Pedro Ponce de León

For the bishop, see Pedro Ponce de León (bishop).

Pedro Ponce de León

Pedro Ponce de León teaching a pupil. Detail of a monument in Madrid.

Fray Pedro Ponce de Leon (1520–1584) was a Spanish Benedictine monk 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. His students were almost all children of wealthy aristocrats 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, but there is some indication from at writings of Juan Pablo Bonet 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.

External links

• A brief article (scroll to the bottom of the page) detailing recent research on de Leon
• The "Education of the Deaf and Dumb" article from the Catholic Encyclopedia, which mentions de Leon's work, among others