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

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ities can a modern state win the loyalty and valuable contribution of such minorities to society as a whole. As Stokoe surrounded himself in the lab with the most knowledgeable linguists and researchers working in the field of ASL, he became firmly convinced that their findings should be applied in every classroom where deaf children gathered. Not to do so would be to short-circuit the children's futures. He reiterated his convictions at conferences, conventions, meetings, workshops:
How could anyone confuse signed English with American Sign Language One was a fully developed language, the other "not a language but a word-encoding system."48
Early in 1975, President Merrill, as national chairman of the Commission on Pedagogy of the Seventh Congress of the World
Federation of the Deaf, sent a memo to all Gallaudet faculty asking for "input" on methods to better educate deaf children.
Stokoe responded with an eloquent, incisive proposal outlining the ways in which deaf children could be educated, along with an accurate indictment of the practices then current in deaf education. This wasn't exactly what President Merrill had had in mind. Even today, almost twenty years later, "An Untried Experiment Bicultural and Bilingual Education of Deaf Children"
(reprinted below despite its length) is one of the most convincing arguments for the use of American Sign Language ever to be produced. Many people have observed that Stokoe's writings are often too scientific, too technical, to be comprehensible to the average reader. Even trained linguists complain about the codes Stokoe uses in his dictionary and textbook. But "An Untried
Experiment" is Bill Stokoe at his best pragmatic, convincing, and eloquentadvocating the cause to which he has dedicated his entire professional life.
In the long history of attempts by hearing persons and by official bodies to educate or to provide education for deaf persons, many methods have been tried. The history is well enough known not to need recounting here. However, one method has not yet been tried on any but an isolated individual or two, even though many findings of current science recommend it.

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