Into the World of Hearing
Some hearing peoplebelieve that people who aredeaf would like to hear if they could. This is not necessarily true.
Some deaf peopledo seek medical treat-ment for
their hearing loss.Some receive cochlear im-plants. But, many deaf peoplehave no desire to be hearing.However, few hearing peoplerealize that there is a deaf culture that is unique fromthe hearing culture. Deaf peo-ple find being deaf very posi-tive, because they don
t havenoise
s to bother them. Worldwide, more than112,000 people have cochlearimplants. In the U.S., some23,000 adults and 15,500children and youth have beenimplanted. American SignLanguage is the third most widely used language in theUnited States.93 percent of deaf children are born intohearing families; only 7 per-cent are born into deaf fami-lies.
Educational performanceof students who are Deaf/Hard of Hearing remainspoor. The average readingcomprehension of 18-year-oldstudents was reported at justbelow 4th grade on the SAT-9.
The average age of identifi-cation of hearing loss in in-fants is two and one-half tothree years of age, well pastthe critical period for speechand language development.Culture results from agroup of people coming to-gether to form a community around shared experiences,common interest, sharednorms of behavior, and shardsurvival techniques. Such asgroups as the deaf, seek eachother out for social interac-tion and emotional support.How a person labels them-selves in terms of their hearingloss is personal and may re-flect identification with thedeaf community or merely how their hearing loss affectstheir ability to communicate.
It is
estimated that 1.6 mil-lion people in South Africause Sign Language as a firstlanguage. Of these 600 000are profoundly deaf and 1million are extremely hard of hearing. A man named ThomasGallaudet suffered from poorhealth through-out his life,and discovered the world of deaf when he met young AliceCogswell. Alice was a deaf child with no language.Through interacting with Alice, he discovered teaching.On a trip to Europe he met,and brought back LaurentClerc, a deaf teacher, and hehelped him open a Americanschool for deaf in Connecti-cut. Thomas Gallaudet life was short, but he left a legacy of educated deaf people atGallaudet University.Gallaudet University Itis a federally chartered univer-sity for education of the deaf,
Deaf CultureHearing is not always the case.
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and hard of hearing, locatedin Washington D.C. It wasthe first school for the ad- vanced education of the deaf and hard of hearing in the world, and is still the world'sonly university in which allprograms and services arespecifically designed to accom-modate deaf and hard of hear-ing students. Hearing studentsare admitted to the graduateschool, and a small number,known as hearing undergradu-ate students are admitted asundergraduates each year. Theuniversity was named afterThomas Hopkins Gallaudet, anotable figure in the advance-ment of deaf education. Gal-laudet University is a bilingualcommunity in which Ameri-can Sign Language and Eng-lish exist side-by-side. Whilethere are no specific ASL re-quirements for undergraduateadmission, many graduateprograms have sign languageproficiency requirements.
To understand Deaf culture, it is helpful to con-sider the concept of culture ingeneral. Culture is commonly defined as the values, tradi-tions, norms, customs, arts,history, folklore, and institu-tions that a group of people, who are unified by race, eth-nicity, language, nationality,or religion, share. In essence,it is the way of life shared by the members of a group. As with any culture, Deaf cultureis learned and passed downfrom generation to genera-tion. Most cultures are passeddown within families. How-ever, because 90 percent of Deaf people are born to hear-ing parents, only a small per-begun to refer to this processas "Deaf hood." According toPaddy Ladd, who coined theterm, Deaf hood is "the proc-ess of defining the existentialstate of Deaf "being-in-the- world." Deaf hood is not seenas a finite state but as a proc-ess by which Deaf individualscome to actualize their Deaf As a result, most Deaf people learn their culturethrough interactions withtheir peers and other Deaf people
often in Deaf schoolsand other community institu-tions. For many Deaf people,developing a Deaf identity isthe result of a process. Re-cently, many Deaf people haveidentity, positing that thoseindividuals construct thatidentity around several differ-ently ordered sets of prioritiesand principles, which are af-fected by various factors suchas nation, era and class." Justlike everyone we have many values, collectivism is one of the main values of the Deaf culture. Deaf people place acentage of Deaf people learntheir culture from their fam-ily.
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