OSSAROTTI, OTTAVIO GIOVANBATTISTA. – Scolopian, b. in Genoa on 25 Oct. 1753, d. there on 24 Jan. 1829. Having entered the Piarist congregation, 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 which he carried out for the education of the deaf-mute. Animated by a profound spirit of Christian charity and reflecting on how the mind grasps and intuitively comprehends things through its own living act, he turned to their education with results, for those times, that were satisfactory. He was in contact with Sicard and also, naturally, with the other founders of institutions for the deaf-mute in Italy, who came to Genoa to learn about the one he had founded. Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel I supported the work of A., enabling him thus to maintain his institution in Genoa throughout his lifetime.
It cannot be said that A. had a preordained and fixed method, and to those who asked him for its rationale he could reply that he had none; not in the sense that he lacked or did not provide a rule or principle for his educational work, but rather in the sense that for each particular case he applied a method, and, one might say, a particular care. Indeed, he employed now the natural method, now the conventional one, and sometimes attempted the emission of articulated speech or writing. For A., as one critic says of his method, «followed the rigorous order of the genesis and concatenation of ideas, both in imparting knowledge and in linguistic instruction, in which, following the celebrated Rosminian theory of the degrees and orders of intuitions in the child’s mental development, he began from an elementary idea to gradually build up the entire linguistic structure, not moving on to a new form of language until the first was well understood and assimilated». A. was concerned with resolving the theoretical problem of language acquisition within the more properly educational problem of awakening and enriching the spiritual life 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 in Genoa and conversed with A. himself, in the account he gave to Vieusseux lamented that the education imparted by A. to the deaf-mute was too theoretical. It would have been better, Mayer thought, if practical aptitudes had been developed in them, those more suited to this kind of pupil: «Why», says Mayer, «not make good craftsmen of them instead of superficial literati?». The means of communication employed by A. were natural gesture, a gesture system he himself invented, dactylology, writing, and articulated speech. The latter was used only for those who had already spoken.