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of support. Indeed, this is the truly unique feature of Deaf culture, and the one most worth educational consideration. It is a mistake to think that deaf babies do not get culturally designed support in the “spoken language” medium. Of course, they do. But they simply cannot take advantage of it to use their inborn language capacity. The deaf child is included in numerous social interactions culturally mediated by spoken language—families eat together, babies go with others on errands or to church, they are toilet trained. As Cole notes, “They live in a world that is suffused with meaning, although they lack access to the specifically linguistic behavior that fills the gaps between actions” (1996, 202). Even so, like all children, deaf children have active minds that develop ways to represent the world. This is enough to allow a kind of participation with others in many activities; it is a myth that deaf children begin their educations with no communication ability and no knowledge of the world. But communication is not always language, and partial knowledge and access are not enough for typical language acquisition to occur. Language acquisition requires full access and participation. Unfortunately, children who do not have full access to their family’s language used in culturally organized contexts will not develop it, even if they can communicate and participate in some of the actions that occur in these contexts. CULTURE, DEAF CULTURE, AND EDUCATION In evolutionary time, we got lucky. Over historical time, social groups made inventions and innovations and passed them on. This is what has made us who we are intellectually and made us very different from our closest primate relatives. But evolutionary and historical time are not right in front of us. Like geological time, these very long spans are difficult to imagine. What is in front of us are deaf children in their immediate time frame—their developmental time. Like all children, they should be able to depend on the pooled resources of others; and for most of their needs, they can. They enjoy the invention of devices that keep houses warm or cool, provide warm bath water and bubbles, cook food, produce entertainment, and print picture books. And they participate more or less willingly in social practices that keep them loved and adored, cared for, immunized against a variety of diseases, and treated for crooked teeth. Many even have access to devices that amplify sound or send pulses of electrical energy into their nervous systems. As cultural beings, deaf children are not completely unique. But there is one area where the resources accumulated 54 Claire Ramsey over the history of the hearing cultural world are not as effective for deaf children as they are for hearing children. Obviously that is spoken language . And in most societies, the shared spoken language(s) is the key to gaining access to other highly valued social innovations, like learning in formal schooling. We can hypothesize about whether or not a lack of ability to hear has ever been in the evolutionary, historical, or developmental plan. But it does not matter. The fact is that there are people who cannot hear, there always have been, and they have invented a variety of cultural solutions and transmitted them to others. We can state unconditionally that late, random, or degraded access to language is not in the plan. Partial or ambiguous access to language does not fill the requirements for participating in culture , nor does receiving basic skills instruction second-hand through an interpreter (Ramsey 2001). And living without the accumulated cultural inventions that boosted the intellects of previous generations is simply not in the plan either. DEFINITIONS OF CULTURE Recently, I had a chance to consider a new millennium definition of culture that was conveyed to me by hearing undergraduates at a midwestern university. The university offers a four-course series of ASL classes. About half of the eighty students per semester who enroll in the courses do so to satisfy their “foreign language” requirement. In these courses, readings about Deaf culture are included on the assumption that learning a language entails learning about its culture. In the case of a minority language like ASL, sensitivity to the culture of Deaf people is required. The same is required for students of Spanish, Lakota, and all the other modern language courses at the university. To my surprise, and, I think, to the Deaf instructors’ surprise, a large group of ASL students took an oppositional stance to the...

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