deaf education
Nothing new, of course -- many people have pointed out similar things. But I keep coming back to the whole question of deaf education and how it's gotten so screwed over by the ADA.
I mean, when the ADA came out I thought it was great. Not perfect, nothing ever is. But in the years since, I've seen a lot of stuff -- first from the disabled community who pointed out a lot of its shortcomings, and then in the last couple of months I've seen how it completely misses the boat when it comes to educating deaf children. In some respects, the ADA has an incorrect focus -- it brings the DISability to the fore. It should have been called something like the American Accessibility Act, and aimed in terms of making everything accessible, and not bogged down in the need to define what disabilities are because of the way it is written. Looking at it in terms of accessibility would keep it from so ludicrously considering mainstreaming as the least restrictive for the deaf, would enable many things to be of benefit to people who need them temporarily as well as permanently, would be far more flexible to a wide range of partial to complete accessibility problems, not to mention those who don't seem to have accessibility issues but do (ironically this can even include deaf people who are not always obviously deaf). Anyway, I digress...you can wander over to The Gimp Parade and Diary of a Goldfish for far better takes on this issue.
But honestly, this whole issue of how deaf children are educated is really beginning to annoy me. And I say this as someone who is basically a success story by the current mainstreaming standards, so this isn't an axe to grind.
Anyway, I think the absolute, primary, immediate need we have is to get more deaf people in the field of education, including deaf education. All kinds of deaf, in order for the kids to see someone like them. Ideally I'd love to see there being nothing unusual about a deaf teacher in any random elementary school across the nation, but realistically what I'd like to see is a strong proportion of the teachers who are teaching deaf children to be themselves deaf.
I mean we can talk all day about how to teach the children, whether or not to use ASL or some signed english, or whether to do speech therapy, how to structure "charter" schools, the question of residential schools, yadda yadda yadda but the essential point is I think, that the TEACHERS need to be DEAF. Full stop. At this point, what you have are teachers who will understand their charges, who will more accurately figure out what's going on with a given child (instead of tossing him in the "difficult" dustbin), and who will in all likelihood be better at teaching them as a result. Then we can start sorting out what works best because we will actually have reasonable input from teachers.
That's going to take a while, obviously -- we need to have more deaf people who are so inclined, to get into the educational field and that can take some time getting the accreditation. But I think we really need to push more and more of us into that system. Undermine it from within, if you will.
I mean, when the ADA came out I thought it was great. Not perfect, nothing ever is. But in the years since, I've seen a lot of stuff -- first from the disabled community who pointed out a lot of its shortcomings, and then in the last couple of months I've seen how it completely misses the boat when it comes to educating deaf children. In some respects, the ADA has an incorrect focus -- it brings the DISability to the fore. It should have been called something like the American Accessibility Act, and aimed in terms of making everything accessible, and not bogged down in the need to define what disabilities are because of the way it is written. Looking at it in terms of accessibility would keep it from so ludicrously considering mainstreaming as the least restrictive for the deaf, would enable many things to be of benefit to people who need them temporarily as well as permanently, would be far more flexible to a wide range of partial to complete accessibility problems, not to mention those who don't seem to have accessibility issues but do (ironically this can even include deaf people who are not always obviously deaf). Anyway, I digress...you can wander over to The Gimp Parade and Diary of a Goldfish for far better takes on this issue.
But honestly, this whole issue of how deaf children are educated is really beginning to annoy me. And I say this as someone who is basically a success story by the current mainstreaming standards, so this isn't an axe to grind.
Anyway, I think the absolute, primary, immediate need we have is to get more deaf people in the field of education, including deaf education. All kinds of deaf, in order for the kids to see someone like them. Ideally I'd love to see there being nothing unusual about a deaf teacher in any random elementary school across the nation, but realistically what I'd like to see is a strong proportion of the teachers who are teaching deaf children to be themselves deaf.
I mean we can talk all day about how to teach the children, whether or not to use ASL or some signed english, or whether to do speech therapy, how to structure "charter" schools, the question of residential schools, yadda yadda yadda but the essential point is I think, that the TEACHERS need to be DEAF. Full stop. At this point, what you have are teachers who will understand their charges, who will more accurately figure out what's going on with a given child (instead of tossing him in the "difficult" dustbin), and who will in all likelihood be better at teaching them as a result. Then we can start sorting out what works best because we will actually have reasonable input from teachers.
That's going to take a while, obviously -- we need to have more deaf people who are so inclined, to get into the educational field and that can take some time getting the accreditation. But I think we really need to push more and more of us into that system. Undermine it from within, if you will.