The Human Right to Language: Communication Access for Deaf Children

PROLOGUE

! PROLOGUE Language is so tightly woven into human experience that it is scarcely possible to imagine life without it. —Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct F R O M A F A R , certain moments in American history appear much starker than they may have been at the time. And yet in hindsight, we look back and are surprised by the previous lay of the land. We wonder how that could have been. As I consider the ways in which deaf and hard of hearing children have been denied that which is essential for educational growth, indeed any human growth at all—communication and language–I return to Brown v. Board of Education,1 perhaps the most important legal case in American history. Before Brown, the previous rules and beliefs that governed a legally segregated nation had been in place for so long that their weight seemed immovable. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that an African American could be denied a seat on a train solely because of his race.2 The Plessy decision made racial segregation the law of the land. The rationales given for the maintenance of legal segregation, including states’ rights, had been cited so often and with such emotional intensity and intellectual sleight of hand that one could not imagine anything different. Then came Brown and, in hindsight , we are or should be stunned by the previous status quo. How could that have been? We know what followed, and still follows, but realize with shame that in the world’s leading democracy, the law of the land at the time of the Brown case prevented a child from entering a public school solely because of his or her race. We are surprised or xi xii / Prologue ashamed not because we are naive or do not know our history but because such a rule was so clearly contrary to our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. There is another moment to consider, one reflective of a system less deadly than slavery and Jim Crow but devastating nonetheless , full of profound consequences for the children I speak about. Whereas Brown represented a break from a historic failure, this other moment represented the formalization of a failure. As Brown moved children away from isolation, this other moment extended and legalized the isolation of many deaf and hard of hearing children. In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Amy Rowley, a deaf child in a public school, was not entitled to have a sign language interpreter.3 This meant, simply and directly, that she could not access a good deal of the language around her. Without the interpreter, the rich and varied language between teacher and student and between student and student was as far away for Amy as the “whites only” school across town was for the African American child in 1953. As of early 2008, the Rowley decision remains the law of the land and continues to be the deaf or hard of hearing child’s Plessy. And so we ask, how can this be? The American classroom is a marketplace of ideas in which our constitutional freedoms may be most vital. It also provides a unique environment in which a child is exposed to a varied and rich amalgam of social, intellectual, emotional, and academic discourse that floats around the child just as air surrounds all of us. The Supreme Court was content to allow Amy Rowley little of the air required to function and grow, and so deaf and hard of hearing children continue in the same suffocating world. Amy Rowley has long since grown up, but she remains everybody ’s child, and we must view her isolation as we would view the isolation of our own children. It is difficult to compare the inequities of history, and although the inhumanities that Brown attempted to remedy were of a truly terrible stripe, the laws and policies visited upon Amy and other deaf and hard of hearing chil- Prologue / xiii dren over the years are harmful in their own fundamental way. A child who is unable to understand a lecture on Brown, who cannot communicate with a friend about plans for Friday night, and who lacks the language necessary to become a literate and functioning adult requires us to ask, again, how can that be? The two teams of attorneys in the Brown case employed dozens of experts and...