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

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Page the second kind of observation, i.e., reading the whole context for all its cluesthe kind of observation deaf children are really good atcounts for nothing. The deaf child instead is forced to get just the sounds of language used, forgetting everything else. Then, if he finally gets the spoken and lipread sound right, he has made a dozen mistakes in grammarmeanwhile the whole rich context, the real meaning has disappeared.
If bicultural, bilingual education for the deaf by the deaf were ever to be tried, the inhumanity and inanity of present experiments in education would be first to go. Deaf children's skill at reading a whole context and their working knowledge of situations and people would be put to good use in learning. What they are good atseeing actions in contextwould help them do what must always be done if one cannot hear. They could then be led, as human beings secure in available society of others like themselves, to deal with the new contexts they must learn about. Using their skill at seeing, knowing, and understanding contexts involving people, they could begin to unravel the mystery of language as a system which relies much lesson context for its information carrying. Ina bicultural and bilingual setting, deaf children would set out to explore the working of spoken and written language from a secure and satisfying home base.
I believe this experiment deserves to be tried. The deaf community ought to setup schools in which the deaf greatly outnumber the hearing faculty and staff, if only as a balance to the circumstances that nine out often deaf children come from homes where only they cannot hear.
The deaf community should not just establish and control the schools deaf children go to they should also control the preparation of deaf teachers. Deaf persons and hearing persons interested in the special education of the deaf should enter the classroom only when fully conversant with the deaf culture and language. Of course this means complete reversal of present practices, wherein some schools the deaf teachers are allowed to teach the senior pupils, and all the preschool,
kindergarten, and primary rooms are staffed by hearing, speaking, and mouthing teachers who know nothing of the

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