Pedro Ponce de León
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Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
Benedictine
Benedictine
Benedictine refers to the spirituality and consecrated life in accordance with the Rule of St Benedict, written by Benedict of Nursia in the sixth century for the cenobitic communities he founded in central Italy. The most notable of these is Monte Cassino, the first monastery founded by Benedict...
monk
Monk
A monk is a person who practices religious asceticism, living either alone or with any number of monks, while always maintaining some degree of physical separation from those not sharing the same purpose...
who is often credited as being "the first teacher for the deaf".
Pedro Ponce de Leon established a school for the deaf at the San Salvador Monastery in Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
. His students were almost all children of wealthy aristocrat
Aristocracy (class)
The aristocracy are people considered to be in the highest social class in a society which has or once had a political system of Aristocracy. Aristocrats possess hereditary titles granted by a monarch, which once granted them feudal or legal privileges, or deriving, as in Ancient Greece and India,...
s who could afford private tutoring. His work with deaf children focused on helping them to learn how to speak language audibly. He also instructed children in writing and in simple gestures. Ponce de Leon is not known to have developed a working sign language
Sign language
A sign language is a language which, instead of acoustically conveyed sound patterns, uses visually transmitted sign patterns to convey meaning—simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speaker's...
, but there is some indication from at writings of Juan Pablo Bonet
Juan Pablo Bonet
Juan Pablo Bonet was a Spanish priest and pioneer of education for the deaf. He published the first book on deaf education in 1620 in Madrid....
that Ponce de Leon developed a manual alphabet which would allow a student who mastered it to spell out (letter by letter) any word. Modern researchers suspect that this alphabet was based, in whole or in part, on the simple hand gestures used by monks under a vow of silence.
Ponce de Leon's work with the deaf was considered bold by contemporaries, as the prevailing opinion among most Europeans in the 16th century was that the deaf were incapable of being educated. Many laymen even believed that the deaf were too simple-minded to be eligible for salvation under Christian doctrine.