Deaf Education

An issue of prime importance with regard to deaf education and deaf individuals has been patterns of literacy achievement and difficulties in this area that are faced by most students who are deaf or hard of hearing. The Renaissance is generally credited with major changes in creative thinking. Accordingly, more complex views of deaf people and deaf education can be found during this period in the writings of the Dutch humanist Rudolphus Agricola and the Italian mathematician and physician Girolamo Cardano. In the late 1400s, Agricola described a deaf person who had been taught to read and write. With signs, he explained, or some other visual or pedagogical means, deaf persons could sufficiently express themselves and understand the world (Radutzky, 1993). When Agricola's work was published 43 years after his death, it came into the hands of Cardano, who elaborated on the uniqueness of deaf people being able to communicate through reading and writing, rather than through hearing and speaking. Cardano's son had a hearing loss, but we know little about how this father's experience shaped his thinking about the connection between written characters and ideas. He took note, for example, of how a deaf person may conceive such a word as "bread" and associate the written word directly with the concept it represented.

The clinical perspective on deaf education has also received impetus, most notably from medical and technological advances. With regard to medicine, there was the near elimination of some formerly common etiologies of hearing loss in children (e.g., maternal rubella), although there has been a relatively greater occurrence of others (e.g., premature birth). Of growing significance, however, is the rapidly increasing number of deaf children who are receiving cochlear implants. Research concerning effects of implants on aspects of development other than hearing is just beginning, and so the long-term implications for education and for language, social, and cognitive growth remain unclear. There is no sign that these seemingly disparate cultural and clinical perspectives will be easily resolved in the educational arena.

In general, the curriculum emphases in deaf education, as a field, have not been closely tied to those in public education for hearing students. In science, mathematics, and social studies, for example, the relevance of the curriculum movements of the 1960s and 1970s, especially those focused on active learning and articulation across grades, were not adequately explored for school programs serving deaf students (Lang, 1987). Although deaf education may need particular emphases in the curriculum (and instruction) to address the special needs and characteristics of deaf learners, the benefits of approaches and materials used for hearing peers have not been systematically examined.

In the absence of full implementation, it is difficult to determine the potential impact of PL 94142 on deaf education and the Deaf community. Meanwhile, many schools for deaf children are finding it difficult to maintain minimum enrollments, and it remains to be determined whether regular public schools really represent less restrictive environments for deaf children than do residential schools.