Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author

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Page persons has never been large, because it is so easy fora deaf person educated in hearing society to share the hearer- speaker's contempt for 'those deaf" who know only sign language and remain outside the general culture in obvious and in subtle ways.
As Vernon, Schreiber, Lieth, and others have told us, the deaf, around the world like other ethnic and linguistic minorities,
now display deaf pride and are beginning to seize the reins of deaf power. Forty years have passed since Ruth Benedict's
Patterns of Culture showed the world how much its human values and virtues depend on cultural wholes that define the integrity of a culture, and how empty are the values imposed by the rich and fortunate and powerful on those they colonize or otherwise enslave.
The term slavery is no hyperbole here. In primitive societies, slaves were kept to do tasks that slave owners thought beneath them. The Romans, more sophisticated, kept Greek slaves to teach them philosophy and art, but also to remind slaves and masters alike that Romans might be inferior to Greeks in the arts but Romans were the world's mightiest military, economic, and bureaucratic power. Today we have beaten the Romans at sophistication. Our counselors and rehabilitators and teachers and interpreters and psychologists and audiologists and soon do not keep slaves in the antique sense, but everyone of them depends on more or fewer deaf clients or pupils or patients to make them feel important,
successful, and superior. This is cultural colonialism, but the fact that it occurs inside our educational and other institutions and not at the ends of the earth makes it no less enslavement of members of one cultural group by the members and the ideologies of a dominant culture.
The time has come to try the experiment suggested here Let the deaf community itself plan and operate the program of education for deaf children. Such a program would beat once tougher and more humane. Tougher because the most successful deaf persons, the deaf community's leaders, know better than anybody how important for the deaf access to the general culture and literacy in its language can be. But more humane, because an educational program centered in the

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