“Do you hear with your ears or with your eyes?”: the education of the deaf pupils at Casa Pia de Lisboa (c.1820–1950)

Abstract

This paper focuses on the education of the deaf pupils at Casa Pia de Lisboa, a Portuguese boarding‐school, covering the period from 1820 to 1950. The intention is to show that a historical sedimentation of a scientific discourse about deafness is an effect of a new rationality of government begun by modernity and perfectly fitting a bio‐political strategy. The development of medical and psychological sciences and their inscription in the educational landscape allows the appearance of new techniques and instruments in the observation and comprehension of the school population, as well as a rush of experts on social prophylactic. The field of practice offers a single heterogenous surface on which discursive objects are involved in the production of effects of power and types of subjectivities: this article is crossed by the double image normal–abnormal deployed by school practices. The conceptualisation of deafness as an abnormality justified the multiplication of corrective processes directed to an erasing of deafness. The deaf were fabricated as the Other of the educative arena and the hospitality given to them was no more than conditional. The oral lingo was conceived not only as the normal but also as the official language that the deaf had to assimilate.

Keywords:

• Casa Pia de Lisboa
• deaf pupil
• deafness
• normal‐abnormal
• bio‐politics
• modernity

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Jorge Ramos do Ó for helping in the revision of the paper.

Notes

¹ Casa Pia de Lisboa is a Portuguese boarding school created in 1780 and still existing today.

² Nikolas Rose, The Psychological Complex: Psychology, Politics and Society in England, 1869–1939 (London, 1985).

³ See, for example, Thomas S. Popkewitz, “Rethinking the political: reconstituting national imaginaries and producing difference,” International Journal of Inclusive Education 5, nos 2/3 (2001): 179–207; id., Cultural Productions: (Re)constituting the Nation, the Child & Teacher in the Educational Sciences (Lisbon, 2002).

⁴ César da Silva, Real Casa Pia de Lisboa. Breve história da sua fundação, grandeza e desenvolvimento de 1780 até ao presente (Lisbon, 1896), 2.

⁵ Ibid., 16.

⁶ Jorge Ramos do Ó, “A Casa Pia (1780–1960) como laboratório da modernidade educativa em Portugal: Reflexões em torno de um projecto em curso,” in Casa Pia de Lisboa: Concretizar um Projecto de Esperança (Lisbon, 2005).

⁷ Foucault, “La ‘gouvernamentalité’,” in Dits et écrits II, 1976–1988 (Paris, 2001),635–657; “Les techniques de soi” (ibid., 1602–1632).

⁸ See, for example, Rose, Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power and Personhood (Cambridge, 1996); Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge, 1999); Popkewitz, Struggling for the Soul: The Politics of Schooling and the Construction of the Teacher (New York: 1998); Thomas S. Popkewitz and Marie Brennan, eds, Foucault’s Challenge: Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Education (New York, 1998); Ó, O governo dos escolares: Uma aproximação teórica às perspectivas de Michel Foucault (Lisbon, 2001). Ó, O Governo de si mesmo: Modernidade Pedagógica e encenações disciplinares do aluno liceal (Lisbon, 2003).

⁹ Popkewitz and Brennan, “Foucault in a Conversation with Education,” in Foucault’s Challenge: Discourse, Knowledge and Power in Education, ed. Popkewitz and Brennan, 5.

¹⁰ Thomas S. Popkewitz, Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform: Science, Education, and Making Society by Making the Child (New York and London, 2008), 4.

¹¹ Maura C. Lopes, “A natureza educável do surdo,” in A invenção da surdez, ed. Adriana Thoma and Maura C. Lopes (Santa Cruz do Sul, 2005), 41.

¹² Rose, The Psychological Complex, 3 and 5.

¹³ Popkewitz, Struggling for the Soul, 77.

¹⁴ Ó, O Governo de si mesmo, 9.

¹⁵ Rose, Powers of Freedom, 223; Nikolas Rose, Inventing our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood (Cambridge, 1996), 121.

¹⁶ Foucault, “Techniques de soi,” in Dits et écrits II, 1604.

¹⁷ Rose, The Psychological Complex, 7.

¹⁸ Cunha, História do Instituto dos surdo–mudos e cegos de Lisboa desde a sua fundação até à sua incorporação na Casa Pia (Lisbon, 1835), 17.

¹⁹ Julia Varela and Fernando Alvarez‐Uria, Arqueologia de la Escuela (Madrid, 1991), 224.

²⁰ G. Baguer, “Anormaux (Enfants),” in Nouveau Dictionnaire de Pédagogie et d’Instruction Primaire, dir. F. Buisson (Paris, 1911), 79.

²¹ Gabriel Compayré, Cours de Pédagogie Theorique et Pratique (Paris, 1897), 11.

²² Durkheim and Buisson, “Enfance,” in Nouveau Dictionnaire de Pédagogie et d’Instruction Primaire, dir. F. Buisson, 552–553; Durkheim, “Éducation” (ibid. 529–536).

²³ Ó, “The Disciplinary Terrains of Soul and Self‐Government in the First Map of the Educational Sciences (1879–1911),” Sísifo. Educational Sciences Journal, 02 (2006): 131, http://sisifo.fpce.ul.pt.

²⁴ Ferreira, Algumas lições de psicologia e de pedologia (Porto, 1920), 17–18.

²⁵ Filipe, Crianças a salvar (Porto, 1942), 25.

²⁶ Rose, The Psychological Complex, 7.

²⁷ Ibid., 6.

²⁸ Ferreira, “A criança anormal,” A Criança Anormal, 1, no. 1 (1930): 8.

³⁰ António Aurélio da Costa Ferreira, “Ensino dos Surdos‐mudos,” Revista Educação 9 (1913): 82–83.

²⁹ Canguilhem, Georges. O Normal e o Patológico (Rio de Janeiro, 2002) 22.

³² Ibid., 4.

³¹ Ary dos Santos, Arquivo da Universidade de Lisboa, VI (Lisboa, 1920), 4.

³³ Ibid., 5.

³⁴ Colin Gordon, “Governmental rationality. An introduction,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. G. Burchell, C. Gordon and Miller (London, 1991), 9.

³⁵ See Erving Goffman, Asylums (London, 1991).

³⁶ Rose, Powers of Freedom, 54.

³⁷ See Michel Foucault, Vigiar e Punir (Petrópolis, 2004), 162–192.

³⁸ Antonino Gonçalves Amaral, “A educação das crianças surdas,” in A Reforma do Ensino no Instituto de Jacob Rodrigues Pereira (Lisboa, 1954), 45–46.

³⁹ Alfred Binet, Les Idées modernes sur les enfants (Paris, 1913), 14–15.

⁴⁰ Ferreira, “Sobre psicologia, estética e pedagogia do gesto,” Anuário da Casa Pia de Lisboa 1916–1917 (1917): 538.

⁴¹ Ian Hunter, “Assembling the school,” in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo‐liberalism and Rationalities of Government, ed. A. Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose (Chicago, 1996), 143–166.

⁴² Ó, O Governo de si mesmo, 105.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 3–5.

⁴³ Guia para a confissão dos alunos surdos (Lisboa), 3.

⁴⁵ Joaquim José da Trindade, Exercícios de observação e de linguagem conforme as 600 gravuras do álbum “O português pela imagem” (Porto, 1906), 94–95.

⁴⁶ See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernidade e ambivalência (Rio de Janeiro, 1999).

⁴⁸ Filipe, Breves notas sobre o ensino dos surdos‐mudos em Portugal (Barcelona, 1920), 29.

⁴⁷ Jacques Derrida, Da hospitalidade (Viseu, 2003), 36.

⁴⁹ Foucault, Vigiar e punir, 130.

⁵⁰ Rosa Y. Alberty, “Um curso de Maria Montessori em Barcelona,” Anuário da Casa Pia de Lisboa 1916–1917 (1917): 346.

⁵¹ Lopes, “A natureza educável do surdo,” in A invenção da surdez, ed. Thoma and Lopes, 46.

⁵² Trindade, Exercícios de observação e de linguagem conforme as 600 gravuras do álbum “O português pela imagem”, 19, 20.