Beware of Allness: Inside JKF’s Mind

Two roads diverged…. In the August 2006 issue of Education Update Online, President designate Jane K. Fernandes is quoted: “All deaf people should have the chance to learn all languages and forms of communication that they will need when they grow up.” All deaf people? All languages? It is difficult to give an exact figure of the number of Deaf people and languages that exist in the world, because it is not always easy to define who, not what, a Deaf human being is and what a language is. All forms of communication? It is also difficult to define which form of communication is best and effective. No, Deaf people don’t need all languages and all forms of communication. Thank you! Don’t push Deaf children too hard with “all languages and forms of communication.” Thank you! It is an old school of thought. It is also purely an offensive joke!

When we contemplate the extraordinary abilities and accomplishments of Deaf people, it is certainly hard to avoid their language and its embedded culture. ASL enables us to process symbols in our brain or in the mind, which in turn empowers us to abstract elements of our experience and to represent them with discrete mental symbols. It was what we did while growing up. Research by Anita K. Barry in her book, Linguistic Perspectives on Language and Education, suggests that there are numerous possibilities that language may have been invented not by adults but by children. If we create any other form of communication or use any other language for Deaf children, we are in danger of imposing other values on them.

Fernandes’ allness statement is what I feared innocent people would think. That’s why I am so embarrassed. Look here, I am certainly no expert in this “all languages and forms of communication” thing; I have only discovered it in the Education Update Online, so far be it from me to tell what it all really amounts to. But this Fernandes does tell us—all of us, me as well as you—what it all amounts to inside her mind. And if everything she said is true, then what it amounts to compared to everything else I have ever known is like all bananas compared to all oranges. No, I don't know all languages and use all forms of communication. I think I am all but "one traveler."