Having a son who has been deaf since birth, I would like to help people become aware of the frustrations that a deaf person might experience and thereby make us all a little more understanding to this most unnoticed handicap. I quote from the August issue of the Readers Digest in an article from the Christian Herald by Ronald Schiller:
“The world of silence is inhabited by two or three million Americans. Of these, some 47,500 are ‘preligually deaf,’ meaning that they were born deaf or lost their hearing before learning to speak.
Most people with normal hearing assume that deafness is a far less serious disability than, say, blindness. Yet Helen Keller, who suffered from both, found deafness to be much the greater handicap.
A deaf teacher with whom I conversed on a typewriter told me: “When your ears stop functioning your world shrinks enormously. You live with loneliness and frustration, ignored by society, unable to communicate with police in emergency or the doctor when ill. Watching movies or TV is an empty experience. You can’t understand strangers’ greetings or civil questions. Eventually you shun the hearing world altogether, and associate only with the deaf. You become a stranger in your own land.
Of all the major physical disabilities, deafness arouses the least sympathy or concern in our socity (not that the deaf want pity). Those afflicted receive none of the tax benefits afforded the blind and crippled: they are protected by no anti-discrimination employment clauses: and when programs are devised to aid other disadvantaged groups, the deaf are too often overlooked. They are America’s forgotten minority.
Why? “I suppose it is because you cannot see deafness” explains Frederick Schreiber, executive secretary of the National Foundation for the Deaf. It’s only when you talk to us and we can’t understand you, or when you hear the funny sounds many of us utter when we try to speak, that you realize we’re different. And your first reaction is that either we’re putting you on or we must be morons. It is no coincidence that ‘dumb’ has become synonymous with stupid.”
All of the major psychological, vocational and educational problems of the deaf are rooted in their inability to communicate with the hearing. An infant’s education begins almost at birth. By the time he enters school, a normal child has effortlessly absorbed 80 percent of the words he will use during the rest of his life, along with a functional understanding of grammar, syntax and sentence construction. But the deaf child enters school with an average vocabulary of ten words and no grammar, and is unable to associate alphabetical letters with sounds he cannot hear. It takes him years to acquire even rudimentary reading and writing skills-often with disastrous effects on the rest of his education. How long after birth a child loses his hearing is of crucial importance.”
I strongly urge each and every hearing person to acquaint himself with some form of deaf education, if only to observe for a short period of instruction. I am sure that you will come away from this experience a richer person and more understanding for those of the “world of silence”.
Originally published in The Paper, October 1974.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1974_10.pdf, printed page(s) 3; PDF page(s) 3.
