Harriet Burbank Rogers

Life & Legacy

Harriet Burbank Rogers (April 12, 1834 – December 12, 1919) was an American educator, a pioneer in the oral method of instruction of the deaf. She was the first director of Clarke School for the Deaf, the first U.S. institution to teach the deaf by articulation and lip reading rather than by signing. Her advocacy for oralist instruction children increased utilization of oral-only communication models in many American schools.
She opposed the total communication approach that allows use of manual communication in addition to oral speech. The ability to gain understanding of specific information is greatly limited in an oral-only environment dependent on lipreading, where a profoundly deaf person with perfect vision is on average only able to understand less than one-third of what is spoken. As result, such oralist-only methods have been widely denounced by Deaf individuals deprived of language and vocabulary from the use of such methods.