A Voice of Silence
DRAPER, ROGER
Writers & Writing A VOICE OF SILENCE BY ROGER DRAPER For upward of a hundred years the professions, institutions and government agencies that deal with deaf people have worked to assimilate them...
...They have been taught mainly or solely in English, not in American Sign Language (ASL...
...Throughout the next few decades, half of the teachers were deaf and signing was the universal medium of instruction...
...The Mask of Benevolence is in the great tradition of American protest literature...
...My habit of avoiding group conversations, because I am sure to be lost, leads others to regard me as arrogant...
...During the following generation this program triumphed: ASL was banned...
...In tacit recognition of the truth, the deaf are customarily shunted into vocational courses preparing them to fill the "rapidly vanishing" and poorly paid unskilled or semiskilled occupations that employ approximately three quarters of them...
...Perhaps worse, no more than 10 per cent of deaf kids upon leaving high school can read at eighth-grade level...
...Without question, the profoundly deaf—especially the nine out of 10 who lost their hearing before they could talk—are, as the author says, the single linguistic group "that can never be totally assimilated...
...The deaf consequently object to educational and medical therapies that are designed to cure what they refuse to consider a disease...
...The processor amplifies the parts of a sound wave used to interpret speech and sends them back to the earpiece, which also has a transmitting coil connected to a 25-millimeter-long wire that must be surgically implanted in the cochlea, a part of the inner ear...
...No aspect of this viewpoint is more central, or harder for hearing people, including me, to accept, than the idea that deafness (as Lane puts it) "is not a disability but rather a different way of being," a culture "as good as hearing, perhaps better...
...This relatively enlightened approach, though, may be in retreat...
...About 90 per cent of the profoundly deaf are born to hearing parents, few of whom bother to learn ASL...
...The same obtained abroad, and all these schools taught the standard academic curriculum...
...Writers & Writing A VOICE OF SILENCE BY ROGER DRAPER For upward of a hundred years the professions, institutions and government agencies that deal with deaf people have worked to assimilate them into the hearing world...
...Then, in 1880, a congress of pedagogues of the deaf—all with normal hearing—gathered at Milan...
...Although "total communication" continues to be a common slogan, it has been superseded by "mainstreaming"—the practice of placing deaf kids (currently 75 per cent of them) in ordinary classes of ordinary schools...
...In short, the deaf tend to be functionally illiterate, so their mean scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test fall below those of the learning disabled...
...These are the constant realities of a moderate impairment that in no way affects my knowledge and pronunciation of English...
...Moreover, as many deaf people angrily maintain, the chimera of integrating them into the majority has not been pursued for wholly disinterested reasons...
...Our goal, Lane argues rightly, should not be to supplant ASL but to teach it earlier and to supplement it with the ability to read and write English...
...And today most attend regular schools...
...Among themselves the deaf communicate in ASL—not a signed form of English but a completely independent phenomenon used by at least 500,000 Americans...
...I dislike the conventional notion of deafness as a disability not because it seems wrong to me, but because it has prompted us to believe we have already found a treatment...
...Institutions "that subscribe to total communication," the name of this method, therefore "communicate very little to very few," says the author...
...Abstractly, that may not be a desirable state of affairs...
...In the 1970s, the fanatical insistence on excluding ASL began to fade, but teachers did not know it well enough to go beyond an occasional signed gloss to conventional oral lessons...
...He maintains that they achieve genuinely encouraging results solely in the group best suited to receive them: adults whose deafness began after they mastered English...
...The policy has failed...
...on average they attain a third-grade level of reading...
...As for children who lost their hearing before they could learn to speak, they have been shown to score minor gains in some artificially easy tests that do not really evaluate their ability to communicate under natural circumstances...
...The deaf have been discouraged from seeking deaf spouses...
...The coil transforms the processed waves into electrical impulses and dispatches them to electrodes along the wire that stimulate adjacent cells in the inner ear...
...But his book embraces a point of view, common among the deaf, that first obtruded upon the consciousness of the world in 1988, when the student body of Gallaudet University demanded the appointment of a deaf president and the reconstitution of its board with a deaf majority...
...The latest tendency, I am indignant to say, is a revival of the most fanatical opposition to the use of ASL, mainly because of hopes inspired by a recent medical technique: cochlear implantation...
...By 1987, a survey indicates, virtually no teachers of the deaf had mastered ASL...
...They proclaimed "the incontestable superiority of speech over sign" and demanded that their charges be instructed exclusively in national oral vernaculars...
...In their opinion, notes Lane, they have a right to hope their offspring "will not embrace a minority language [ASL] and culture which they find alien," and no corresponding obligation to ascertain if such an attitude is practical, let alone ethical...
...Many other deaf people remain essentially prelinguistic until they make contact with their fellows, often as late as their teens, and their ability to learn any language, including ASL, is permanently impaired...
...In the 1970s, the most recent period for which comparative statistics are available, 5 per cent of the deaf attended college, a third of the hearing rate...
...A microphone contained in an earpiece that looks like a hearing aid receives ambient sound and transmits it to a processor usually worn on the patient's chest or belt...
...As a result of the classroom monopoly conferred upon spoken language, deaf children learn scandalously little...
...Indeed, of the men and women who have never been able to hear, and so experience the greatest difficulty in acquiring language, the best readers belong to the small minority, born to deaf parents, who learned ASL in early childhood...
...Probably three quarters are unable to read newspapers...
...Many are angered by my problem, and some actually imply that my true problem is laziness...
...The first residential deaf academies opened in this country in the early 19th century...
...Thus nine deaf persons in 10 marry deaf and conduct their social lives accordingly...
...The experts have their own interests to protect...
...Harlan Lane makes his case eloquently yet scientifically...
...The whole technology, Lane believes, is too experimental to be applied to the very young...
...The device is fairly complicated...
...I can testify almost, though not quite, from experience that he is right...
...Nor, in a minimum of 75 per cent of cases, are they capable of speaking English intelligibly...
...Nonetheless, the oralist regime has failed even to impart the essentials of spoken English...
...We and they don't even have a common language...
...Within our hearing culture there is a surprisingly separate nonhealing one...
...The important fact is that, contrary to the self-interested dogmas of the experts, ASL is no obstacle to learning English...
...But you do not have to share his conviction to see that a procedure of distinctly limited value in enabling the deaf to understand and be understood by the rest of us should not have become an excuse to go on educating them exclusively in the majority tongue...
...Experts reinforce these feelings: They advise parents to save their children from the subculture of deafness by raising them in a rigorously English-only milieu...
...If the profession of deaf education acknowledged" that signing "is the best way to educate these children," he suggests, "deaf adults would once again enter the profession" and hearing people might lose their jobs...
...they too do not know ASL...
...In theory, I myself do not have a politically correct attitude on this matter: If an effective treatment existed, I certainly would not reject it in principle...
...These, in turn, trigger neighboring cells until the pattern of stimulation reaches the brain's auditory region and is there turned into sound...
...To Lane, it is hardly an accident that only 10 per cent are deaf themselves...
...Close to half cannot follow speech, and a majority of the remainder cannot do so in realistic situations...
...Lane conducts research on cochlear implants at Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
...But some programs have provided sign language interpreters, who at least give deaf students a means of understanding the course-work...
...anyone using it was forced to retire...
...Lane rightly condemns mainstreaming for isolating children from other deaf people and the deaf community, in the long run their chief or only social environment...
...Once, long ago, they did...
...Like it or not, the deaf share a collective identity more important to them than any identity they share with us...
...Lane, an academic specialist in the psychology of language, hears normally...
...A lot of hearing people simply can't or won't speak loud enough for me to comprehend them...
...Oral education," Lane charges, "in its desperate drive to win the deaf child to the community of English users, drives out all other instruction...
...Since the age of four I have had an auditory disability that falls far short of deafness yet has taught me certain facts...
...But in his passionate new book, The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community (Knopf, 310 pp., $23), Harlan Lane insists it is inevitable " for the elementary reason that nearly all [of the deaf] cannot hear sufficiently well to acquire English" and thereby "disappear into the mainstream...
...In 1990 the Food and Drug Administration permitted surgeons to perform the operation to place the wire in anybody over two years of age...
Vol. 75 • June 1992 • No. 8
