Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  The popularity of mainstreaming has also contributed to the shift in Lexington’s student population. Parents who have a strong desire to see their deaf children fit into the hearing world and who might once have sent their children to Lexington are now choosing to mainstream them in public schools. Traditionally, children who have strong parental involvement are the ones who succeed best at oralism. With this pool depleted, Lexington faces the more complex challenge of teaching children whose parents may not have jobs or green cards, let alone fluency in English. The social reality is that many of these children need a program of instruction that includes sign language.

  Even if the political disputes about ASL were not hammering at the old system, Lexington could not remain a pure oral school—not if it wants to meet the needs of the city’s deaf children. Not if it wants to continue to exist.

  Once the conference tables have been dragged into position, the interpreter has taken his seat, and the committee members have uncapped their pens and turned to fresh sheets of their legal pads, Oscar welcomes the members, speaking and signing simultaneously. When he recruited them, he asked for both a commitment to the importance of audition and English for all students and an open mind concerning communication methodology. The two may seem mutually exclusive—they certainly don’t leave room for those champions of ASL who reject any use of English or residual hearing. But given Lexington’s history and reputation, the idea of having any discussion, of having any ambivalence about oralism, represents a significant divergence from course.

  The discussion also represents a fair amount of courage, not just because change in itself can be threatening, but because in this particular case no clear path lies ahead. So many different voices must be heard: those of educators, parents, students, policymakers, and members of the deaf community. Some say it’s criminal to force deaf children to use their voices and hearing aids, to instruct them in anything but ASL, their natural language, their birthright. Others say it’s criminal to do anything but teach them English and speech from infancy, to help them compensate for their hearing loss, to allow them to communicate with their parents. Still others say the only solution is to provide a choice, but that becomes convoluted with the question of who chooses—parents, children, teachers? The din of voices promises to be confounding, and there are no guarantees; the committee’s final report may recommend actions that Lexington will find itself unable to carry out.

  The teachers on the committee have turned their classes over to substitutes today; the administrators have shelved their regular responsibilities. Coffee sits cooling in stiff white cups. A beehive stack of Danish sent up from the cafeteria glistens, untouched, on the back table. Under the quiet hum of fluorescent bulbs, the room brims with a certain heightened energy—excitement about attempting something new, trepidation about being able to meet the objective.

  A trio of guest speakers has been invited to address the matter. Each is deaf. Each is a professional who holds a doctoral degree. And each approaches the subject from a startlingly different point of view.

  Richard Stoker, the director of the Central Institute for the Deaf (CID), an oral school in St. Louis, speaks for himself, explaining that he never found the time to learn sign language. A product of mainstreaming, he says he aligns himself socially and culturally with the hearing world. Signing is absolutely proscribed at CID. When asked whether CID students ever rebel against the restrictions, Dr. Stoker retorts, “Sure, we have a handful of hotheads who have nothing but bad things to say about being educated at an oral school, and I assign the same value to them as I do to black supremacists.”

  At these words the committee members seem to flinch collectively. Still, it is impossible to ignore CID’s record: as a private school, it has the right to admit only students who are able to succeed orally, and their test scores compare remarkably well with those of hearing students. If CID were state-funded, like Lexington, and required to accept students who need a manual program, Dr. Stoker declares he would sequester them so that the students who were succeeding orally wouldn’t be tempted by any exposure to sign language. When he reveals that all of CID’s graduating students read within one year of grade level, the Lexington staff looks momentarily sick with envy.

  Then there is Sam Supalla, a linguist from the University of Arizona, whose view is 180 degrees from Dr. Stoker’s. One of the 10 percent of deaf people who are bom to deaf parents, he signs in his native ASL. Following the deaf cultural tradition, he begins his talk by outlining his school and family background, relating a few anecdotes that locate him within the culture. He explains that while he was growing up on an isolated Oregon farm amid a large deaf family, he naturally believed that deafness was the norm, and until he was three years old he thought that the word “hearing” referred to a person who couldn’t sign.

  After establishing his cultural identity, Dr. Supalla goes on to explain language acquisition theory. He says that because deaf children rely on vision rather than audition, they cannot acquire English naturally but must learn it as a second language. He cautions against using MCE, SEE, and PSE, the made-up sign systems that blend components of English and ASL. “The languages are not compatible,” he warns. “When you try to mix them, something in the system goes haywire.” Auditory and speech training he does not advocate at all, saying that they injure a deaf child’s self-esteem by emphasizing weaknesses rather than strengths. Children’s first language ought to be ASL, Dr. Supalla asserts, with no compromises and no exceptions; to him, this is no less than an issue of human rights.

  These two views alone are enough to send the committee members reeling. Practical considerations aside—How could they sequester the manual kids from the oral ones without imposing a damaging stigma? How could ASL be the students’ first language when many of the teachers, let alone the parents, can barely sign?—the differences between the two seem impossible to reconcile. Yet both speakers point convincingly to the success of their respective views. Already the committee would seem to be at an impasse.

  But it is Irene Leigh, the assistant director of the Lexington Center for Mental Health Services, who, with fine understanding, paints the most devastating picture. She doesn’t use an interpreter but simultaneously speaks in a clear, throaty voice and signs in English word order. Like Dr. Supalla, she begins with personal information: her early training with hearing aids and speech therapy, her lack of deaf adult role models, and her experience of being mainstreamed with other deaf students in Chicago’s public school system, where she maintained ties with two distinct groups of friends, one deaf and one hearing. More than either of the other two speakers, Dr. Leigh is personally familiar with both sides of the issue, being attuned to dichotomous cultures within herself.

  She advocates neither oralism nor ASL, posing instead two rhetorical questions: “Can you imagine all of your students succeeding orally? At the same time, can you imagine depriving students of the opportunity to learn speech?”

  Dr. Leigh offers no middle ground between Dr. Stoker and Dr. Supalla but a third perspective. As a psychologist who counsels hearing parents, she has heard fears that the deaf community makes “moonies” of deaf children, turning them into militants for deaf pride. As a member of the deaf community, she has heard charges that the hearing establishment makes zombies of deaf children, turning them into lonely, culturally bereft oralists. With the moonie-zombie paradigm, Dr. Leigh highlights the core of the issue, the truth beneath the cool, dry layers of pedagogy and linguistics and reading scores: “mode of communication” has become a shibboleth. No one will reach a solution to the communication debate without understanding and addressing the emotional stakes in the tug of war over deaf children.

  “Let’s not throw the hearing aids out with the bathwater.” This is one of Oscar’s fond sayings, which he delivers innocuously enough. Only it is not innocuous; in the present political climate these are incendiary words, depending on who utters them, and in what context, and to whom.

  Oscar ca
n afford to say them, partly because Lexington is an old oral school and nobody expects it to fall into quick concordance with the political trend toward ASL, and partly because he has been a sort of affiliate member of New York’s deaf community since he was born. He is apportioned a little more trust and respect by deaf people than if he were a know-nothing hearie fresh on the scene. But mostly he can afford to say these words because he is relatively secure in his position as superintendent; at least so far, the deaf community has not tried to oust incumbents.

  Ever since the Gallaudet University uprising in 1988, hearing professionals have been watching what they say. That week-long protest galvanized deaf people across the United States, enchanted the international news media, and ended victoriously with the instatement of Gallaudet’s first deaf college president and first deaf president of the board. The Deaf President Now (DPN) movement was spontaneous, masterminded by no political strategists, planned in advance by no protest committee. Gallaudet was in the midst of hiring a new college president, and the announcement that the search committee had selected a hearing candidate should have been unremarkable, in light of the fact that Gallaudet had had hearing presidents since its inception in 1864. But it was as though the civil rights movement of the 1960s had finally seeped past the language barrier and achieved critical mass within the deaf community. The students erupted in rebellion. They marched to Capitol Hill. They took over their campus, pushing buses in front of the main entrance gates. At two or three or four each morning, student leaders set off the fire alarms, triggering strobe lights in each dorm room to rouse the residents; then they all trudged through the dark to the gymnasium to plan operations for the next day.

  The story caught on rapidly with the news media; reporters, photographers, and television cameras descended on campus. Interpreters from all over gave up commitments and flocked to Gallaudet, donating their services to help the media conduct interviews. Deaf leaders flew in to lend their support. Politicians and celebrities joined in, endorsing the students’ efforts and attracting more coverage. By the end of the week, the hearing president-elect stepped down, I. King Jordan became the university’s first deaf president, and Gallaudet was internationally famous.

  Schools for the deaf across the nation followed the situation avidly. Lexington had reason for particular interest. The president of Gallaudet’s student government, who appeared on Nightline with Ted Koppel as a key leader of DPN, was Greg Hlibok, a Lexington alumnus. And the newly elected president of Gallaudet’s board of trustees, Phil Bravin, was another Lexington alumnus, a member of the Lexington Center board, and a parent of two current Lexington students as well as a friend and colleague of Oscar’s. In spite of the number of miles separating Jackson Heights from Washington, D.C., the unfolding events seemed not so very far away.

  Many Lexington students and staff members openly cheered the Gallaudet victory. Others registered the outcome with veiled skepticism and concern. It was not difficult to imagine where DPN could lead. For years, the predominance of oralism had worked as an oppressive measure, effectively preventing deaf people from becoming teachers and entering the field of education, leaving the fate of deaf children exclusively in hearing hands, robbing deaf adults of jobs, denying them any input in decisions about how to educate deaf children. DPN taught deaf people that they didn’t have to accept this anymore. It signaled an end to hearing people’s unchallenged authority.

  The deaf cause had become a media favorite, and hearing politicians wanted to capitalize on this popularity. With the backing of these two allies, deaf people were able to shift the centuries-long imbalance of power between the hearing and themselves. In the years since DPN, local members of the deaf community have followed the example of the Gallaudet students, putting pressure on school hiring committees and policymakers with rallies and boycotts. This has done much to raise consciousness among the public, the media, and politicians as well as among school officials who may previously have disregarded the rights, or even the existence, of the deaf community.

  But it has also bred a certain amount of indiscriminate kowtowing to the wishes of the deaf militants. In some instances, an eagerness to demonstrate support for the civil rights of deaf people has overtaken the commitment to providing educational choices to deaf children and their parents. Some people say that in order to make up for all those years during which signing was prohibited and speech enforced, speech should not even be an option any more. Oralism, viewed as the tool of the oppressor, is regarded so negatively as to be discarded altogether, even if this means alienating hearing parents and driving a wedge between them and their deaf children, and even if it means denying children possible social and employment opportunities later in life.

  Most hearing people within the field fall into one of two camps: those who believe that the changes herald a victory for deaf people and who support the militants with all their hearts, and those who do not. Among those who do not, most are savvy enough to tread lightly, speak vaguely, and take care not to alienate deaf leaders. The frontier between deaf and hearing worlds has become a political minefield laced with danger.

  Tramping through this field with something like luck or grace comes Oscar. Rather than aligning himself with one camp or the other, he weaves down the middle in a stubborn cakewalk, questioning the certainties of both. Not that he stands pristinely aside while others clash ideological swords and jockey for power; he is in the struggle as much as anyone. But his agenda remains distinct.

  An example of the kind of situation that Oscar fears will arise from too-hasty efforts to appease the deaf militants is the fiasco that occurred in 1991 at the elementary and high schools housed on Gallaudet’s campus. The Kendall Demonstration School and the Model Secondary School for the Deaf (MSSD) adopted a new policy when school opened that fall: all communication would be conducted in ASL. This was enforced with such ludicrous rigor that a hearing teacher having a conference with hearing, nonsigning parents was required to use ASL and summon an interpreter to voice an English translation for the parents. By early winter, the school had received so many complaints that it suspended the rule.

  Soon after that, word was out that Gallaudet had issued an expanded definition of ASL; now it was to include any variation of sign language, from nonvoiced pure ASL to signs in English word order combined with speech. Linguists groaned. Kendall and MSSD were conveniently able to reinstate the ASL-only rule without a lot of nonsensical maneuvering. The experts have continued to revise and hand down definitions, and deaf people have continued to get along in the same variety of contact languages they have always used.

  While Gallaudet’s ASL-only policy proved muddled and ultimately embarrassing, another, subtler scenario concerns Oscar even more. Last year, one of Lexington’s high school seniors decided that he wanted to drop speech from his program. Three half-hour speech lessons a week are commonly scheduled for all high school students. The senior in question was Seth Bravin, the youngest son of Phil Bravin. An outstanding student and a class leader, bound for Gallaudet the following fall, Seth felt that he was old enough to make this decision for himself.

  Oscar met with him and told Seth that he respected his wish and his right to drop speech, and that he agreed that this decision was unlikely to hamper Seth’s future success or happiness. Then he asked him to consider his role as a class leader, someone whom other students admired and tried to emulate. He asked him to consider the role of speech for students who were not college-bound, who might be seeking blue-collar jobs with hearing employers and coworkers unaccustomed to deafness. He told Seth that he was worried that dropping speech could become faddish, cool, that students who might not have Seth’s ability to choose in their best interests would want to drop it too.

  There was a time when Lexington measured its students’ success by their degree of assimilation into the hearing world. Carrie Rosenfeld, the first Lexington student, established the model for subsequent graduates when she wrote at age seventy, “Despite my handicap, I h
ad the good fortune of being with normal hearing people. Most of my good friends were amongst them.” Today, these words sound so sad. Who taught her to aspire to friendships with “normal hearing people”? Was she also taught to shun friendships with deaf people? She writes of being “blessed with a devoted hearing husband,” of having children and grandchildren who were all hearing, or, as she puts it, “normal.” How did she feel, as the one “abnormal” person in the family? If she was “blessed” with a hearing husband, was he “afflicted” with a deaf wife?

  Today, Carrie is no longer the model. Lexington advocates oralism not for the sake of assimilation but for the sake of choice and increased opportunity. This was clear at the meeting between Oscar and Seth Bravin, and each respected the other’s position. Nevertheless, Seth made Lexington history by going ahead and dropping speech. But he made it quietly, conceding to Oscar’s wish for him to avoid setting a trend. No other students have since made the request. The whole event seems evidence, however, of a change in climate that could seep through Lexington’s walls; the school would do well to prepare for that possibility.

  Since mainstreaming has caught on as the oralists’ method of choice, and since speech and audition are increasingly out of favor with the deaf community, Lexington has found itself edged out onto an increasingly narrow limb. The communications committee is now trying to define the exact terms of that limb. Its efforts are made much harder by the fact that Lexington is not seeking to ingratiate itself with those on either side of the debate, who, like Dr. Stoker and Dr. Supalla, propose rather straightforward communication policies.

  Lexington will adopt neither of the extreme approaches. It seeks a third alternative, one that doesn’t exist—one that will answer not to hearing chauvinists or deaf militants but to the needs of the students and their parents. Working within the complex portrait painted by Dr. Leigh, risking the stubborn cakewalk that Oscar has navigated between opposing camps, the committee will try to create one.