the isolation that Deaf children can experience if they’re the only Deaf person in a room – or a school – full of hearing people.
With the Deaf community, there’s a very proud culture that can come with knowing the language – and to be educated entirely orally, either in mainstream or specialist schooling, would potentially remove, or at the very least alter, a big part of that culture.
In this bold sentences, the governments expect to close the Deaf schools almost all over the world. They think or thought that the CIs will help the deaf children and people to hear clearly and have "normal" hearing. That is not true at all. When someone lose their hearing and can not get back to "normal" hearing again (only the mild and moderate hearing loss people may be able to hear with the hearing aids), even with the hearing aids or CIs. A lot of them like for me, I can not pick up what the person said or what the teachers or the hearing students were saying. That is also what the hearing specialist and teachers expect us to lipread to understand what is going on in the classrooms. As for FM, some of them are able to and others not. When I was in the hearing classrooms in the United States, I did not have FM at all and still have trouble understanding what they said when I tried to lipread them.
Without signing the sign language like ASL or yours in BSL, it is definitely impossible to understand what going on in the hearing classrooms. That is why we want ASL, BSL or any other sign languages (have Sign Language Interpreters) in the world to be able to understand so that we can understand the lessons or the studies in high school, colleges or lectures. Sign language is very important for many Deaf people where there are hunger for learning and communicating. No wonder, many Deaf schools provided sign languages so that we can understand whereas many other Deaf schools want oral education. We have struggled for many years to fight with hearing educators to provide us sign languages, notetaking and close captioned films.
Being in the Deaf Culture is important to us but back then, we were not told about Deaf community and the Deaf Culture and wanted us to use oral education in both in the Deaf schools and mainstream schools. I guess we are still fighting for our equal rights to have sign languages in the schools and other public places.
I never like being in a oral environment in schools and expected to be like the hearing people. That is why I am a Deaf Militant fighting for my right as Native American and Deaf person. :P
