The Rising of Lotus Flowers: Self-Education by Deaf Children in Thai Boarding Schools

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 1 Introduction Even more so than for the hearing child, the residential school is the very heart and soul, the veritable center, of the social experience of deaf children. —Joshua Fishman (1982, i) While out walking, we may take notice of a tiny plant that has pushed its way up through a crack in a concrete slab, and we may admire its tenacity. In Southeast Asia, people similarly appreciate the efforts of the lotus flower to rise above its conditions. Rooted in the muck at the bottom of a pond, a lotus plant grows up through the dark water to reach the surface and blossom in the sunlight. The beautiful, pure flower arising from the murky depths reminds its admirers that one can rise above his or her circumstances and achieve a higher state. This book is about 376 deaf children living at a residential school in Thailand. Their indomitable will to learn and to communicate helped them to make the best of an isolated and intellectually barren situation. The students, ages six to nineteen years, engaged in constant and intensive interaction with one another on the playgrounds and in the dorms. Through a variety of activities, they taught one another invaluable and essential knowledge about their school, society, and the world. Thanks to the interaction among youth, the school was a place of learning that far exceeded its contribution in academic preparation. Looking back on their early lives, many deaf adults in Thailand have told us that most of what they learned as children they learned from one another. The medium of communication itself—Thai Sign Language—was the most valuable kind of knowledge passed among these children. Most of them had arrived at the school at the age of six years and older with little grasp of any language, either spoken or signed.1 They had been raised by hearing-speaking parents who had practically no knowledge of Thai Sign Language.2 The hearing-speaking teachers at the Bua School had only a rudimentary grasp of the sign language. But using Thai Sign as the vernacular, the students made their daily routines, play, and discussions of lessons into language-rich experiences. Acquiring the language 1 bit by bit during everyday activities, the student newcomers gained a tool for exchanging thoughts with other people. They began to use language for myriad purposes, just like other children. Bua School for the Deaf sits on the bank of a wide river across from a sleepy town of 20,000 people.3 The area is rural and mountainous. The children spend ten months of the year within the walls of the institution, which has buildings scattered across two acres. This book is the report of a research study that describes the social activities created by children in this school, and it explores the influence these activities had on the children’s learning. We describe the students’ social organization and their activities, which have purposes ranging from highly creative to highly authoritarian. Our focus was the after-hours and weekend periods when the students were largely undisturbed by adults. The main study was conducted at the school during 1991–92 and reported in Charles’ doctoral dissertation (Reilly 1995) for the University of Maryland. We followed up with a visit in 1994 and a week-long visit to the school in 1999 as well as with interviews of key informants in 1997, 1999, 2003, and 2004. The word bua means “lotus flower” in the Thai language. Thus, we derived the pseudonym “The Bua School for the Deaf” because the term bua reminds us of the children’s achievements in rising above their conditions . The school combines features of a “total institution”—confining and long-term residence—with a high degree of self-supervision by the students , ages six to nineteen years old. In short, these deaf students are physically and socially confined, and their teachers are psychologically distant and communicatively unintelligible. No one would expect that these conditions of isolation would help deaf children to finally gain mastery in a language and become essentially normal children. This outcome of institutionalization is an unexpected and positive one. The successful acquisition of a first language by children of such advanced age is by itself of profound consequence. That it is acquired from the hands of fellow deaf children is extraordinary and is a testimony to the resilience of the human mind. The deaf children in the school formed a critical mass of visually oriented people...