Talk:Education of the deaf/Archive 1

Comment
The article seems to contain a great deal of back-and-forth between manualists and oralists, as well as arguments whose basis the wiki editor clearly did not comprehend and simply copied over. A number of grammatical errors also present themselves, for instance, the use of "evolution" as a proper noun, which it is not. Someone knowledgeable about the subject of the history of hearing impaired teaching methods should rewrite that section and leave out the partisanship. 70.167.86.164 (talk) 20:07, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

POV
It seems that this article advocates manualism over oralism, and gives examples from the first more than over the second. It even goes to saying "The time of oralism is considered to be the "dark ages for the deaf people in America", and saying deaf community "hates" oralism, instead of citing indivuals for their individual opinions. Some deaf people may even advocate oralism. It doesn't portray enough both of the methods failures, like manualism's failure of introducing the deaf to the broader society. It really portrays oralism as evil, instead of just a failing technique. If I'm correct, none of the references are from any official community... 205.211.221.52 (talk) 22:20, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

This article is written from a sociological POV, and because anything social involves value judgements, it assumes an oppressor-victim tone. Personally, I would prefer a framing article phrased in terms of greater or less functionality surrounding the current article, which is focused on the historicity of the clashes between the holders of each view. --BlueNight (talk) 00:51, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Rewrite, Separate, De-Escalate
I agree with the comments above. I do brain and education research and considered how my work might contribute to the deaf community. This article completely discouraged my interest as it focused on the divisive political tension within the deaf community. I agree with the POV author above regarding the complete lack of neutrality of this article. I suggest the following:

1. Dedicate an article to the very real political fight within the deaf community regarding their identity as a disability and a culture. As a hearing person, my only exposure to the deaf community (NPR radio shows mainly) has typically focused on the politics of whether cochlear implants is staying "true" to one's deafness. An article to outline the many perspectives of this and other tensions would be very helpful.

2. A SEPARATE article dedicated to the field of teaching deaf to speak: how is it taught, any empirical studies on degrees of speech competency compared to hours spent teaching and/or learning, what are the specific tools and techniques used, etc. Maybe one very small sub-section can quickly introduce the politics of Oralism vs. Manualism, which has a sub-header link to the main article regarding the divisive debate.

3. Redirect Manualism to Sign Language, which appears to be a comprehensive and informative article. Within this larger article Manualism can be put in context and then given a link to the political debate. In an effort, to focus peoples attention on solutions, it seems logical that an encyclopedia should prioritize factual curriculum over an internal debate within a specific community. This debate should have its own article with links in the introduction to the many valid forms of communication available to the deaf

As an interested outsider the -ism schism appears to be completely political and it distracts from the many ways we all can help deaf people navigate their world via whatever means they choose. I see no fundamental problem with teaching speech/lip reading or sign language. Both pedagogies have their own merits on their own as options for deaf people to engage each other and the wider community. Also, is there another term for oralism? It appears that oralism is meant to signify lipreading and speech to the exclusion of sign language. Again, this seems very divisive and not helpful to those mainly interested in a NPOV description of all possible solutions. Surely, there's some reasonable curriculum that advocates teaching speech/lip reading as a compliment to sign techniques, NOT exclusion. Wolfworks (talk) 17:55, 18 October 2009 (UTC)


 * It is divisive, and oralism and manualism are official terms with connotations that cannot be helped. They both have their own merits, yes, (I however I learn towards bilingual-bicultural education). Oralism does in fact almost always teach speech in exclusion of sign, frequently banning sign use in the class room. Total communication and Simultaneous Communication are blends of usually Manually Coded English/speech, but tend to learn towards signing or speech depending on if the teacher is hearing or Deaf (with confluent mistakes in the weaker language - how confusing!). Personally I feel they are kitchen-sink methods.
 * My view is any POV problems should be fixed here as there is plenty of good stuff in this article currently, no redirect. JoeSmack Talk 19:26, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

I have known several Deaf people, and I have yet to meet one, ONE, that supports oralism. The Deaf almost always do this as a result of feelings of loneliness and the misery of being told they "do not talk well enough" by their teachers. Further more, oralism does not enable the Deaf to act as hearing people. Only 30% of all words can actually be lip read. Most other words are guessed. This makes it easier for the Hearing to interact with the Deaf, but not vice versa. It is actually harder, especially when it is not difficult to communicate by pencil and paper. The prevailing feeling of the deaf community is that oralism results in much work to create much misery. Meet deaf people, and you will find that truly, none of them support oralism.-JDR —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.126.148.67 (talk) 08:03, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Rewrite
I did a sentence by sentence edit to take out some of the more direct bias and generalizations. Phrases like "in fact" and "The American speaking public were removed. ruark —Preceding undated comment added 03:51, 9 January 2010 (UTC).
 * Editing the sentences will not take away the apparent bias of manualism over oralism. It is the author's intent and information. This whole article basically came out of the book, Forbidden Signs: The Campaign against Sign Language, which discusses what the author calls the "pseudo-scientific arguments for preventing the use of sign language", and coming back with baseless attacks against oralism. (i.e. "Oralism began to decline because “research found that oralism was a complete failure”" without addressing any assessments or the source of research within the book)--LDemeter Talk31, January 2011 (UTC)

Linguistics
Why is there so little information in this article about the research done by linguists on the manual modality? This reads like the elevation of ASL to a position equal with oral language is a matter of opinion and politics, rather than a topic that's been studied in detail both experimentally and through observation and about which people have actual scientific knowledge. There isn't even any information here on the studies done on infants learning sign language as a first language, or the fact that child language development milestones are nearly identical for deaf children learning ASL and hearing children learning English. I don't have all the information to write this section, but anyone who does should definitely contribute. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.206.162.68 (talk) 05:14, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

The article on first languages is probably a good place to reference this article. As a person with hyperlexia who learned to read by the age of 3, I feel my native language is written text, with less fluency in spoken English. I don't use the written word to communicate in-person because it's slower than speech, and because our culture is not built around it, but the Internet feels like home and family to me. I would be interested in research on hyperlexics who were raised by manualists. As for rewriting this article to include Unsigned IP's suggestion, I don't know any research on it, but I would encourage any editor who does to contribute. --BlueNight (talk) 01:02, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Capitalization
The article seems to go back and forth a lot between Deaf and deaf. Maybe there is an rule for this which is being followed and I'm just unfamiliar with that rule but it appears to just be very inconsistent capitalization. Svenna (talk) 20:01, 14 March 2010 (UTC)


 * The word "Deaf" refers to members of the Deaf Community (similar as using Portuguese to refer to people from Portugal). A Deaf can be a hearing person (it's not related with hearing loss, but community membership, e.g., someone that was born in Spain can be considered Portuguese if moved to Portugal a long time ago and /or adopted their culture / way of living). In opposition, the word "deaf" is used to refer to anyone that has a hearing loss. RMP Talk 17:03, 27 October 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.88.134.90 (talk)


 * As a person with hyperlexia, I find it fascinating (and somewhat amusing) that my native language, the written word, can make this distinction with ease through capitalization, whereas manual and oral languages have no universal equivalent that I know of. (Actually, body language is probably the most common equivalent, although its use varies much more than capitalization.)  --BlueNight (talk) 01:09, 28 November 2010 (UTC)