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

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Page This untried experiment would begin with recognition that among deaf people in many places can be found a lively and viable subculture with a language sufficient to carry on all or almost all the activities necessary to any society. It would then utilize that language and the rich details of that culture as a means to bring deaf children into a full and satisfactory enculturation quite appropriate to their ages and their individual schedules of development. Next, as fully participating,
though juvenile, members of the deaf community, they would be given by this experiment better knowledge of a central fact about the deaf subculture, namely, that there exists roundabout it a larger, dominant, majority, hearing, speaking, and
(in some cases) literate general culture.
At this point comes the crucial part of the as-yet-untried experimentthe larger general culture and its language are made an object of study by the young deaf person. Unlike current educational efforts, this experiment would not immerse the deaf child from the start in a speaking, gesture-suppressing, nearblind milieu that practice has all the humane virtues of hurling a naked Eskimo baby into the water between ice floes in the pious belief that sooner or later the Eskimo baby must learn to live in a watery world. Instead, in this experiment the society in which normality is not to hear would gradually show the youngster how the customs and actions and beliefs and words and rules of the hearing culture differ from the familiar ones of the deaf. Along with this process of getting to know about the world outside would go explanations of why knowledge of English in America, Italian in Italy, Danish in Denmark, etc, can benefit the deaf. In short, this untried experiment in pedagogy would be both bicultural and bilingual.
The chief reason for thinking it might actually succeed as few experiments in teaching the deaf have is that, since de l'Épée's time, many deaf persons have brilliantly succeeded in becoming bicultural and bilingual. Heretofore, these persons have had to achieve their double belonging and their skill at encoding language in two ways despite the educational system and despite almost complete separation between the two cultures. The number of truly bicultural deaf

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