Braidwood's Academy: Britain's First School for Deaf Children

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The claim that the Edinburgh district of Dumbiedykes was named after the academy is popular but uncertain. Accounts of Braidwood's methods come mainly from visitors and later writers, since he published little.

Charles Shirreff

established Thomas Braidwood ran a school teaching mathematics in Edinburgh. In 1760 the father of Charles Shirreff, a deaf boy of about ten, asked him to teach his son to write. Braidwood succeeded, and went further, teaching the boy to speak. Shirreff later became a well-known miniature painter. The success led Braidwood to open an academy for deaf pupils.

The method

established Braidwood used what was later called a combined method, using natural signs, a manual alphabet, writing, lip-reading and articulation. His aim was to give pupils both language and speech. Teaching was expensive and individual, so most pupils came from wealthy families.

Johnson's visit

established In 1773 Samuel Johnson and James Boswell visited the academy during their tour of Scotland. Johnson was impressed, writing that the pupils "not only speak, write, and understand what is written, but if he that speaks looks towards them, and modifies his organs by distinct and full utterance, they know so well what is spoken, that it is an expression scarcely figurative to say, they hear with the eye." He described it as a subject of philosophical curiosity.

Pupils

established Pupils included John Goodricke, who became a pioneering astronomer, discovering the variability of the star Algol and explaining it, and was elected to the Royal Society before his death at 21 in 1786. The American Francis Green sent his deaf son to the academy and published an account of it in 1783 under the title Vox Oculis Subjecta.

Secrecy and its consequences

established In 1783 Braidwood moved his academy to Hackney, near London. He and his family, including his nephew Joseph Watson, who ran the London Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb from 1792, dominated deaf education in Britain and kept their methods secret.

shared In 1815 the American minister Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet came to Britain to learn how to teach deaf children. The Braidwood family would only train him on terms he found unacceptable, and he went instead to Paris, where he learned the sign-based methods of the Abbé Sicard. With the deaf French teacher Laurent Clerc, he founded the American School for the Deaf in 1817, and American Sign Language developed from that tradition. Historians see the episode as a turning point in deaf education.

An Edinburgh private school

shared Braidwood's Academy belonged to a large and poorly recorded world of private teaching. The historian R. D. Anderson, in Scottish Education since the Reformation (1997), notes that by the later 18th century parents in the larger towns had a wide choice of schools, and that Edinburgh's variety was probably exceptional for a capital and university city. Private education was very widespread, he writes, but has been underestimated because it left few traces in the records. Braidwood, a mathematics teacher whose deaf pupils paid high fees, fits that pattern, and it helps explain why so little is known of his teaching beyond what visitors wrote. Anderson does not discuss deaf education itself.

established The same decade saw other experiments in Scottish schooling. Perth Academy, founded in 1761 and based on mathematics and science, was an early example of the "academy movement" that Anderson describes as offering local families a modern alternative to the classical grammar school.

Legacy

established Braidwood's Academy is remembered as the beginning of deaf education in Britain. In Edinburgh, Donaldson's Hospital, a school for deaf children, opened in 1850 in a grand building designed by William Playfair. It was one of several charitable "hospital" schools founded in 19th-century Edinburgh from private bequests, alongside John Watson's and Daniel Stewart's.

• Braidwood's first deaf pupil later became a painter.
• Samuel Johnson said the pupils could "hear with the eye".
• The astronomer John Goodricke was a pupil.
• Braidwood kept his methods a family secret.
• The secrecy may have shaped American Sign Language history.

• Myth: the Edinburgh district of Dumbiedykes was named after the academy. The claim is popular, but it is uncertain.
• Disputed: what Braidwood's methods really were. Accounts come mainly from visitors and later writers, since he published little and the family kept its methods secret. The combined method of signs, fingerspelling, writing, lip-reading and speech is how they were later described.
• Disputed: why Gallaudet went to Paris in 1815. The usual account is that the Braidwood family would train him only on terms he found unacceptable, so he learned the sign-based methods of the Abbé Sicard instead. Historians see the episode as a turning point for American deaf education, but sources differ on the details.