many were
deaf
zero so he believed that deafness was
inherited however
none of his children were deaf so
he because he believed that it was
inherited here's where eugenics comes in
if you don't know what eugenics means
it's like genetics dna
like um not going to go into
an obvious person that we know about
eugenics or that
was into eugenics but basically we want
the perfect
race hint hint who that person is that
i'm talking about we want the perfect
race
get rid of all the discrepancies all the
flaws so that we can have the perfect
race
so he believed alexander graham bell
believed that deaf people should not be
allowed to marry and have
children even if they married a
hearing person he felt like he thought
that they would have deaf children so he
believed
that deaf people should not be able to
should not be allowed to be married
should not be allowed to have children
even though he was married to a deaf
person
so
not every deaf person but the deaf
community
in a as a whole
despises alexander graham bell. and me as
a hearing person
learning about deaf
culture in college i was amazed because
we don't hear that
the hearing community is like oh yay
alexander graham bell invented the
telephone and i've got my cell phone
connected to my hand at all times
preaching to the choir but
when i heard this you know i was amazed
people just skim over that so
because of alexander graham bell's ideas
and his
prominence his well being well known for
being an inventor
he was able to help pass a law in 1880
that made sign language banned
in deaf schools so if deaf children
can't communicate in sign language can't
learn sign language
then what are they going to do they have
to learn oralism
so from 1880
to 1970 90 years
i'm sorry i've been watching a lot of
these videos and they make me want to
cry so
a lot 90 years sign language was not
allowed
in deaf schools
so they all had to learn oralism well
hearing culture you might immediately
think yay that's great all these people
could learn
to speak however
um only
10% of deaf people
can read lips and the best lip readers
so of those 10% the very best can read
about 30%
of what you're saying so like maybe
you're covering your mouth maybe you
have a mustache
i hope i don't have a mustache um maybe you
have an accent maybe you have a lisp
in a perfect situation only 30%
of what you're saying can be read maybe
you're chewing gum maybe you're looking
this way
so oralism really doesn't work
except for that tiny percent of people
like alexander graham bell's mother
so not only did he take the ability to
speak away he also took away
a beautiful community and a beautiful
culture if you know nothing about the
deaf community
and the deaf culture definitely check
out
any video on it on youtube
the culture is just beautiful um he made
hundreds of thousands of people feel
isolated who were already
living in this world of people they
couldn't communicate to
now they can't even communicate with
people who are just like them
because they were not allowed to sign in
school
think about that you can't speak you
can't use your hands
how are you going to communicate with
people some people did
know sign language very little because
90%
of deaf kids are born to hearing parents
um so very few could you know
sign under the desk
so another negative
of oralism if they were in deaf school
they were spending a ton of time on
teaching the kids how to speak
if the deaf kid was in a hearing school
like they were in a smaller town
then the deaf kid was being taken out of
the class
during lessons and taught how to
speak so in both situations
they are losing time spent in
english math science history um
maybe art so by the time they get out of
school
they have no they have a very poor
education
so i told you that the that asl
started being allowed in schools again
in 1970
when a study was done that asl
is in fact a language it meets all the
requirements of being
an official language so asl started
being allowed in schools again
in the 1970s i'm pretty sure you know
people who were alive and went to school
in the 1970s
so the deaf people that went to well the
60s because 1970
it started being allowed so people that
went to school in the 50s and 60s
that are still alive today remember
um having that were deaf remember having
oralist teachers and
guess what they didn't know sign
language if they graduated
before that was really going on so when
i was in college learning sign language
a lot of my professors who were deaf
did not learn sign language until they
got to college
if they didn't go to college because
they had a poor education
um because of oralism then there may be
deaf people alive today
actually i'm pretty sure like there's
going to be deaf people alive today that
never got to learn sign language
and are very isolated so
i really tried to not be biased i'm sure
you can figure out
how i feel about this but what do you
think of alexander graham bell
let me know in the comments nobody has
wrong answers this is just an opinion
um do you think that he is a good guy
yay telephone metal detector
headed to the beach to get me some
quarters
um or do you think he's a bad guy who
wanted deaf
people to go extinct or
do you think that he was just a very
confused man who thought he was doing
the best for everyone
or do you think something else so i hope
you enjoyed my video give it a like
and if you're done with me you can turn
this off now
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um mom-spiration mom
advice check out my website and all of
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plans for like
everything except science because i'm
terrible at science
so give me a like do the bell thing
this is definitely my first time to say
all this so i'm awkward
so hope you enjoyed and you learned
a lot about alexander graham bell in my
12 minutes of speaking
bye
