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

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Page with Gallaudet security officers, who had handcuffed him making it impossible for him to signand held him in a neck lock.]
Why should the college demand that students be fluent in English, yet not hold the faculty to the same standard with regard to fluency in ASL It's disrespectful to deaf culture. Whatever prestige resulted from Bill's work must go to him,
not to the university. Only George Detmold can officially represent the university when it comes to deserving praise. He supported and stood by Bill when no one else did.
People do not look to Gallaudet anymore for new information or research on ASL. There is no marker or monument on campus extolling Bill and his work. Gallaudet is out of the mainstream as far as ASL and deaf culture go. It didn't and still doesn't deserve Bill. He's too good for Gallaudet. Attitudes have begun to change at Gallaudet. In 1989 three Gallaudet researchers, Robert E. Johnson, Scott K. Liddell, and Carol
J. Erting, published a page document entitled "Unlocking the Curriculum" In it they make a strong argument for many of the same teaching practices that Stokoe had pleaded for in his 1975 memo to President Merrill about the education of deaf children.
While it may seem to be too obvious to say, it remains true that, in order to understand signed utterances built on English syntactic and morphological principles, a child must first be competent in English. It also remains true that most deaf children arrive at school with little or no competence in English. These observations combine to suggest that English is not the most appropriate language to use for instruction in important and valued parts of the curriculum. This conclusion seems to have escaped the reasoning of those who have designed our current approaches to instruction for deaf children.31
In the final paragraph of the document, the authors state their observations and predictions relative to the implementation of their recommendations. These comments are strikingly similar to those Stokoe made in 1975 when he asked President

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