Silent World — A discussion group discussion

Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks

Like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, this is a fascinating voyage into a strange and wonderful land, a provocative meditation on communication, biology, adaptation, and culture. In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect--a minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well. Seeing Voices is, as Studs Terkel has written, "an exquisite, as well as revelatory, work."

Fascinating book! I read it a few months ago. Highly recommend!

What I found interesting is the fact that Thomas Gallaudet and Alexander Graham Bell fought a war about the best way to educate the deaf - the former wanted to teach via sign language and the latter by getting the deaf to speak. To me sign is the best answer for the deaf as they can 'speak' quickly with their hands, whereas they don't have the feedback mechanism to make speech clear to the hearing population, anymore than the brain damaged, which is why they were mocked for trying it by the ignorant in society. Bell was trying to integrate them but their defective equipment meant they could never be totally proficient in spoken language but could easily speak among themselves through sign. Do we need everybody to speak a language? Does everyone need to be bilingual, to get on with the rest of the world? We should see the advantages to the deaf of their own language and not try to force them to conform as this is a common failing in human society. Violence is trying to get others to do as we say, whether it is by word or deed. Peace is leaving people to do their own thing, follow their own hearts. They should play to their own strengths, not be forced to obey uniformity. We need more creative individuals, not sheep to the slaughter