William van Praagh

William van Praagh was a British educator, born Wolf Saloman van Praagh in Rotterdam in 1845, who settled in England in 1866 and became a pioneer of the Oralist method of educating deaf children, a method that taught deaf pupils to speak and to lip read rather than to rely on sign language. He established day schools for deaf students in England at a time when residential institutions dominated deaf education, arguing that day schooling kept children closer to their families and to ordinary spoken language use, and he founded institutions to train teachers in oralist methods so that his approach could spread beyond the schools he personally ran. His advocacy helped move deaf education in England toward oralism in the decades before and after 1880, a shift that became one of the most consequential and debated turns in the history of deaf education.