Resource: Education of the Deaf as Viewed from the Rehabilitation Perspective
In this journal article from 1972, accessible via JSTOR, Brian Bolton offers a view on the problems facing deaf education. He begins by citing the low graduation rate of deaf students – a number which he calls a “rough estimate.” He believes that in 1972 as many as half of the deaf youths in the United States of America were in “vocational rehabilitation” (job training) programs. He notes research that shows deaf people attain the same intelligence as hearing people and therefore should have the same potential. He believes that deaf children have trouble reading and even more trouble writing, but I tend to believe that perhaps that may be the fault of the way they were educated. He believes that only 1 percent of deaf people achieve a 12th grade achievement level, which I would hope has changed since 1972. Furthermore he argues that many deaf people are socially and emotionally immature. He believes these factors and the lack of vocational training for the deaf have caused most of their inability to get on equal footing with hearing people. Bolton makes it clear that he blames the educational establishment for these problems. Bolton also does not believe that deaf students ever reach the same language achievement levels as hearing students. He is a strong believer in integrating deaf and hearing communities in schools to allow for social interaction. His solution to the problem is pre-schooling for the deaf, early parental education, and integrated education. While many of Bolton’s views are outdated and certainly not politically correct, it is true that including deaf students in the general education classroom with hearing students is ideal as it does not isolate them from the world. The statistics are probably inaccurate, but, nonetheless, the point that life is more difficult for the deaf in a hearing world is certainly not to be understated. For a deaf student in my classroom, it would be at a minimum necessary to provide visual and written representations of anything I teach to make it possible for the deaf student to learn to read in a second language. This study also makes me curious about whether ASL signers have foreign sign classes for BSL and other sign languages.s
Work cited:
Bolton, Brian. “Education of the Deaf as Viewed from the Rehabilitation Perspective.”
Peabody Journal of Education 50.1 (Oct 1972): 63-67.
