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

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Page There were teachers, however, who simply did not consider the students' needs or interests. Instead they complained that the college shouldn't have let the students in because they didn't know how to write an English sentence, or because their grammar was inadequate, or that they didn't seem to have any motivation. 25
Stokoe was learning as he went along. Ashe compared the way the deaf professors taught with the approach of many hearing professors who had been "trained" to teach deaf students, he became convinced that the trained teachers not only lacked solutions but were the cause of many of the problems. The trained teachers of the deaf were (and still are, he says, afflicted with the wider
American cultural complex "If it ain't English, it ain't language" They and their graduate schoolteachers are hard to convince that another language is in the picture, even when they live in Florida or Texas and the other language is
Spanish. After all, they can argue that these people are in this country now and that what their education has to give them is the ability to get along incorrect English.
To convince them that a language without sounds is a language is harder by several orders of magnitude. They have spent expensive credit hours learning the anatomy of the outer, middle, and inner ear, and of the organs of speech, not to mention the etiology and so forth of hearing loss, speech and language disorders, and more hours in the clinic learning to operate audiometers and read audiograms.
And of course their requirement in statistics makes it possible for them to think that by talking knowingly about the means, medians, modes, standard deviations, and the rest of the differences between the test scores of hearing and deaf students they are saying something important.26
Hans G. Furth, a psychology professor at the Catholic University of America and the author of Thinking without Language, has observed that "the history of the deaf stands out as one exceptionally glaring instance of man's inability to see beyond the confines of his own theoretical assumptions From the

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