Charles Baker (1803 - 1874)

Charles Baker

Charles Baker was a British educator, pioneer in deaf education, naturalist and artist.

He became known and honored in Great Britain for having developed the first school textbooks for deaf-blind children, including those based on drawing.

As a young man he became a teacher at the Edgbaston Institute for the Deaf and Dumb in Edgbaston, near Birmingham, and was faced with a complete lack of textbooks for such children. Baker had a passion for entomology, and began directing the attention of his older pupils to the various objects of natural history around them. As a result, in 1828, he authored a small volume of illustrations entitled British Butterflies: their differences, genera and species, with lithographic illustrations of each genus, comprising 33 species, drawn by the children of the Edgbaston School for the Deaf and Dumb."

Charles Baker worked as a teacher of the deaf and headmaster at Doncaster School for forty-five years. During this time he produced many specialized teaching guides and textbooks under the general title "Circle of Knowledge", which were used in Europe and Russia, as well as in China and Japan.