The Deaf Community In America Summary

In the book, The Deaf Community in America: History in the making by Meliva M. Nomeland and Ronald E. Nomeland, discusses the drastic changes in past years for the deaf community. Chapter three talks about Edward Miner Gallaudet and Alexander Graham Bell. They are two extremely different men born ten years apart and expressing very opposite views on the deaf community. Gallaudet and Bell were actively involved in the Washington area as well as sharing the same friend group. When the topic of deaf education would come up, the two men would have heated arguments about how it should be taught. In fact, Gallaudet University was almost turned down because of Alexander Graham Bell. He spoke out on the school’s program to the House Appropriations …show more content…
The Milan conference in 1880 was not much help to the support of Sign Language and Deaf culture because it was the belief that deaf people should be taught orally. It was voted 140 to 4 that oral method should be the preferred method of teaching. It is quite baffling to think that the hearing culture was making decisions for people that they probably knew nothing about. In addition, I am sure they did not ask the deaf community which method they would prefer or even to just let them have the option to pick. In today’s society, Deaf people still unfortunately still struggle at times to gain the independence they deserve due to the uneducated hearing community who label them as impaired. Nevertheless, it is leaps and bounds from how far sign language and the deaf community was compared to back when Bell and Gallaudet were alive. Thankfully, from my experience public schools are starting to educate their students more on different cultures and languages. I can recall being in kindergarten and learning a new sign every day or a new word in a different language. This out of everything, brings a little hope that if we as a community educated each other on the different cultures then we can all be more accepting of