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St. Paul’s declaration in his letter to the Romans that “faith comes by hearing” was long misinterpreted to mean that those who could not hear were incapable of faith, and Rome would allow no one to inherit property or title if he could not give confession. For this reason, starting in the fifteenth century, some inbred noble families undertook oral education of their deaf children. Most of the deaf, however, had to rely on the basic sign languages they could formulate; in urban settings, these evolved into coherent systems. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Abbé de l’Épée pursued a vocation among the poor deaf of Paris and was one of the first hearing people ever to learn their language. Employing it as a means for explaining French, he taught the deaf to read and write. It was the dawn of emancipation: you did not need speech to learn the languages of the speaking world. The Abbé de l’Épée founded the Institute for the Instruction of Deaf-Mutes in 1755. In the early nineteenth century, the Reverend Thomas Gallaudet of Connecticut, who had become interested in the education of a deaf child, set off for England to get information on deaf pedagogy. The English told him that their oral method was a secret, so Gallaudet traveled on to France, where he was warmly received at the institute, and he invited a young deaf man, Laurent Clerc, to accompany him back to America to establish a school. In 1817, they set up the American Asylum for the Education and Instruction of the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. The fifty years that followed were a golden age. French sign language mixed with homespun American signs as well as the sign dialect on Martha’s Vineyard (where there was a strain of hereditary deafness) to form American Sign Language (ASL). Deaf people wrote books, entered public life, achieved widely. Gallaudet College was founded in 1857 in Washington, DC, to provide advanced education to the deaf; Abraham Lincoln authorized the college to grant degrees.
Once the deaf became high-functioning, they were asked to use their voices. Alexander Graham Bell led the nineteenth-century oralist movement, which culminated with the first international meeting of educators of the deaf, the Congress of Milan, in 1880 and an edict to ban the use of manualism—a disparaging word for Sign—so that children might learn to speak instead. Bell, who had a deaf mother and a deaf wife, disparaged Sign as “pantomime.” Appalled by the idea of “a Deaf variety of the human race,” he founded the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, which sought to forbid deaf people to marry each other, and to keep deaf students from mixing with other deaf students. He asked that deaf adults undergo sterilization and persuaded some hearing parents to sterilize their deaf children. Thomas Edison jumped on the bandwagon to promote an exclusive oralism. When Lexington was founded, hearing people wished to teach the deaf to speak and read lips so they could function in the “real world.” How that dream went horribly wrong is the grand tragedy around which modern Deaf culture has constructed itself.
By World War I, some 80 percent of deaf children were being educated without Sign, a situation that was to prevail for half a century. Deaf teachers who had signed were suddenly unemployed. The oralists thought signing would distract children from learning English, and any pupil who signed at an oralist school had his hand struck with a ruler. George Veditz, former president of the National Association of the Deaf (NAD), protested in 1913, “‘A new race of pharaohs that knew not Joseph’ are taking over the land. Enemies of the sign language, they are enemies of the true welfare of the deaf. It is my hope that we all will love and guard our beautiful sign language as the noblest gift God has given to deaf people.” Deaf people were considered moronic—hence our use of the word dumb to describe idiocy—but such limitations were the result of denying them their language. The activist Patrick Boudreault has compared oralism to the conversion therapies used to “normalize” gay people, a social Darwinism run hideously amok. Despite all these unhappy developments, the schools remained the cradle of Deaf culture.
Aristotle contended that “of persons destitute from birth of either sense, the blind are more intelligent than the deaf and dumb” because “rational discourse is a cause of instruction in virtue of its being audible.” In fact, expressive and receptive communication serve this function, even when not organized around hearing. That Sign might be a full language eluded scholars until the linguist William Stokoe published his groundbreaking book Sign Language Structure in 1960. He demonstrated that what had been deemed a crude, gestural communication system had a complex and deep grammar of its own, with logical rules and systems. Sign depends predominantly on the left hemisphere of the brain (the language hemisphere, which in nonsigning people processes sound and written information) and to a much lesser degree on the right (which processes visual information and the emotional content of gestures); it employs the same essential faculties as English, French, or Chinese. A deaf person with a left-hemisphere lesion after a stroke will retain the ability to understand or produce gesture, but lose the ability to understand or produce Sign, much as a hearing person with a left-hemisphere lesion will lose the ability to speak and understand language, but will still understand and produce facial expressions. Neuroimaging shows that while people who acquire Sign early have almost all of it in the language regions, people who learn Sign in adulthood tend to use the visual part of their brain more, as though their neural physiology were still struggling with the idea of it as a language.
A twenty-six-week-old fetus can detect sound. Exposure in utero to specific sounds—in one study, the music from Peter and the Wolf, and in another, the flyover sound of Osaka airport—causes a newborn to show preference or tolerance for those sounds. Two-day-olds born to French-speaking mothers have responded to the phonemes of French, but not to those of Russian; two-day-old American children prefer the sound of American English to the sound of Italian. Recognition of phonemes begins several months before birth; refinement of that ability, which includes a narrowing of it, takes place during the first year of life. At six months, infants in one study could discriminate among phonemes of all languages; by the time they were a year old, those raised in an English-speaking environment had lost the ability to distinguish the phonemes of non-Western languages. These are astonishingly early processes.
The critical period for connecting meaning to those sorted phonemes is between eighteen and thirty-six months, with a gradually diminishing language-acquisition capacity that tails off at about age twelve—though some exceptional people have acquired language much later; the linguist Susan Schaller taught Sign to a twenty-seven-year-old deaf man who had had no language at all until then. During the critical period, the mind can internalize the principles of grammar and signification. Language can be learned only through exposure; in a vacuum, the language centers of the brain effectively atrophy. In the language-acquisition period, a child can learn any language; and once he has language itself, he can learn other languages much later in life. Deaf children acquire Sign exactly as hearing children acquire a first spoken language; most can learn aural language in its written form as a second language. For many, however, speech is a mystical gymnastics of the tongue and throat, while lipreading is a guessing game. Some deaf children acquire these skills gradually, but making speech and lipreading the prerequisite to communication may consign deaf children to permanent confusion. If they bypass the key age for language acquisition without fully acquiring any language, they cannot develop full cognitive skills and will suffer permanently from a preventable form of mental retardation.
One cannot imagine thought without language any more than one can imagine language without thought. An inability to communicate can result in psychosis and dysfunction; the hard of hearing often have inadequate language, and researchers have estimated that up to one-third of prisoners are deaf or hard of hearing. The average hearing two-year-old has a vocabulary of three hundred words; the average deaf child of hearing parents has a vocabulary of thirty words at two. If one eliminates families with high levels of parental involvement and families who are learning Sign, the numbers become even more alar
ming. Douglas Baynton, a cultural historian at the University of Iowa, wrote, “The difficulty of learning spoken English for a person profoundly deaf from an early age has been likened to a hearing American trying to learn spoken Japanese while locked within a soundproof glass cubicle.” Forbidding Sign does not turn deaf children toward speech, but away from language.
An oralist focus does not simply exist within the parent-child relationship; it becomes that relationship. A mother must, as one team of psychologists wrote, “impose herself upon his natural play-learning patterns, often against his will.” Many deaf children who ultimately managed to develop oral skills complain that their schooling was dominated by the effort to teach a single ability—thousands of hours of sitting with an audiologist who squeezed their faces into positions, made them move their tongues in certain patterns, repeated drill exercises day after day. “In my history class, we spent two weeks learning to say guillotine, and that was what we learned about the French Revolution,” Jackie Roth, a Deaf activist, said to me of the oralist education she had had at Lexington. “Then you say guillotine to someone with your deaf voice, and they have no idea what you’re talking about. Usually, they can’t tell what you’re trying to pronounce when you say Coke at McDonald’s. We felt retarded. Everything depended on one completely boring skill, and we were all bad at it.”
The 1990 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) has sometimes been interpreted to assert that separate is never equal, and that everyone should attend mainstream schools. For wheelchair users, now provided with ramps, this is splendid. For the deaf, who are constitutionally unable to learn the basic means of communication used by hearing people, mainstreaming is the worst disaster since the Congress of Milan. If oralism destroyed the quality of the deaf residential schools, mainstreaming killed the schools themselves. At the end of the nineteenth century, there were eighty-seven residential schools for the deaf in the United States; by the end of the twentieth century, a third had closed. In the mid-twentieth century, 80 percent of deaf children went to residential schools; in 2004, less than 14 percent did so. Judith Heumann, the highest-ranking person in the Clinton administration with a disability, declared that separate education for children with disabilities was “immoral.” But Heumann erred in omitting a deaf exception to her diktat.
In its 1982 decision in Board of Education v. Rowley, the US Supreme Court maintained that a deaf girl was receiving an adequate education if she was passing her courses and held that there was no need to provide her with a translator, even though her primary language was Sign and even though through lipreading she understood less than half of what was being spoken. Justice William Rehnquist wrote, “The intent of the Act was more to open the door of public education to handicapped children on appropriate terms than to guarantee any particular level of education once inside. The requirement that a State provide specialized educational services to handicapped children generates no additional requirement that the services so provided be sufficient to maximize each child’s potential.” At deaf schools, the standard of education is often low; at mainstream schools, much of the education is inaccessible to deaf students. In neither instance are deaf people getting a good education. Only a third of deaf children complete high school, and of those who attend college, only a fifth complete their studies; deaf adults earn about a third less than their hearing peers.
The deaf children of deaf parents frequently have a higher level of achievement than the deaf children of hearing parents. Deaf of deaf, as they are colloquially called, learn Sign as a first language at home. They are more likely to develop fluent written English, even if there is no spoken language at home and they attend a school where teaching is in Sign, than are deaf children of hearing parents who use English at home and go to a mainstream school. Deaf of deaf also score higher in other academic areas, including arithmetic, and are ahead on maturity, responsibility, independence, sociability, and willingness to communicate with strangers.
Helen Keller is said to have observed, “Blindness cuts us off from things, but deafness cuts us off from people.” Communicating in Sign is more meaningful to many deaf people than being unable to hear. Those who sign love their language, often even if they have access to the languages of the hearing world. The writer Lennard Davis, a “child of deaf adults” (CODA) who teaches disability studies, wrote, “To this day if I sign ‘milk,’ I feel more milky than if I say the word. Signing is like speech set to dance. There is a constant pas de deux between the fingers and the face. Those who do not know sign language can only see the movements as distant and unnuanced. But those who understand signing can see the finest shade of meaning in a gesture. Like the pleasure some hearing people take in the graded distinctions between words like ‘dry,’ ‘arid,’ ‘parched,’ ‘desiccated,’ or ‘dehydrated,’ so the deaf can enjoy equivalent distinctions in the gestures of sign language.” Jackie Roth said, “Socially or in secret, we always signed. No theory could kill our language.”
Deafness is defined as a low-incidence disability. It is estimated that one in a thousand newborns is profoundly deaf, and that twice as many have less severe hearing impairment. Another two or three per thousand will lose hearing before age ten. The Deaf activists Carol Padden and Tom Humphries wrote, “Culture provides a way for Deaf people to reimagine themselves as not so much adapting to the present, but inheriting the past. It allows them to think of themselves not as unfinished hearing people but as cultural and linguistic beings in a collective world with one another. It gives them a reason for existing with others in the modern world.”
• • •
After a week of protests outside the Lexington Center, the demonstrators went to the Queens Borough president’s office. The demonstration, though still in deadly earnest, had that air of festivity that clings to anything for which people are skipping work or school. Greg Hlibok, perhaps Lexington’s most famous alumnus, was going to speak.
Six years earlier, Gallaudet University had announced the appointment of a new president. Students had been rallying for the university to have its first Deaf CEO, but a hearing candidate was selected. In the week that followed, the Deaf community as a political force abruptly came into its own. The Deaf President Now (DPN) movement, led by student activists, among whom Hlibok was the apparent leader, was the Stonewall of Deaf culture; Hlibok was the Deaf Rosa Parks. In a week, demonstrations closed down the university; the protests received substantial coverage in the national media; Hlibok staged a march on the Capitol that included twenty-five hundred supporters; and they won. The board chairman resigned, and her place was taken by a Deaf man, Phil Bravin, who immediately named Gallaudet’s first deaf president, the psychologist I. King Jordan.
At the borough president’s office, Greg Hlibok was electrifying. ASL is relatively noniconic; only a small number of signs actually look like what they describe. But an articulate signer can create a picture by mixing signs and gesture. Greg Hlibok compared the Lexington board to adults playing with a dollhouse, moving around the deaf students like little toys. He seemed to be building the house in the air; you could see it in front of you and witness the interfering arms of the board reaching into it. The students cheered, waving their hands over their heads, fingers splayed, in Deaf applause.
A week later, there was a protest on Madison Avenue in front of the office of Lexington’s board chairman. Several board members marched, including Phil Bravin. After Madison Avenue, members of the core committee finally met with the chairman and an external negotiator. An emergency board meeting was scheduled, but the day before it, Max Gould resigned; a few days later, the chairman of the board followed suit.
When they are excited, many deaf people make loud sounds, often at high or low pitch—wordless exclamations of delight. In the halls of Lexington, students cheered, and anyone hearing was transfixed by the sound. Phil Bravin, who took over as Lexington’s board chair, would say to me a few months later, “It was the best thing that could have happened to those students
, no matter how many classes they missed during the protests. Some are from families that said, ‘You’re deaf; don’t shoot too high.’ Now they know better.” At the Lexington graduation, a week later, Greg Hlibok said, “From the time God made earth until today, this is probably the best time to be deaf.”
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Jackie Roth did not grow up at the best time to be deaf, but she grew up in better times than her parents had. Walter Roth, Jackie’s father, was an unusually beautiful baby, and his mother was thrilled with her son until she found out he was deaf, at which point she wanted nothing more to do with him. “She was so ashamed,” Jackie said. Walter was given to his grandmother to raise. “My great-grandmother had no understanding of deafness,” Jackie said. “But she had a heart.” Unsure what to do with Walter, she sent him to eleven different schools—deaf schools, hearing schools, special schools—but he never learned to read or write past a third-grade level. He was so handsome that he seemed to glide along despite these limitations. Then he fell in love with Rose, ten years his senior, whose first marriage had fallen apart because she was infertile. Walter said he didn’t want to have children anyway, and they were married. Two months later, Rose was pregnant with Jackie. Walter’s mother declared it an outrage.
Walter and Rose were not proud of their deafness; when they found out that their daughter, too, was deaf, they both cried. Walter’s mother shunned her new grandchild in favor of the hearing daughter Walter’s sister had produced. Walter’s siblings had married well; they had expensive weddings and bar mitzvahs in New York. But because Walter, uneducated, was working as a manual laborer in a printing plant, he and Rose lived in relative poverty; they would sit at a table in the corner at those functions, shunned, desperately trying to look as though they belonged.
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