Deaf to the potential

Sign language in Australia, which is known as Auslan, is not going to conveniently disappear. It is a subject for study at VCE level, at adult education centres and universities, and numerous people - academics, researchers and interpreters - make a living from it. Auslan is a community language. Across the Tasman, New Zealand has three official languages - English, Maori, and New Zealand Sign Language.

The cochlear implant does not somehow “immunise” children against deafness, in the way the good doctors suggest. Deaf people with a cochlear implant are a normal and unremarkable sight at gatherings of the deaf community. It is normal to see deaf people with cochlear implants using fluent Auslan.

Dr Shepherd does not explain why deaf people lead unproductive lives, and how a cochlear implant will magically make them productive. The ability to lead a productive life, in the sense of seizing opportunities for example, comes just as much from within the individual as from external trappings. The state of being deaf itself proffers numerous opportunities in life to those willing to look beyond ignorance and stereotyping. And if opportunities for deaf people are limited, then Dr Shepherd’s self-serving attitudes are one of the reasons why.

Doctors Nelson and Shepherd are saying to parents of young deaf children that the cochlear implant is the only way (and the truth, and the light, one is tempted to add). Parents are much more intelligent than to swallow that. They need to gather as much information as they can about deafness, and this includes meeting people for whom deafness is a normal part of their lives. Parents who do this will gain a far richer knowledge of deafness than the good doctors will ever want them to know.

Dr Nelson has no idea that parents of deaf children have numerous choices open to them. The cochlear implant is one of those choices, but it is emphatically not the only choice. The benefits of a cochlear implant for deaf adults and children have been much extolled, and rightly so. But the good doctors doth praiseth too much. By their own logic, a cochlear implant is the ideal prescription for legions of unhappy hearing people who lead unproductive lives and who are drawdowns on the community and welfare.

As the Chief Protector of Aborigines lamented in the very last line of Rabbit Proof Fence: “If they would only understand what we are trying to do for them”.

Exactly. If these good doctors would only understand what deaf people are trying to do for them.