Emma Garrett

Emma Garrett was an American educator of the deaf who lived from around 1846 to 1893 and became one of the most influential advocates for oral speech instruction in nineteenth-century deaf education. Born in Philadelphia, she trained at Alexander Graham Bell's Boston University School of Oratory, graduating in 1878, before joining the Pennsylvania Institute for the Deaf and Dumb at Mount Airy as a speech instructor. Working alongside her sister Mary Smith Garrett, she co-founded the Pennsylvania Home for the Training in Speech of Deaf Children Before They Are of School Age, known as the Bala Home, in 1882, and served as its superintendent. Garrett championed oralism over sign language, developing what she called the word method, an approach that combined syllabic instruction with lip-reading practice to help young deaf children acquire spoken language before they reached ordinary school age. She traveled to Europe in 1890 to study deaf education abroad and demonstrated her methods publicly at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where she died in 1893.