Communication network update series nr 3

The first attempts to educate congenitally deafblind children took place in the XIXth century. The vision of the pioneers of deafblind education was to help these children to wrench themselves away from a world of chaos and darkness and enter a world of light and meaning.

For them, the key for opening the door which separates these two worlds was language. When Helen Keller in USA and Marie Heurtin in France, produced their first linguistic expression (the fingerspelled word “water” for Helen and the word “knife” produced in tactile sign language by Marie), it was felt that they had joined our human community.