著者

森田 伸子

出版者

一般社団法人日本教育学会

雑誌

教育學研究 (ISSN:03873161)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.70, no.4, pp.498-510, 2003-12-30

---

The history of modern education has been the history of nationalization of people by teaching them the national language and its letters. The level of national literacy has been regarded as the criterion of the level of the modernization. It must be noticed that this process of invention of literate people was also the process that made deaf people abandon their natural language=sign language and accept the national language=language of voice. Deaf people were forced to learn the language of voice, as well as its letters. In other words, the hypothesis of the general development from orality to literacy, which has been supported by some anthropologists, has no meanings for the deaf people. There used to be, however, various ideas of languages, including the gestures as well as the speech, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries Europe. It is remarkable that both of them were regarded as "natural language" and thought to have their own writings, alphabet letters for the former and some kind of characters for the latter. In this paper, we will examine these two types of writings, and the different meanings or possibilities of literacy.