The Deaf are foreigners in their own country
This is from a news article in the Independent in September 1989. It had followed soon after the Deaf President Now! campaign at Gallaudet in the USA.
Its is of interest in view of its insistence the Deaf were well and truly foreigners in their own countries, but not only that, the legacy of Alexander Graham Bell continued to be a problematic legacy. The passage also revolves around sign language vs oralism. Anthony Turner presents the ideology behind oralism as no less than a fallacy and the growth of sign language has been stunted by this very begotten quest devised by Alexander Graham Bell and others.
Thirty six years later in 2025 one can easily ask whether things have improved or not. Its quite difficult to say and whether the reader (Deaf or hearing) think things have improved or have not is evidently a moot point? Has technology changed the situation – such as cochlear implants etc – thus the whole argument needs a re-evaluation or a totally different approach.
ANOTHER minority is losing patience with public prejudice and government evasiveness. They are even talking, half humorously, about blowing up one of the symbols of their oppression. Yet these people have no historic homeland to defend, or to which they can be deported. This is their country, but prejudice and ignorance have made them foreigners in it. For these are the deaf; and the symbol of their oppression is not a police station, but a telephone exchange.
It is not simply that the tele- phone has excluded the deaf from equal participation in society and limited their choice of employment. The very person of its inventor is an object of execration to all those who have been born deaf.
Alexander Graham Bell, after all, invented the telephone by accident. He was really trying to develop a hearing-aid for his deaf wife; his scientific interests sprang from a lifelong involvement with deaf education. His approach is summed up by his pronouncement that “the main object of the education of the deaf is to fit them to live in the world of hearing-speaking people”.
Consider the consequences of the triumph of this oralist policy in the wake of the Milan Congress of Educators of the Deaf in 1880. That date marks the end of a century which saw not only a flowering of deaf literacy and achievement, but the first steps towards the deaf taking charge of their own lives. The key that unlocked the prison door was the adoption of Sign language as a medium of instruction.
Wherever the deaf were gathered in sufficient numbers, purely visual languages had evolved; but it was not until the late eighteenth century that the Abbé de l’Epée, Charles Michel, learnt the language of the Parisian deaf and devised a system which enabled deaf students to read and write French. De l’Epée’s method was widely adopted across Europe and America, with a growing number of deaf people becoming teachers of their own kind. But was this very success that brought about the downfall of Sign.
If the deaf can be educated, ran Bell’s argument, they can participate in the hearing world. If they can, they must – a logical fallacy. And since the language of the hearing world is spoken, speech training must take precedence over every other objective – another fallacy. Further, since the use of Sign surely retards acquisition of speech (a false assumption), Sign must be suppressed even as a medium of communication among the children themselves.
This edifice of error was reared on a fundamental misunderstanding about Sign. Even De l’Epée thought that it was a primitive, rudimentary code, incapable of nuance or of conveying abstract ideas.
In fact, Sign satisfies every criterion of a genuine language, including possession of a syntax, the ability to generate an infinite number of propositions and a capacity for poetic expression. (Sign is quite distinct from the “manual alphabet”, which signers only use for spelling out proper names. A more pardonable misconception is that Sign is universal; national sign languages actually differ almost as much as their spoken counterparts.)
After 1880, despite the angry protests of those born deaf, bilingualism was progressively abolished in deaf education, thereby reversing the trend towards self- determination. In many schools worldwide the use of Sign became a punishable offence, and school authorities maintained round-the-clock surveillance by cutting Judas-holes in dormitory doors. Deaf teachers who only communicated effectively with their pupils by Sign were phased out. Costs rose steeply because oral methods required smaller classes, but with priority given to speech training, all other educational goals had to be reduced. Forcible integration offered deaf children a vocabulary and reading ability far below that of their hearing peers, and furnished them with access to only the humblest forms of employment.
To add insult to injury, Bell became involved with the eugenic movement. A fervent advocate of preserving the Nordic racial purity of America (he seems to have forgotten to take account of the pre-Columbian inhabitants), he was also obsessed with the notion – statistically disproved even in his own lifetime – that deaf couples had an increased likelihood of producing deaf children, and that the very existence of a “deaf community” was therefore a genetic threat to the nation.
And yet Sign survived underground, because it is the only natural mode of communication between deaf people. The last 40 years have seen its slow climb back to respectability but mainly as a Sign version of spoken language. Even today, true Sign is not taught in many schools for the deaf in Britain, nor is it a compulsory part of training for teachers of the deaf.
In fairness to Bell, he was deeply affected by the experience of his mother (deafened in childhood by scarlet fever, like his wife). To hearing people, deafness is a medical condition to be cured or alleviated. This is quite simply because it is an affliction for the vast majority who are not born deaf.
For most of us who live long enough, will be another of the discomforts of old age. For those of us in middle life who are placed, by disease, accident or surgery, beyond the reach of the most powerful hearing-aid, it is a disaster comparable to losing all our limbs – a diminution with repercussions for our careers, our personal relationships, our self-esteem and even our sense of identity. It is a kind of solitary confinement. Sign offers no escape, because after adolescence one cannot make a new language truly part of oneself. Lip-reading, though essential, is stressful and limited: all people unlipreadable some of the time, and some people all of the time.This stark and persuasive “medical model” deafness has inspired huge advances in ear surgery and hearing-aid technology: but in other respects it has become an instrument of oppression. First, it confounds crucial distinctions between the hard of hearing, the profoundly deafened and the prelingually profoundly deaf; even the deaf themselves have been taken in by this, the unitary view of their condition. The hard of hearing and the deafened have, in the past, been tacit or not-so-tacit supporters of oralism; and the born deaf have retaliated by speaking as if they alone were the true deaf. This confusion had played into the hands of the bureaucrats who gratefully seize any excuse to avoid change: “We can do nothing till the deaf agree what they want,” they say.
Second, the medical model projects the feelings of powerlessness and dependence associated with acquired deafness on to the born deaf, and regards them as defectives, incapable of taking decisions affecting their own lives. It has not only deprived them of access to their natural language, but of pride in their identity: deaf children subjected to oralist education have been known to believe that they will grow up into hearing adults.
Third, the medical model has even reached the limit of its use- fulness for the deafened and the hard of hearing: they no longer wish to be objects of pity and patronage they are demanding their right of free participation in society.
Alexander Graham Bell’s world-shaping invention is a practical case in point. The telephone need no longer be an exclusion factor. The technology already exists for direct voice communication between a deaf person and any hearing person with an ordinary telephone. It was developed by our own Royal National Institute for the Deaf (RNID) with the assistance of British Telecom (before privatisation), and is in regular use by 170 subscribers crowded on to two lines. An operator types out the hearing party’s words so that they appear on the deaf party’s television screen a modem. If this service were expanded a hundredfold, it would only cost £8m a year to run; but employment opportunity and an the social benefits, in terms of employment opportunity and an end to isolation and dependence, would be incalculable.
And yet earlier this year it looked as though Ted (the Telephone Exchange for the Deaf) would have to close down, be- cause the Government would not renew funding for the operators’ Perhaps s the greatest gain of the salaries. The buck was passed to British Telecom which promptly passed it back, their duty now, of course, being not to provide an essential infrastructure service but to maximise profits for their shareholders. After frantic lobbying by the RNID and the users of the service, BT and the Government entered into a half-hearted conflict which barely ensures the survival of the existing service for two years, with no provision for expansion.
Significantly, BT’s contributions will come from its “charitable fund”; the Government, for its part has failed to see this as a discrimination issue and compel BT to assume responsibility for the service. This is a case where the Government must lead from the front; as with racial and sexual discrimination, market forces and individual goodwill are not enough. A government whose declared aim is to extend the frontiers of freedom must betray that aim if its policies (or lack of them) keep the deaf dependent, not free.
Is there any ray of hope closer than the next election? As it happens, the first shots of a deaf revolution may already have been fired a few months ago on the other side of the Atlantic. Gallaudet College in Washington DC is the only liberal arts college for the deaf in the world. In 124 years it has never had a deaf chief executive. When the post fell vacant last March and the board of trustees (on which the hearing out- numbered the deaf 17 to four) failed to appoint either of the two deaf candidates, the students closed the college and barricaded the campus. The teaching faculty struck in sympathy, and within a week the board had been forced to surrender and its chairman to resign. Nothing focused the students’ anger more effectively than the chairman’s statement that “the deaf are not yet ready to function in the hearing world”.
“The one true deafness, the in- curable deafness, is that of the mind,” Victor Hugo wrote to his deaf friend Ferdinand Berthier. Deafness of the mind manifested as facile assumptions and lack of imagination on the part of government departments and hearing people in local councils, Parliament – provokes bitterness and frustration among the deaf of all categories. Is it incurable? Or can we summon the will to forge coherent national policies which are needed to give the deaf access to the life of the community?
Perhaps the greatest gain of the Gallaudet events was the collapse of the illusion that the deaf are powerless in the face of hearing paternalism. In this country, the upsurge of Tory radicalism and its attacks on the “dependency culture” based on public hand-outs may even be a blessing in disguise. The new climate of ideological conflict will prompt deaf people to reject charity (to which one not is entitled, but which flows entirely from the goodness of heart of the giver) from any source. Now they will demand a right: the right to dismantle the legacy of Alexander Graham Bell.
The Independent September 1989.
7th February 2017 I wrote the above on a former account of mine at Twitter – this referred to the Independent article from 1989. Indeed ‘audism’ is a country and every country is audist!
The passage where it is asserted the symbol of Deaf oppression is not a police station but a telephone exchange is of interest because there had in fact been some thought during the 1980s the only solution some Deaf had envisaged in order to highlight the issue of oppression was to carry out certain acts. It was an idea entertained in both the UK and the USA. For the Deaf the problem was one of trying to do things covertly and not make a noise or cause any sort of distractions. At the time there was no technology that would have helped. Thus the Deaf were essentially a victim of their own limitations and that was the usual barrier in the face of the oppression that hearing society dispenses.
