I was grabbed by a headline I saw the other day and only just got a chance to read it. It’s called “Parents of deaf kids push for more American Sign Language education” and this is the url: https://www.wxyz.com/news/national/two-americas/parents-of-deaf-kids-push-for-more-american-sign-language-education. It grabbed me, of course, because these were *hearing* parents of deaf kids requesting ASL education.
I wrote before about the times in which my parents grew up and hearing parents were mostly very much against deaf children learning sign language. I also wrote about my experiences as an interpreter for Deaf students in the school system. There, there were 3 different methods of communication and 3 different kinds of interpreters: sign language, cued speech and lipreading (oral method). We were beginning to see the spread of cochlear implants, the newest thing in “fixing” a Deaf kid.
When Deaf parents have a Deaf baby, that child learns sign language right from the beginning. When they begin school, they have a language in place: American Sign Language. They have an easier time with English and don’t lag behind as much as the deaf kids with hearing parents.
Why? Those kids don’t have language from the get go. It takes a while for the parent to realize there’s a problem. The first thing they do is take their kids to doctors and audiologists who still view deafness as something pathological that needs to be “fixed”. They recommend testing to see if the kids qualify for cochlear implants. Meanwhile, other hearing kids are in preschool learning and signing deaf kids are in the process of acquiring more language too.
By the time deaf kids of hearing parents enter kindergarten, they’re lagging behind their hearing and signing deaf peers. They may or may not have been implanted. The white coated specialists have advised hearing parents NOT to use sign language because it might “impede” language acquisition. This is the same bullshit reasoning used when my mother attended an oral-only school for the deaf. Everyone told my grandparents that learning sign language would prevent my mother from speaking proper English.
Hearing educators think they know what’s best for Deaf children. They don’t. They know little to nothing about sign language and how much it benefits and enriches the lives of Deaf people. I’m very happy that, in this article, mothers in Michigan with deaf kids are united in trying to get a bill passed in their state legislature that would allow for ASL in schools. “These women are now behind the fight for Lead-K, a legislative campaign calling for the state to put ASL learning on equal footing with English, and ensure deaf kids are at age-expected levels by kindergarten.” I hope it passes but don’t hold out with too much hope for it because of the mindset of the GQP: they are determined to set the clocks back any way they can.
Even after the Deaf President Now and Deaf Pride movement, there is still so much ignorance about deafness. I think many people think ASL is just uneducated English. It’s not. It’s a beautiful expressive language with its own grammatical rules, syntax, and idioms. Here’s a better source explaining what ASL is from the National Association of the Deaf’s website: https://www.nad.org/resources/american-sign-language/what-is-american-sign-language/
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