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

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Page world of deafness. In this untried experiment it would be only the exceptional hearing person who could work with the youngest children while most hearing-speaking teachers would be most usefully employed in the later grades helping the pupils learn more about the hearing-speaking world they will soon see more of. But the babies would start off with adults who, like themselves, have to cope with the world through information entering the eyes, transmitted by bodily action, but generated and organized by good deaf brains.
As for the parents, let the hearing parents learn how to fingerspell and sign, if they like. Many are doing so now as part of the program of "total communication" But let the school make it possible for the children to interact freely in "deaf" Sign.
There will be plenty of time later for them to pickup the different ways of manually representing the majority culture's language. In fact they pickup now various approximations, in large part, I believe, because the schools still do not recognize that there are varieties of majority language, varieties of sign language, and varieties of ways of mixing the two.
There will be time for real learning and developing and second-culture-language learning in a school where it is natural as breathing not to hear. Ina world where there is much to see and where it is natural to sign and beautiful to be deaf and alive, there will be time to learn that language is made inside the head whether it comes out as English or Sign.
There maybe plenty of time for the deaf child, but I would like to see this experiment tried soon. Not just because a cultural minority with a silent language needs a chance to catch up with the majority's world, but also because if the majority could let this experiment be tried soon enough it might just break the self-destructive, dehumanizing spiral it seems locked into. Needless to say, President Merrill did not advocate the adoption of Bill Stokoe's "untried experiment" at the Seventh Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf. In fact, he never responded to it at all.

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