ASSAROTTI, OTTAVIO GIOVAMBATTISTA. - Piarist, b. in Genoa on 25 Oct. 1753 and d. there on 24 Jan. 1829. Having entered the congregation of the Pious Schools, he devoted himself with zeal and success to the teaching of physics, philosophy and theology. But his principal work, for which he deserves a worthy place in the history of pedagogy, is that carried out for the education of the deaf-mute. Animated by a profound spirit of Christian charity and thinking that the mind grasps and intuits things by its own living act, A. turned to their education with results that, for those times, were satisfactory. He was in contact with Sicard and also, naturally, with the other founders of institutes for the deaf-mute in Italy, who went to Genoa to inform themselves about the one he had founded. Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel I favored A.'s work, so that he was able to keep his institution going in Genoa during his lifetime.
It cannot be said that A. had a preordained and fixed method, and to anyone who asked him the reason for it he could reply that he had the method of having none; not in the sense that he had or gave no rule or law to his educational work, but rather in the sense that to each particular case he applied a particular method and, one might say, a particular treatment. In fact he now adhered to natural mimicry, now to conventional mimicry, and sometimes he even attempted the emission of articulated speech or writing. The fact is that A., as a critic says of his method, followed the rigorous order of the genesis and concatenation of ideas, both in imparting knowledge and in linguistic teaching, in which, anticipating the celebrated Rosminian theory of the degrees and orders of intellections in the mental development of the child, he started from a most elementary idea in order to raise gradually the whole linguistic edifice, not passing to a new form of language without the first having been well understood and assimilated. A. was concerned to resolve the theoretical problem of linguistic learning into the more properly educational problem of the awakening and spiritual enrichment of the deaf-mute. To this end he also made use of play, work and religious practices. Enrico Mayer, who in 1823 visited the Institute of Genoa, conversing with A. himself, in the account he gave of it to Vieusseux, lamented that A.'s education imparted to the deaf-mute was too theoretical. Better, Mayer thought, if provision had been made to develop in them practical aptitudes, as those that can be more proper to this kind of handicapped person: "Why," says Mayer, "not make them good artisans instead of superficial men of letters?". The means of communication of which A. made use were natural mimicry, a mimicry invented by him, dactylology, writing and articulated speech. The latter for those who had already spoken.
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Nino Sammartano