Being Deaf

As you know, I work in a deaf school, so it would be better to talk about “Deafness” to understand things better when you read my words on the deaf. Before I was assigned to this volunteer work, I had been, in fact, illiterate in audiology, which is the science and medicine that deals with the sense of hearing. So I went to book shops to get books about this study, but it was too tough to get them and I could find only one book. This fact would be showing people’s interests on Deafness in society. However today life is very convenient; I went to “Amazon.com” and got more than 30 books so easily by just “clicking” from all over Japan, and they were delivered in a couple of days. And what’s more, their prices were so cheap. What a life! It is true that we live in a dreamy world today indeed. 

The deaf means people who have problem with hearing and basically can’t “talk”. Although many students “utter” voice in everyday life, it doesn’t follow the system of language. Therefore they can’t talk in this definition. There are some students who can somehow “talk”, this is because of the age that hearing was lost. If it is from the birth, you do have problem with hearing and utterance; if it happened by some accident like disease or side-effects of medicine at a certain age, you might be able to keep some level of talking ability. Many of the deaf are “hard of hearing” who can hear large sound and “complete deaf” seems rather rare. But in developing countries, since they don’t learn language systematically due to deafness, they don’t know how to “talk”, while the deaf can learn it with the help of hearing aid, FM hearing system, artificial internal ear etc. in developed countries.

Language consists of “form” and “meaning” and these 2 elements must be connected in order to acquire language. First of all, child memorizes language as sound (form) through passive communication with mother (primary child carer). And he/she adds meanings of each word through non-linguistic communication (gestures or facial expressions). Then importantly, the ability of language can, in truth, affect the ability of thinking. In the next phase, child recognizes what he/she utters by ears and “Bone conduction”, and by looking at the reactions of people around him/her, child judges and corrects the meaning of what he/she utters if it’s proper or improper, and then acquires the ability of thinking and of control oneself, which is called “Feedback”. In one’s infancy, deaf baby utters sounds but the baby stops utterance itself because of the lack of Feedback. In sum, deafness influences the total ability of human, and it is said that the deaf have difficulty to grasp “abstract concept” such as English grammar. In fact, my students have quite low ability in English.

 However I’d say that their lives are very rich, thanks to communication through “sign language”. Of the books that I read in Japan, I got to know an African American, A. J. Foster, who contributed to establish more than 30 deaf schools in Central and West Africa from 1960s to 80s, and founded his first deaf school in Accra in 1965. On the contrary, it was the time of “the Dark Ages” for the deaf living in “developed” countries because sign language had been banned for a long time based on the idea of “Oralism”. Even if the deaf train to talk, they can’t be perfect and communicate with hearing people fluently. Nevertheless society forced them to follow that stupid idea and the deaf had suffered form it. Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf, once said, “If I could remove one of my disabilities, I’d surely choose ‘hearing’, because I could communicate with people.” Her words would imply that Communication is the most important thing for human beings. Thanks to A. J. Foster and sign language, today our school is full of smiles of children, which is the symbol of richness.