1989 - Seeing Voices (6 page)

36. Although Bell has been seen as something of an ogre by the deaf (George Veditz, a former president of the National Association of the Deaf, and a hero of the deaf, called him ‘the most to be feared enemy of the American deaf’), it should be noted that Bell said on one occasion:

I think that if we have the mental condition of the child alone in view with out reference to language, no language will reach the mind like the language of signs; it is the method of reaching the mind of the deaf
child.

Nor was he himself ignorant of Sign; he was, on the contrary, ‘a fluent signer on his fingers—as good as any deaf-mute…[he] could use his fingers with bewitching grace and ease,’ in the words of his deaf friend Albert Ballin. Ballin also called Bell’s interest in the deaf ‘a hobby’—but it bears many of the marks, rather, of a violent and conflicted obsession (see Gannon, 1981, pp. 78-79).

Deaf pupils were prohibited from using their own ‘natural’ language, and thenceforth forced to learn, as best they might, the (for them) ‘unnatural’ language of speech. And perhaps this was in keeping with the spirit of the age, its overweening sense of science as power, of commanding nature and never deferring to it.

One of the consequences of this was that hearing teachers, not deaf teachers, now had to teach deaf students. The proportion of deaf teachers for the deaf, which was close to 50 percent in 1850, fell to 25 percent by the turn of the century, and to 12 percent by 1960. More and more, English became the language of instruction for deaf students, taught by hearing teachers, fewer and fewer of whom knew any sign language at all—the situation depicted by David Wright, at his school, in the 1920’s.

None of this would have mattered had oralism worked. But the effect, unhappily, was the reverse of what was desired—an intolerable price was exacted for the acquisition of speech. Deaf students of the 1850’s who had been to the Hartford Asylum, or other such schools, were highly literate and educated—fully the equal of their hearing counterparts. Today the reverse is true. Oralism and the suppression of Sign have resulted in a dramatic deterioration in the educational achievement of deaf children and in the literacy of the deaf generally.
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37. Many of the deaf are now functional illiterates. A study carried out by Gallaudet College in 1972 showed that the average reading level of eighteen-year-old deaf high school graduates in the United States was only at a fourth-grade level, and a study by the British psychologist R. Conrad indicates a similar situation in England, with deaf students, at graduation, reading at the level of nine-year-olds (Conrad, 1979).

These dismal facts are known to all teachers of the deaf, however they are to be interpreted. Hans Furth, a psychologist whose work is concerned with cognition of the deaf, states that the deaf do as well as the hearing on tasks that measure intelligence without the need for acquired information.
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38. Furth, 1966.

He argues that the congenitally deaf suffer from ‘information deprivation.’ There are a number of reasons for this. First, they are less exposed to the ‘incidental’ learning that takes place out of school—for example, to that buzz of conversation that is the background of ordinary life; to television, unless it is captioned, etc. Second, the content of deaf education is meager compared to that of hearing children: so much time is spent teaching deaf children speech—one must envisage between five and eight years of intensive tutoring—that there is little time for transmitting information, culture, complex skills, or anything else.

Yet the desire to have the deaf speak, the insistence that they speak—and from the first, the odd superstitions that have always clustered around the use of sign language, to say nothing of the enormous investment in oral schools, allowed this deplorable situation to develop, practically unnoticed except by deaf people, who themselves being unnoticed had little to say in the matter. And it was only during the 1960’s that historians and psychologists, as well as parents and teachers of deaf children, started asking, ‘What has happened? What
is
happening?’ It was only in the 1960’s and early 1970’s that this situation reached the public, in the form of novels such as Joanne Greenberg’s
In This Sign
(1970) and more recently the powerful play (and movie)
Children of a Lesser God
by Mark Medoff.
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39. There had, of course, been other novels, like Carson McCuller’s
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
(1940). The figure of Mr. Singer, an isolated deaf man in a hearing world, in this book is quite different from the protagonists of Greenberg’s novel, who are vividly conscious of their deaf identities. A huge social change, a change in social outlook, has occurred in the intervening thirty years, with above all, the emergence of a new self-consciousness.

There is the perception that something must be done. But what? Typically, there is the seduction of compromise—that a ‘combined’ system, combining sign and speech, will allow the deaf to become adept at both. A further compromise, containing a deep confusion, is suggested: having a language intermediate between English and Sign (i.e., a signed English). This category of confusion goes back a long way-back to de l’Epee’s ‘Methodical Signs,’ which were an attempt to intermediate between French and Sign. But true sign languages are in fact complete in themselves: their syntax, grammar, and semantics are complete, but they have a different character from that of any spoken or written language. Thus it is not possible to transliterate a spoken tongue into Sign word by word or phrase by phrase—their structures are essentially different. It is often imagined, vaguely, that sign language
is
English or French. It is nothing of the sort; it is itself, Sign. Thus, the ‘Signed English’ now favored as a compromise is unnecessary, for no intermediary pseudo-language is needed. And yet, deaf people are forced to learn the signs not for the ideas and actions they want to express, but for phonetic English sounds they cannot hear.

Even now the use of signed English, in one form or another, is still favored against the use of ASL. Most teaching of the deaf, if done by signs, is done by signed English; most teachers of the deaf, it they know any sign, know this and not ASL; and the little cameos that appear on television screens all use signed English, not ASL. Thus, a century after the Milan conference, deaf people are still largely deprived of their own, indigenous language.

But what, more importantly, of the combined system by which students not only learn sign language but learn to lip-read and speak as well? Perhaps this is workable, if education takes account of which capacities are best developed at different phases of growth. The essential point is this: that profoundly deaf people show no native disposition whatever to speak. Speaking is an ability that must be taught them and is a labor of years. On the other hand, they show an immediate and powerful disposition to Sign, which as a visual language, is completely accessible to them. This is more apparent in the deaf children of deaf parents using Sign, who make their first signs when they are about six months old and have considerable sign fluency by the age of fifteen months.
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40. Though there may be early development of a vocabulary of signs, the development of Sign grammar takes place at the same age, and in the same way, as the acquisition of speech grammar. Linguistic development thus occurs at the same rate in all children, deaf or hearing. If signs appear earlier than speech, it is because they are easier to make, for they involve relatively simple and slow movements of muscles, whereas speech involves the lightning coordination of hundreds of different structures, and only becomes possible in the second year of life. Yet it is intriguing that a deaf child at four months may make the sign for ‘milk,’ where a hearing child can only cry or look around. Perhaps all babies would be better off knowing a few signs!

Language must be introduced and acquired as early as possible or its development may be permanently retarded and impaired, with all the problems in ‘propositionizing’ which Hughlings-Jackson discussed. This can be done, with the profoundly deaf, only by Sign. Therefore deafness must be diagnosed as early as possible.
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41. One may suspect deafness from observation, but one cannot easily prove it in the first year of life. If, therefore, there is any reason to suspect deafness—for example, because there have been other deaf people in the family, or there is lack of response to sudden noises—there should be physiological testing of the brain’s response to sound (measuring so-called auditory evoked potentials in the brainstem). This test, relatively simple, can confirm or rule out the diagnosis of deafness as early as the first week of life.

Deaf children must first be exposed to fluent signers, whether these be their parents, or teachers, or whoever. Once signing is learned—and it may be fluent by three years of age—then all else may follow: a free intercourse of minds, a free flow of information, the acquisition of reading and writing, and perhaps that of speech. There is no evidence that signing inhibits the acquisition of speech. Indeed the reverse is probably so.

Have the deaf always and everywhere been seen as ‘handicapped’ or ‘inferior’? Have they always suffered, must they always suffer, segregation and isolation? Can one imagine their situation otherwise? If only there were a world where being deaf did not matter, and in which all deaf people could enjoy complete fulfillment and integration! A world in which they would not even be perceived as ‘handicapped’ or ‘deaf.’
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42. Sicard imagined such a community:

Could there not be in some corner of the world a whole society of deaf people? Well then! Would we think that these individuals were inferior, that they were unintelligent and lacked communication? They would certainly have a sign language, perhaps a language even richer than ours. This language would at least be unambiguous, always giving an accurate picture of the mind’s affections. So why would this people be uncivilized? Why wouldn’t they in fact have laws, government, police less mistrustful than our own? (Lane, 1984b, pp
.89-90)

This vision, so idyllic for Sicard, is also imagined—but as horrific—by the equally hyperbolic Alexander Graham Bell, whose fear-filled 1883
Memoir upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race
, with its draconian suggestions for ‘dealing with’ the deaf, was prompted by his experience on Martha’s Vineyard (see below). There is a hint of both feelings—the idyllic and the horrific—in H.G. Wells’s great tale ‘The Country of the Blind.’

The deaf themselves have had occasional impulses to deaf separatism or deaf ‘Zionism.’ In 1831 Edmund Booth suggested the formation of a deaf township or community, and in 1856 John James Flournoy the establishment of a deaf state, ‘out west.’ And in fantasy the idea is still active. Thus Lyson C. Sulla, the deaf hero of
Islay
, dreams of becoming governor of the state of Islay and making it a state ‘of, by, and for’ deaf people (Bullard, 1986).

Such worlds do exist, and have existed in the past, and such a world is portrayed in Nora Ellen Groce’s beautiful and fascinating
Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard
. Through a mutation, a recessive gene brought out by inbreeding, a form of hereditary deafness existed for 250 years on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, following the arrival of the first deaf settlers in the 1690’s. By the mid-nineteenth century, scarcely an up-Island family was unaffected, and in some villages (Chilmark, West Tisbury), the incidence of deafness had risen to one in four. In response to this, the entire community learned Sign, and there was free and complete intercourse between the hearing and the deaf. Indeed the deaf were scarcely seen as ‘deaf,’ and certainly not seen as being at all ‘handicapped.’
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43. There have been and are other isolated communities with a high incidence of deafness and unusually benign social attitudes to the deaf and their language. This is the case on Providence Island in the Caribbean, which has been studied in great detail by James Woodward (Woodward, 1982), and is also described by William Washabaugh (Washabaugh, 1986).

Perhaps the Martha’s Vineyard example is not that rare; perhaps it may indeed be expected to occur whenever there are significant numbers of deaf people in a community. There is an isolated village in the Yucatan (discovered and originally filmed by ethnographer and filmmaker Hubert Smith, and now being studied linguistically and anthropologically by Robert Johnson and Jane Norman of Gallaudet University) where thirteen adults, and one baby, out of a population of about 400, are congenitally deaf—here again the whole village uses Sign. There are other deaf relatives—cousins, second cousins, etc.—in nearby villages.

The Sign they use is not ‘home sign,’ but a Mayan Sign that is clearly of some antiquity, because it is intelligible to all of these deaf people, even though they are scattered over hundreds of square miles, and have virtually no contact with each other. This is quite different from the Central Mexican Sign used in Merida and other cities—indeed, they are mutually unintelligible. The well-integrated, full lives of the rural deaf—in communities that accept them wholly, and have adapted by themselves learning Sign—is in great contrast to the low social, informational, educational, and linguistic level of the ‘city’ deaf in Merida, who find themselves fit (after years of inadequate schooling) only for peddling or perhaps riding bike-taxis. One sees here how well the community often works, while the ‘system’ does badly.

In the astonishing interviews recorded by Groce, the island’s older residents would talk at length, vividly and affectionately, about their former relatives, neighbors, and friends, usually without even mentioning that they were deaf. And it would only be if this question was specifically asked that there would be a pause and then, ‘Now you come to mention it, yes, Ebenezer
was
deaf and dumb.’ But Ebenezer’s deaf-and-dumbness had never set him apart, had scarcely even been noticed as such: he had been seen, he was remembered, simply as ‘Ebenezer’—friend, neighbor, dory fisherman—not as some special, handicapped, set-apart deaf-mute. The deaf on Martha’s Vineyard loved, married, earned their livings, worked, thought, wrote, as everyone else did—they were not set apart in any way, unless it was that they were, on the whole, better educated than their neighbors, for virtually all of the deaf on Martha’s Vineyard were sent to be educated at the Hartford Asylum—and were often looked at as the most sagacious in the community.
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