Vintage Sacks by Oliver Sacks

of deaf children and in the literacy of the deaf generally.
    These dismal facts are known to all teachers of the deaf, however they are to be interpreted. Hans Furth, a psychologist whose work is concerned with cognition of the deaf, states that the deaf do as well as the hearing on tasks that measure intelligence without the need for acquired information. He argues that the congenitally deaf suffer from “information deprivation.” There are a number of reasons for this. First, they are less exposed to the “incidental” learning that takes place out of school—for example, to that buzz of conversation that is the background of ordinary life; to television, unless it is captioned, etc. Second, the content of deaf education is meager compared to that of hearing children: so much time is spent teaching deaf children speech—one must envisage between five and eight years of intensive tutoring—that there is little time for transmitting information, culture, complex skills, or anything else.
    Yet the desire to have the deaf speak, the insistence that they speak—and from the first, the odd superstitions that have always clustered around the use of sign language, to say nothing of the enormous investment in oral schools, allowed this deplorable situation to develop, practically unnoticed except by deaf people, who themselves being unnoticed had little to say in the matter. And it was only during the 1960s that historians and psychologists, as well as parents and teachers of deaf children, started asking, “What has happened? What
is
happening?” It was only in the 1960s and early 1970s that this situation reached the publics, in the form of novels such as Joanne Greenberg’s
In This Sign
and more recently the powerful play (and movie) Children of a Lesser God by Mark Medoff. 25
    There is the perception that something must be done. But what? Typically, there is the seduction of compromise—that a “combined” system, combining sign and speech, will allow the deaf to become adept at both. A further compromise, containing a deep confusion, is suggested: having a language intermediate between English and Sign (i.e., a signed English). This category of confusion goes back a long way—back to de l’Epée’s “Methodical Signs,” which were an attempt to intermediate between French and Sign. But true sign languages are in fact complete in themselves: their syntax, grammar, and semantics are complete, but they have a different character from that of any spoken or written language. Thus it is not possible to transliterate a spoken tongue into Sign word by word or phrase by phrase—their structures are essentially different. It is often imagined, vaguely, that sign language
is
English or French. It is nothing of the sort; it is itself, Sign. Thus, the “Signed English” now favored as a compromise is unnecessary, for no intermediary pseudo-language is needed. And yet, deaf people are forced to learn the signs not for the ideas and actions they want to express, but for phonetic English sounds they cannot hear.
    Even now the use of signed English, in one form or another, is still favored against the use of ASL. Most teaching of the deaf, if done by signs, is done by signed English; most teachers of the deaf, if they know any sign, know this and not ASL; and the little cameos that appear on television screens all use signed English, not ASL. Thus, a century after the Milan conference, deaf people are still largely deprived of their own, indigenous language.
    But what, more importantly, of the combined system by which students not only learn sign language but learn to lip-read and speak as well? Perhaps this is workable, if education takes account of which capacities are best developed at different phases of growth. The essential point is this: that profoundly deaf people show no native disposition whatever to speak. Speaking is an ability that must be