This article is about the deaf education methods debate in the public schools of Toronto, Canada. The author demonstrates how pure oralism (lip-reading and speech instruction to the complete exclusion of sign language) and day school classes for deaf schoolchildren were introduced as a progressive school reform in 1922. Plans for further oralist reforms in 1945 brought significant opposition from a deaf political organisation--the Ontario Association of the Deaf (OAD). The author situates the Toronto battle over methods between progressive educators and deaf people in the longer historical and larger transnational context of debates over oral and manual methods. The author's examination of the Toronto methods debate raises and answers crucial critical questions about the contested nature of progressive school reforms by examining grassroots responses to reform. The author also places significant emphasis on the effects of reforms on deaf young people who received instruction. The pure oralist method was never as successful for deaf young people as oralists claimed it could be. Yet deaf youngsters felt more ambivalent about the methods than hearing school officials and parents, and deaf adults, did. Historical issues in deaf education that the author examines continue to be controversial today.