The Rising of Lotus Flowers: Self-education by Deaf Children in Thai Boarding Schools (review)

The Rising of Lotus Flowers tells a truly remarkable story that resonates far beyond the walls of the Bua residential school for deaf children. Charles Reilly and Nipapon Reilly write of generations of children who arrived at the Bua School without language. These confused, inarticulate youngsters were described by their older classmates as “know-nothings.” The school’s hearing teachers had no sense of who these children were, and the teachers’ poor signing and inaccessible speech did not help matters. But a complex student hierarchy accepted these children, gave them name signs, and waited for the two or three years for knowledge and language to blossom in their young minds.

Bua School in 1991–1992, the years of Reilly and Reilly’s initial study, had over four hundred students but was isolated from even the small town across the river. School filled every aspect of these children’s lives, but most of this time was organized by the children themselves. Teachers worked from 8:00 am to 3:00 pm and then, like the good bureaucrats they were, retired for the day. For the rest of their waking hours, the oldest children organized themselves and the younger students. A strong Thai tradition of sibling caretaking translated into a remarkable student-run system that gave these youngest “know-nothings” time to learn and adjust to their new world. The student leaders translated the general cultural respect for discipline into drills full of explicit examples of objects and actions. These older students also turned the teachers’ unintelligible lessons on hand washing into comprehensible routines.

And yet, life at the school involved much more than drills. For example, mentors guided the younger students through unfamiliar routines. One videotaped Scout meeting captured this mentoring in action:

“Older Boy” is in second grade. “New Boy” is a newcomer. The two boys tour the exhibit together; Older Boy always has his arm around New Boy or a grip on his wrist. Older Boy points out things and makes comments. He uses simple signs in short phrases. He does not expect an answer; New Boy never says anything.

(127–28)

After the children gained basic knowledge of the school (usually in two or three years), they became and were acknowledged as “mindful.” Then they could participate in the school’s true intellectual and social life. Nipapon Reilly, herself a Deaf Thai who experienced a similar education, and two older students who were studied recalled this process from their own childhoods and remembered the “slow learning period, a dawn of understanding, and finally feeling comfortable in conversations by fourth grade (a period encompassing five years or more)” (129). One student spoke of “watching and remembering more and more until, ah-hah, the spark of understanding” (ibid.).

This spark was fostered most of all by conversations between the students of every cohort, everyone interacting in groups of similar abilities, described as a Vigotskyan zone of proximal development, the kind of space just challenging enough to be maximally enriching. Especially as they grew older, students talked to each other for hours on end, exploring and trying to understand the world around them, telling jokes, and stimulating each other in myriad ways.

At the top of the school’s social hierarchy were the master storytellers, boys who could recount with verve and glee the latest action movie they had seen, girls who could talk of romance and relationships, or news interpreters who could translate the fuzzy, uncaptioned, unintelligible images on TV screens into meaningful information. While some of these storytellers, particularly the girls, stayed within their own social circle, others made public performances, telling half-hour-long versions of movies or tales they invented themselves. Peers and younger students, those mindful enough to appreciate this vivid storytelling, watched, learned, and imitated the storytellers and thereby gained a wide range of new skills...