The Deaf Way: Perspectives from the International Conference on Deaf Culture

Promoting the Interests of Deaf People

LIISA KAUPPINEN hat should we deaf people as a group know and do to ensure equality of opportunity for ourselves, to cope with the difficulties we encounter daily in a predominately hearing world, and to make optimal use of our abilities in our chosen work? First, we must know and remember our history, and look to it as a source of strength. Second, we must make our identity increasingly clear by discovering and maximizing our own special abilities. Third, we must enhance our consciousness, knowledge of our situation, and determination to assume responsibility and take needed action. Deaf people are fortunate today to be protected by such national and international human rights agreements as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Children, various agreements on the right of all human beings to an education, and rights granted in some nations concerning deaf people's use of their own language and the furtherance of their economic independence. In spite of these gains, however, many laws and norms-both written and unwritten-continue to oppress deaf people. For example, the majority of deaf people in the world-nearly 80 percent-are still deprived of any education at all. Furthermore, of the deaf people who receive an education , only 1 percent have the right to receive it in any form of sign language. In other words, 99 percent of the deaf people in the world today who receive an education do so through an oral teaching method. The majority of deaf people of the world are still unwanted. Instead of working to change their attitudes toward deaf people and striving to make the environment more suitable for deaf individuals-more visually accessible, for instance-hearing people still tend to fight against deafness. Medical science continues to try to find ways of retrieving the sense of hearing; people continue to insist on the use of the one channelhearing -which does not work with deaf people. The prevailing view is that deafness is a disease, a serious defect, a disability. Deaf people as a group, however, do not see themselves as defective or disabled. They do not think there is anything wrong with them, something lacking in their personalities . Deaf people as a group know they are whole and sound, and not disabled. Consequently, there is constant friction between these two viewpoints, resulting from the lack of understanding. Deaf people have problems in their relations with people who are not deaf (or people who are not deaf have problems in their relations with the deaf), but deaf people do not experience these problems as a disability. Promoting the Interests of Deaf People Deaf people must assume full responsibility for everything that concerns them. They can't just continue complaining about injustice; rather, they must act and work to re-educate people, starting with the people who first diagnose deafness in a child. It is important to focus on the training of doctors, psychologists, and others who give firsthand information to the parents of a deaf child. For example, a professional who would describe any deaf child as "speech impaired" is simply not the right person to be giving information to parents. We must assume more responsibility for everything that concerns the first years of a deaf child's life-mental development, the learning of language, social skills-and we must help the child to learn about our history and development, and to learn ways of dealing with society. This can be accomplished by supporting the families of deaf children and making the living environments of deaf children more stimulating. We need to find ways to teach survival strategies to deaf people of different age groups. Deaf people must learn more ways of coping with day-to-day and long-term difficulties, efforts that could be facilitated through training programs. Deaf people need to be encouraged to gain control of their own lives and not think of themselves as living in the custody of society. The habit of dependency must be broken, and one of the best ways of accomplishing this is through education. Education alone can give deaf people of all ages the ability to compete in society. The basic criticism deaf people level against the way deaf children are most commonly educated is the same all over the world. The method most commonly used for teaching deaf children is painfully difficult to understand. This method, in which the use of sign language is completely or almost completely forbidden, has been called oralism. Various...