ABSTRACT
Yale, Caroline Ardelia (1848-1933). American educator of the deaf. Yale was born in Charlotte, Vermont, the daughter of a farmer and was educated at Williston Academy, Vermont and Mount Holyoke Seminary, South Hadley, Massachusetts, 1866-8. She taught in local schools for two years and in 1870, joined the staff of the Clarke Institute for Deaf Mutes (later Clarke School for the Deaf), Northampton, Massachusetts. The school, started by Harriet B. Rogers three years earlier, taught children to read by the oral method. Yale’s commitment to Clarke School was a lifelong one. She was associate principal, 1873-86 and principal, 1886-1922, continuing to direct the teacher training programme until 1933, thus spending 60 years at this work. Starting with the ‘visible speech’ system of Alexander Melville Bell, Yale, in collaboration with Alice C. Worcester, developed the Northampton Vowel and Consonant Charts which better represented the range of elementary sounds making up the English language. The system was so successful that it was adopted for use in teaching children of normal hearing to read. In 1889, Yale established a teacher training department at the school which attracted attention from many countries. She was ultimately responsible for the introduction of the teaching of speech in the majority of American schools for the deaf. One of the founding members of the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, 1890. Lectured in phonetics, department of spoken English, Smith College, trustee, Northampton Hospital for the Insane, member of the Northampton School Committee for 25 years and trustee, Clarke School, 1918-33. Yale received honorary degrees from Illinois Wesleyan College, 1896, Smith College, 1910 and Mount Holyoke College, 1927. See her Formation and Development of Elementary English Sounds (1892); Years of Building: Memories of a Pioneer in a Special Field of Education (1931).
