EXAMINATION OF THE DEAF AND DUMB PUPILS IN THE TOWN HALL, MELBOURNE – October 9, 1871.

Deafness has become a most peculiar thing. Places like the Victorian School for the Deaf have run since 1860, and underwent huge changes in philosophy, which had cruel implications for the children.

By the 1950’s, at least, the place ran on oralism, so the kids were forced to learn to lip read, and to speak by sensing the vibrations in their throats. It was difficult and slow, impaired linguistic development and led to a dissociated experience of communication. The staff would claim that graduates could participate in the larger society, but on linguistically impoverished terms.

Graduates from that time report that sign language became a samidzat under-culture, learnt in secret, sometimes using torches under the bedclothes at night.

Eventually, the school was converted to Sign Language, and nurtured an exuberant culture of signing people – a separate subculture with its own associations, communities and marriages.

Deaf people began to speak of Deaf Culture and Deaf Pride, and challenge the idea that deafness was a disability. After all, it brings something exquisite and imaginative to the larger culture – a gestic form of complex communication, as elaborate as the sounded, which is allied to dance and pictogram.

In a world which is increasingly driven by visual experience, by notions and processes that can only be understood in three dimensions, then working from the visual centres is surely useful. Just think of the way our lives are now full of pictorial storytelling and graphic pleasures.

I like the whole idea. As a child who grew up hearing impaired, I think I am more unconsciously driven by visual cues from other people than most. Or at least, more than I would have been if I had been able to hear. It is not a coincidence that part of my living comes from writing narration tracks, which are words about pictures.

But the American live in what we consider, at least intuitively, to be an over-rhetoricised society. We have inherited the British notion of understatement, of a pragmatism that denies the power of the conceptual. We are much less inclined to embracing a politics of disability, or discrimination.

Nonetheless, the deaf community has fought and won an important battle to achieve teaching in Auslan. It is available in schools, and is taught in various places to hearing children. But the Victorian School for the Deaf still has to navigate State governments which run on a one-size-fits-all generic model of disability, which pushes for the integration of medically compromised children into the normal education system.

You can see the tension. Deaf people are arguing they operate in a parallel culture, which is not deficient, and should not be attacked by well-meaning but disempowering bureaucrats. They demand the right to be asked, to have their children raised as they choose.

Unsurprisingly, the argument becomes conceptual, takes in slogans about Deaf Pride. In the US, this rhetorical framework, and the ideas underpinning it, are potent factors in the long fight about the governance of Gallaudet University, which is a complete college campus run on signing.

But while deaf people resist the notion of disability, medical science is coming at them. Cochleal implants are getting better and better, and some deaf people would argue that this is an assault on the deaf community. What is more, less and less children are born deaf. Rubella has been largely beaten; we are learning the genetic markers of deafness. When you have your amniosentesis, and the doctor says your child will be normal but deaf – what do you do? Hardliners would say an abortion under these conditions is genocidal.

The convolutions of the rhetoric don’t really matter. Suffice to say that some kids are deaf, and they have the right to be taught in the way that is most useful to them, and not to families or bureaucrats. But it is sad to see the student population of the Victorian School for the Deaf declining, and the staff struggling to keep it running. In the last few years, it has taken in children with other disabilities, which require obvious support and isolate them in different ways. There is something vaguely offensive about the intrustion implied by that. Why should the deaf community engage with these challenging kids, rather than the “normal” world?

Personally, I wish I had learnt to sign when I was a child. Not that I needed it, but it would have been a pleasure, and a form of insurance if my hearing declined with age. Which it has, and is.

I was reminded of deaf politics, and brought up to speed on contemporary issues, from a documentary produced by Sally Ingleton called Welcome 2 My Deaf World. I was stimulated to write by an interesting article on the superheated politics of deafness in the US in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

And the article on Auslan in Wikipedia is fascinating. Did you know that Auslan is split into two dialects, northern and southern, which are much more separate than spoken language? Or that the Catholic Church ran a system of deaf education based on Irish Sign Language, which only used one hand?

Here is a chunk of a review about Welcome 2 My Deaf World, which captures some of the flavour:

‘One student observes, “Hearing is awful, all that shouting and stuff, I’d rather stay deaf.”

Some students say they’d rather hear, some would rather stay deaf. The realization becomes that total denial of the deaf challenge is often not constructive. One girl admits, in this context, that she’d really like to talk to her friends on the phone. Yet, encouragingly, a teacher asks, “Do you think the deaf are disabled.” “No way, absolutely not,” is the general opinion.

And the film’s display of the unbridled joy on their faces in many situations is a revelation. One child remarks about hearing, “It’s stupid the way they open their mouths when they talk.” And “If your mind is OK, you’re not disabled,” another adds.

Still, another girl wants to bear hearing children. “But how can I communicate with a hearing baby?” “Teach the baby sign language, of course,” comes the response.

But then a 15-year-old laments that the deaf “need special treatment all the time.” And a girl expresses, “In no way would I marry a deaf person.” But still another, “Why do I need hearing anyway; what’s it for?”

Ultimately from Arts and Letters Daily

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