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ularly his belief that they should not intermarry. "It is the duty of every good man and every good woman to remember that children follow marriage"
he wrote, "and I am sure that there is no one among the deaf who desires to have his affliction handed down to his children" In 1884 Bell headed a committee to plan fora major
convention in New York City, the Convention of Articulation Teachers of the Deaf. It was agreed that the following topics would be addressedtopics which represented nothing less than an attempt to eradicate the use of sign language in deaf day and residential schools. First steps in articulation teaching. Voice training. Speech reading. Classification of the deaf in regard
to articulation teaching5
. Artificial aids to hearing. How best to make speech the vernacular of our pupils. Difficulties experienced by deaf articulators on account of the irregularities of English spelling. Articulation as a means of instruction. Prerequisites of teachers of articulation. History of the methods of teaching speech to the deaf. The best means of promoting the cause of articulation teaching in America14
On
the last day of the convention, Alexander Graham Bell concluded his address to the hundreds of teachers who attended with an optimistic statement "I am sure that we must all feel intense gratification that the results of this convention promise to be productive of so much good. I think we must all feel stimulated and encouraged
by contact with one another, and I am sure that we shall go home with a deeper and firmer resolution to do what we canto give speech to the dumb and to teach the deaf to understand the speech of others."15
Bell's advocacy of oralism in the United States was mirrored in Europe. In 1880 at an international conference in Milan on
the education of deaf children,
it was decided, despite the protests of Gallaudet and a few
other sign language advocates, that oralism should replace manual signing
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