Multiculturalism
in the United States has pushed the importance of a second language on the
American youth. All over the country, high schools are offering Spanish, French
and German courses. In recent years, Vietnamese and Japanese courses are
available in some high schools. However,
ASL (American Sign Language) is not offered as a second language to most high
school students. In fact, ASL is considered a college course; yet not all
colleges offer it. While all accredited colleges require a foreign language
towards any Bachelor of Arts degree, not all schools consider ASL to be a language, foreign or not. Furthermore, while ASL is accepted as a language in
some educational industries, it is considered to be an elective in others. This
is primarily because not everyone agrees on how to classify it.
Although most
experts will agree that language is a system of symbols that allows people to
communicate with one another, others insist that language must contain oral
transmission. This in turn has created controversy on how to categorize ASL. Because colleges cannot agree on how to classify the language, there underlies a
second question. How are credits from ASL courses transferred from one college
to another? With so many debates on how to classify the non-oral language, many
students will not take the course. Thus, a language barrier between the deaf
and the hearing continues to rise across the country.
Language
not only allows communication, it insures the continuity of culture. To dispute whether or not ASL is considered a
second language based upon oral transmission would seem absurd. Consider the infamous Helen Keller who
through an illness was left blind and deaf.
Without these two senses, she was cut off from the symbolic world, which
greatly limited her social development.
Only when her teacher, Annie Mansfield Sullivan broke through Keller’s
isolation using sign language did Keller realize her human potential (Macionnis
64). For this reason, ASL should not be
considered an elective, but a language and should be treated with the same
respect as any language.
Another
problem that many deaf citizens encounter is the social neglect. This neglect is associated with the language
barrier. Language has a great impact on
the social needs of every culture and the deaf are not the exception. It is common that hearing parents are unable
to communicate with their deaf children due to a language barrier, which in
turn creates a social neglect. Often
this neglect stems from the act of love.
Frequently hearing parents realize that it would be quite difficult for
a deaf individual to survive in a hearing world without proper training. For this reason, many deaf children are sent
off to deaf schools while the parents are left uneducated about the basic needs
of their deaf child. Moreover, many hearing parents do not learn any form of sign language outside of the basic
finger spelling, which in turn limits the communication and leaves the child
feeling isolated from his/her family.
Other
parents become over protective regarding their deaf child and the hearing
world. Determined to keep them safe,
some parents have been known to keep their child secluded from the hearing and in
turn, the world. Tracy Brevozski, an
educational interpreter for ASDB in Kingman AZ. stated, “These children
are indirectly being harmed by the love of their parents because the child inevitably
grows to depend on the parents for all of his/her needs. It eventually becomes too
difficult for the deaf child to be self-reliant and able to fit into the
hearing world without proper care.” In
both cases, the children become victims of love while being deprived of social
experiences in the hearing world.
Consequently, numerous citizens in the deaf community feel isolated from
both the hearing society and/or their families.
Thus, various deaf individuals are left with their own small group of
where interaction is possible.
Although
some accommodations such as closed captioning, TDD/TTY, and interrupters have
been made accessible to the deaf community, there still remains a communication
gap between the hearing and the deaf.
This communication gap can be minimized through work and discovery. “Educating the deaf to interact with the hearing
is of great importance. However, it cannot stop there. We must educate the hearing
as well.”—Tracy Brevozski.
The
structural-functionalist, also known as an idealist might suggest that the deaf
and the hearing communities need to work together as a whole and complete
society. Herbert Spencer, an influential English philosopher who coined the
term ‘survival of the fittest’ years before Darwin might have suggested that
depriving one community from the other would create a series of social
problems, which in turn could have a dramatic effect on both societies. However,
W.E.B. Du Bois and Karl Marx might have recognized the inequality of respect
given between ASL and other languages. Sociologists such as Du Bois and
Marx that use the social-conflict paradigm recognize continuous conflict
between dominant and disadvantaged categories of people. Marx might have also compared the deaf
community to the capitalist and the class conflict theory. It might also be
argued that the hearing keep the deaf oppressed just as the capitalists have
oppressed the poor, which would leave the deaf community in a state of
alienation.
No
matter what theory one can apply, the facts are indisputable. The deaf culture
should not be ignored any longer. It is time to break the walls of the language
barrier and social neglect. Only then
can both societies live in harmony.
Sandie RH Hart
Prosper, TX
References
Brevozski, Tracy. Educational Interrupter. N. Campus
Kingman High School, ASDB. Arizona School Deaf And Blind.
Macionis, John J. Sociology.
Congress Cataloging. Saddle River, NJ. 1987. (16-100)
Spradley, Thomas
S. and James P. Spradley. Deaf Like Me. NY. Random House Inc. 1978.
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