How about a full answer, KellyM? Which private Catholic school in eastern Maryland?
And, yes, I will spend my own coin to call the school to determine if there are, in fact, two hearing students whose native language is not Sign who are being forced to have unneeded interpreters.
Bullshit! Is right, you watch one movie and you think there isnt a Deaf culture. My challenge to you is to go to Galludet University for a semester and see how different it is. ASL is a language, and it is not based on english as most people think. That is also why the Deaf read at a third grade level. I know many Deafies, I like most and some bug the hell out of me. But there is no question they live a totally different lifestyle than most. And they have characteristics to their own. If it’s not culture then it’s a sub-culture, that deserves and demands your respect
There is a vast difference between a community and a culture. Nobody (I think) is denying that the deaf ‘community’ exists, with a lot of shared norms (including language) and some shared values (at least to the extent of promoting ASL as a legitimate language).
Now whether that constitutes a ‘culture’ is another matter altogether.
As I said, define “culture” and I’ll tell you if there is such a thing as “Deaf culture”. If you’d rather call it “the deaf community” or “deaf sub-culture”, so be it. But what’s the point?
The bottom line is that many deaf people have limited interaction with hearing people, and instead interact mostly with other deaf people, for the various reasons I listed earlier.
The thing is, the “Deaf Culture” movement is really a response to the spectacularly misguided deaf education practices last generation. Oralism and residential schools were practically guaranteed to produce several generations of deaf adults who were angry about how they were treated by the hearing world, suspicious of the motives of hearing people who wanted to “help” them, and isolated from everyone except other deaf people.
Deaf education has changed dramatically in the last 20 years. But the effects of the past are still here and so you have deaf adults who are ASL chauvinists. The thing is, deaf adults aren’t pissed off about ignorant strangers who knew nothing about deafness and were rude or bigoted or violent. They are pissed of at so-called deaf educators who applied their instructional and social theories without noticing the destruction and misery they were causing.
Such an experience might train you to question the motives of people who “just want to help”. Why do they want to help? Why do they want to help US? What qualifications do they have to help us? What psychological rewards do they get from “helping” disabled people?
See what I’m getting at? If the last big initiative from hearing people to help integrate deaf people into the mainstream (oralism) was a disaster, don’t you think it would make people suspicious of the next big push (cochlear implants)? Maybe their suspicions are well-founded and maybe they aren’t. But doesn’t it make sense that they are suspicious? And that accusing people of child abuse because they aren’t jumping on the bandwagon is foolish?