Fuller, Sarah

Sarah Fuller, (born February 15, 1836, Weston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died August 1, 1927, Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts), American educator, an early and powerful advocate of teaching deaf children to speak rather than to sign.

Fuller graduated from the Allan English and Classical School in West Newton, Massachusetts, and then became a schoolteacher. From 1855 to 1869 she taught in Newton, Massachusetts, and then in Boston. In 1869 she studied for three months under Harriet B. Rogers at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, in order to prepare for her new post of principal of the Boston School for Deaf-Mutes, which opened with 10 pupils in November of that year. It was the first such institution in the country to be operated on a day-school basis, and in the first five years of her principalship the enrollment increased sixfold. In 1870 she learned of “visible speech,” the system of Alexander Melville Bell for teaching the deaf, and it was at her invitation that his son, Alexander Graham Bell, traveled to the United States the next year to teach the system to the school’s faculty.

Fuller believed in beginning speech instruction for deaf children at an early age. In this idea she went against the prevailing opinion of her organized colleagues. Her Illustrated Primer (1888) was written for the instruction of teachers. In that year Mr. and Mrs. Francis Brooks, parents of a deaf daughter, endowed the Sarah Fuller Home for Little Children Who Cannot Hear to promote her methods among children of nursery-school age. (The home lasted until 1925; the endowment later became the Sarah Fuller Foundation for Little Deaf Children of the Boston Children’s Medical Center.) In 1890, with Alexander Graham Bell, Caroline A. Yale, and others, Fuller helped found the progressive American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, of which she was a director from 1896. In 1910 Fuller retired as principal of her school, which had been known since 1877 as the Horace Mann School for the Deaf.