History Doesn't Repeat Itself, But it Sure Does Rhyme (With Apologies to Mark Twain)

Abstract

In preparing for the 150th anniversary issue of the American Annals of the Deaf, which will feature articles dating back to 1847, I have read in areas outside my usual sphere of interest to gain some understanding of the past in order to better understand the present. I admit it has been slow going. On a positive note, I have accumulated a veritable treasure house of cliches about the past and its influence, or lack thereof, on the present and future. My favorite, aside from the mangled quote from Mark Twain in the title, is Kierkegaard's contention that life is lived forward but understood backward. Now, I have no idea what this means nor, for that matter, what Twain meant, but it sure looks good on paper. On a more serious note, I have been trying to assess what the last 150 years in the education of the deaf and hard of hearing children and adults mean and whether it has any relevance to us who live in a time that is essentially pragmatic and ahistorical. I was disappointed, but not surprised, to learn that there are fundamental, often bitter, differences of opinion over whether history is linear or circular. If it is linear, we have nothing to learn from the past. If it is circular, we have to understand its cycles within the ever-changing contexts of technologies and social systems. Obviously, human nature has not changed since the beginning of recorded history, and the basic human stages of birth, maturation, procreation, and death have not been repealed: yet the lives of our ancestors 150 years ago were far different from ours. (For that matter, not many of us were using e-mail or cellular phones just 10 or 15 years ago.) From my limited reading, it seems that different historians talked about 4-, 10-, 25-, and 50-year cycles, and even 200-year waves. But we are still left with the question of what it all means. The decade of the 1840s was certainly different than today. Slavery was still entrenched in the South and had only recently been abolished in some northern states. The Republic of Texas, which had seceded from Mexico, was in the process of becoming a state-only to secede from the United States two decades later in the Civil War. The American policy of Manifest Destiny was evident in the Mexican-American War and in the threat of war with England over what are now the states of Washington and Oregon. Our northern cities were being flooded by impoverished Irish-speaking immigrants fleeing from famine and German-speaking immigrants fleeing political upheaval. These dry historical facts had a direct impact on deaf individuals. Not many people realize that the first bilingual programs for deaf children were established within the framework of German/English-language schools in large American cities, that Catholic and Lutheran schools for the deaf were developed to maintain religious and cultural identities, that the growth of day schools in large cities was partly in response to the unwillingness of state residential schools to accept Jewish and Catholic children from Yiddish-, Polish-, and Italian-speaking families. …