I think your conclusion re the education establishment is solid. The same conclusion can be applied to many other fields that are governed by experts. Law, criminal justice, climate science and economics come immediately to mind. You've shown here how this tendency has been with us for a long time. To me, this indicates an innate human tendency to defer to experts.
How to prevent such outcomes? Since trying to change human nature is generally futile and the law of unintended consequences always lurks, I favor the libertarian philosophy of limiting the ability of those who would use force to enact their grand schemes. Take away their ability to use (government) force; require them to use persuasion. The A.G. Bell tale shows us that even without a great deal of force bad ideas can become practice. But at least we have a fighting chance to resist the experts. To the relevance of this discussion to education, my conclusion speaks to the need for school choice so that decisions about how to educate can be made free of force.
Thanks! And Bell wasn't entirely about libertarian nudges. He was lobbying states to shift from residential schools to day schools, so that deaf kids would have limited contact with one another. So, that was a use of state power. He just didn't favor the state disallowing marriage between those who somehow evaded his nudges.
Today, both the woke Left and the censorious Right are using the public schools to push their agenda. Public education may have been necessary in the days of mass immigration and mass illiteracy. It is time to think about how the state, if it wants well-educated citizens, can provide parents with the tools they need, money, to educate their children so that they can have opportunities to thrive.
Jul 24, 2023·edited Jul 24, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes
As the firstborn son of deaf parents (some 70+ years ago) I found this piece very interesting. Even though my parents have been dead for more than 30 years, I can still sign fluently and often find myself thinking in sign language. One of my secret hobbies is silently and motionlessly translating songs into sign language.
The only deaf people in a tiny Minnesota town, my mother was an excellent lipreader. My dad was terrible at it but always carried around a pen and pad of paper. A baker, he communicated with his boss by writing messages in flour cast across the workbench.
They went to monthly deaf social events. The took me along until I was old enough to stay home alone with my brother. They were loud, structure shaking-affairs. Deafies are natural actors and emote more than any other group of people I've encountered - drunk or sober.
They knew about oralists and were very much opposed to the whole concept. I could certainly understand why.
I once read that much of our culture is learned aurally. This at least partially explains why many deaf people don't "get" things. Many times I would try to explain things to them and they would smile and nod, and still not get it.
I find myself very critical of deaf interpreters. It's almost impossible to accurately translate the speech of a politician, for example, so the interpreter just devises his or her own message as they're delivering the warped message. I could also do without the overexaggerated facial expressions. I think closed captioning would be much more honest and effective.
In the final analysis, BOO Bell and YAY Gallaudet!
This is such a wonderful and touching account. I'm especially honored that someone with your history enjoyed the piece. When I was fairly good at ASL, I also used to sign conversations around me, or TV shows. Love the idea of your father writing in flour. And yes, I remember fondly the open emotions at the events I attended. Here's one funny memory. For a while, I corresponded with a Gallaudet student who had attended my lectures. She was studying spoken Chinese--which mystified me, as it is such a tonal language. At some point, she asked my advice, as she was considering moving to New York City, where I had lived for a time and grown exceedingly weary of. I started to moan to her about how much I dislike the place. And then I thought for a moment and told her, "You know what? The thing that really drove me nuts in New York was the blaring, relentless, 24-hour-a-day noise. So the thing I REALLY hated about New York is utterly, absolutely irrelevant to you."
I forgot that he said that. In Spielberg's "Lincoln," Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) says pretty much the same thing about his constituents. When Lincoln advises caution on Reconstruction, Stevens/Jones says, "Shit on the people and what they want and what they're ready for. I don't give a goddamn about the people and what they want. This is the face of someone who has fought long and hard for the *good* of the people without caring much for any of 'em."
Too bad I've already had a cocktail this evening, because after reading this I need a drink. "Those who love people and those who love mankind," Wow, is that concise.
There's a great quote attributed to about half a dozen 19th century writers: "It ain't so much what I don't know that bothers me. It's what I know for certain that just ain't so." If Bell had paid the least attention, he'd have noticed that children with perfectly normal hearing can learn to sign well before they learn to speak.
I wonder if Bell's support of oralism was from his experience with his mother, who might have lost her hearing after she learned to talk. It's also worth considering that the "oralists" imposed a nearly (or perhaps flatly) impossible burden on deaf people to spare themselves and others the burden of having to learn ASL or an equivalent.
Assuming they're here, and have advanced, it makes you wonder what people in 2123 will think of our science today.
Couple of typos, to be pedantic: you mentioned Bell doing something in 2016, and obviously meant 1916. And when you mentioned the "CODA" movie, I'm pretty sure you meant "Children of Deaf Adults."
In Sub-Saharan Africa, I used to run across very small children who could speak 3 or 4 languages perfectly fluently. The phenomenon was not unknown in 1880. And yes, it is often hypothesized that Bell's attitude came from his late-deafened mother. Gallaudet's mother, in contrast, was born deaf. The two women had very different attitudes toward how deaf people should comport themselves. As for the movie, I have it as "Child of Deaf Adults"--which is the film's official subtitle, as the central character is one specific child, not the collective. Glad you liked it!
Why don't we teach the failures of great people along with their successes?
I guess a lot depends on the culture/narrative where you are. I recall that a textbook in the hills of Kentucky had a long paragraph about Sherman's march to the sea - but a textbook in Detroit didn't mention it.
But, how is it that selective memory is applied to Bell? Did the atrocities of Nazi Germany cause social amnesia about eugenics and anyone who supported it?
I think you're certainly correct, that academia attracts people who are more attached to men in the abstract than to men in particular. But it could hardly be otherwise: if you're powerfully driven by empathy with particular persons, you would go to work directly to help them -- it would be far less satisfying to retire to the cloister to beaver away at some abstract principles that might be hugely helpful, someday, to an entire class of (future) people in similar cirx.
Exemplia gratia, if you empathize powerfully with people who suffer from cancer, it seems like it would be much less satisfying to do basic research on oncogenes -- which may or may not pay off, and certainly not in time to help anyone now stricken with the disease -- than to become an oncologist or oncology RN where you can get right to work, and directly help specific and real people right now. To go off to work at advancing abstract knowledge, it seems to me like you *must* be the kind of person who derives more pleasure from serving humanity in the abstract than as individuals.
But...surely we need such people, no? In addition to compassionate oncology RNs, and brilliant surgeons, we also, in the long run certainly, need these awkward perhaps semi-autistic types who labor long decades in the lab to make fundamental advances. I'm reminded that two of the most important and broad breakthroughs in molecular biology in the recent past, the PCR reaction and the mRNA vaccine, were invented by people (Kary Mullis and Katalin Karikó) who were a bit weird, and in Mullis's case probably had a hard time forming strong personal connections.
Whether we need people laboring in the academy on abstract topics in the humanities also -- forming new theories of government, justice, economics, education -- is a much harder question for me to answer, since in fields where the ability to empirically check theory is far less, the danger of misguided even if well-meaning adoption of bad theory is much greater.
And I would add that an additional problem, beyond that of motivation you identify, is that the academy also by its nature -- by the fact that they read books and write papers instead of, for the most part, building machines, planting and harvestng, or working with people -- loves theory, to the extent that they are at best reluctant empiricists, and prefer if possible to decide the truth value of propositions by pure logic and argument, rather than any squalid peasant practice of direct measurement.
But both these tendencies seem to me baked into the nature of the academy, and go all the way back to Aristotle pontificating at picnics to his audience of upper class scions, passing through the late antiquity monk scribbling away in the scriptorium weighing up arguments for whether reports of a bleeding host are credible, and the medieval university deciding whether St. Paul's letters were or were not conclusive evidence against heliocentrism (without, of course, themselves bothering to study the orbits of the planets in the sky above the steeple each night).
What may be more salient, perhaps, is less the nature of the academy per se, but our relationship to it -- that is, in *our* abilty to be emprical, to weigh the theories of the learned against practical experience, to discount the importance of title or pedigree of the author, and eloquence of the argument, and consider instead only the hard and measureable facts at hand. It does seem to me hat we are more obsequious to learning and eloquence than perhaps we used to be 50 years ago, more inclined to take things said by Brilliant People as gospel without subjecting them to anything so disrespectful as skeptical critique. (Or perhaps, we take things said by Our Brilliant People as gospel, and things said by Those Rat Bastard Fakirs the Other Trbe considers brlliant as dangerously seductive sophistry, to be rejected forthwith, and *also* not subjected to skeptical critique.)
Jefferson is alleged to have said the government you elect is the government you deserve. If the academy has become more scholastic and detached from real life (and real people), it could be that originates in how we reward them.
I think your conclusion re the education establishment is solid. The same conclusion can be applied to many other fields that are governed by experts. Law, criminal justice, climate science and economics come immediately to mind. You've shown here how this tendency has been with us for a long time. To me, this indicates an innate human tendency to defer to experts.
How to prevent such outcomes? Since trying to change human nature is generally futile and the law of unintended consequences always lurks, I favor the libertarian philosophy of limiting the ability of those who would use force to enact their grand schemes. Take away their ability to use (government) force; require them to use persuasion. The A.G. Bell tale shows us that even without a great deal of force bad ideas can become practice. But at least we have a fighting chance to resist the experts. To the relevance of this discussion to education, my conclusion speaks to the need for school choice so that decisions about how to educate can be made free of force.
Thanks! And Bell wasn't entirely about libertarian nudges. He was lobbying states to shift from residential schools to day schools, so that deaf kids would have limited contact with one another. So, that was a use of state power. He just didn't favor the state disallowing marriage between those who somehow evaded his nudges.
There was a time in NYC when I was moderately proficient in ASL.
Had occasion to help at Theatre for the Deaf and was friends with the creators of Hands On (interpreting Broadway plays to include the deaf community)
It is a beautiful language that is not only in the hands but I the face and posture.
It is beautiful. It has its own poetry, “music” of a sort, literature, folklore, history, humor, heroes, villains.
Indeed
I once had a lunch date with Marlee Matlin ( Children of Lesser God) to help me with my practice
Now THAT’S great.
Today, both the woke Left and the censorious Right are using the public schools to push their agenda. Public education may have been necessary in the days of mass immigration and mass illiteracy. It is time to think about how the state, if it wants well-educated citizens, can provide parents with the tools they need, money, to educate their children so that they can have opportunities to thrive.
Great points. My only disagreement (and I jest) is the “It is time to think about” should be “For decades, it has been time to think about.”
As the firstborn son of deaf parents (some 70+ years ago) I found this piece very interesting. Even though my parents have been dead for more than 30 years, I can still sign fluently and often find myself thinking in sign language. One of my secret hobbies is silently and motionlessly translating songs into sign language.
The only deaf people in a tiny Minnesota town, my mother was an excellent lipreader. My dad was terrible at it but always carried around a pen and pad of paper. A baker, he communicated with his boss by writing messages in flour cast across the workbench.
They went to monthly deaf social events. The took me along until I was old enough to stay home alone with my brother. They were loud, structure shaking-affairs. Deafies are natural actors and emote more than any other group of people I've encountered - drunk or sober.
They knew about oralists and were very much opposed to the whole concept. I could certainly understand why.
I once read that much of our culture is learned aurally. This at least partially explains why many deaf people don't "get" things. Many times I would try to explain things to them and they would smile and nod, and still not get it.
I find myself very critical of deaf interpreters. It's almost impossible to accurately translate the speech of a politician, for example, so the interpreter just devises his or her own message as they're delivering the warped message. I could also do without the overexaggerated facial expressions. I think closed captioning would be much more honest and effective.
In the final analysis, BOO Bell and YAY Gallaudet!
This is such a wonderful and touching account. I'm especially honored that someone with your history enjoyed the piece. When I was fairly good at ASL, I also used to sign conversations around me, or TV shows. Love the idea of your father writing in flour. And yes, I remember fondly the open emotions at the events I attended. Here's one funny memory. For a while, I corresponded with a Gallaudet student who had attended my lectures. She was studying spoken Chinese--which mystified me, as it is such a tonal language. At some point, she asked my advice, as she was considering moving to New York City, where I had lived for a time and grown exceedingly weary of. I started to moan to her about how much I dislike the place. And then I thought for a moment and told her, "You know what? The thing that really drove me nuts in New York was the blaring, relentless, 24-hour-a-day noise. So the thing I REALLY hated about New York is utterly, absolutely irrelevant to you."
"I love mankind, it's people I can't stand." Linus (Charles M. Schulz)
I forgot that he said that. In Spielberg's "Lincoln," Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) says pretty much the same thing about his constituents. When Lincoln advises caution on Reconstruction, Stevens/Jones says, "Shit on the people and what they want and what they're ready for. I don't give a goddamn about the people and what they want. This is the face of someone who has fought long and hard for the *good* of the people without caring much for any of 'em."
Max, that’s the quotation I was trying to remember!
Too bad I've already had a cocktail this evening, because after reading this I need a drink. "Those who love people and those who love mankind," Wow, is that concise.
Great, isn't it?
There's a great quote attributed to about half a dozen 19th century writers: "It ain't so much what I don't know that bothers me. It's what I know for certain that just ain't so." If Bell had paid the least attention, he'd have noticed that children with perfectly normal hearing can learn to sign well before they learn to speak.
I wonder if Bell's support of oralism was from his experience with his mother, who might have lost her hearing after she learned to talk. It's also worth considering that the "oralists" imposed a nearly (or perhaps flatly) impossible burden on deaf people to spare themselves and others the burden of having to learn ASL or an equivalent.
Assuming they're here, and have advanced, it makes you wonder what people in 2123 will think of our science today.
Couple of typos, to be pedantic: you mentioned Bell doing something in 2016, and obviously meant 1916. And when you mentioned the "CODA" movie, I'm pretty sure you meant "Children of Deaf Adults."
Great read, as always.
PS: looks like you already fixed the date.
Yup. Another friend beat you to it. Thanks.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, I used to run across very small children who could speak 3 or 4 languages perfectly fluently. The phenomenon was not unknown in 1880. And yes, it is often hypothesized that Bell's attitude came from his late-deafened mother. Gallaudet's mother, in contrast, was born deaf. The two women had very different attitudes toward how deaf people should comport themselves. As for the movie, I have it as "Child of Deaf Adults"--which is the film's official subtitle, as the central character is one specific child, not the collective. Glad you liked it!
Your text says "Child of Death Adults." Just saying.
Fixed!!!! Thx.
Ahhhhhh! I’ll fix that.
Why don't we teach the failures of great people along with their successes?
I guess a lot depends on the culture/narrative where you are. I recall that a textbook in the hills of Kentucky had a long paragraph about Sherman's march to the sea - but a textbook in Detroit didn't mention it.
But, how is it that selective memory is applied to Bell? Did the atrocities of Nazi Germany cause social amnesia about eugenics and anyone who supported it?
I think you're certainly correct, that academia attracts people who are more attached to men in the abstract than to men in particular. But it could hardly be otherwise: if you're powerfully driven by empathy with particular persons, you would go to work directly to help them -- it would be far less satisfying to retire to the cloister to beaver away at some abstract principles that might be hugely helpful, someday, to an entire class of (future) people in similar cirx.
Exemplia gratia, if you empathize powerfully with people who suffer from cancer, it seems like it would be much less satisfying to do basic research on oncogenes -- which may or may not pay off, and certainly not in time to help anyone now stricken with the disease -- than to become an oncologist or oncology RN where you can get right to work, and directly help specific and real people right now. To go off to work at advancing abstract knowledge, it seems to me like you *must* be the kind of person who derives more pleasure from serving humanity in the abstract than as individuals.
But...surely we need such people, no? In addition to compassionate oncology RNs, and brilliant surgeons, we also, in the long run certainly, need these awkward perhaps semi-autistic types who labor long decades in the lab to make fundamental advances. I'm reminded that two of the most important and broad breakthroughs in molecular biology in the recent past, the PCR reaction and the mRNA vaccine, were invented by people (Kary Mullis and Katalin Karikó) who were a bit weird, and in Mullis's case probably had a hard time forming strong personal connections.
Whether we need people laboring in the academy on abstract topics in the humanities also -- forming new theories of government, justice, economics, education -- is a much harder question for me to answer, since in fields where the ability to empirically check theory is far less, the danger of misguided even if well-meaning adoption of bad theory is much greater.
And I would add that an additional problem, beyond that of motivation you identify, is that the academy also by its nature -- by the fact that they read books and write papers instead of, for the most part, building machines, planting and harvestng, or working with people -- loves theory, to the extent that they are at best reluctant empiricists, and prefer if possible to decide the truth value of propositions by pure logic and argument, rather than any squalid peasant practice of direct measurement.
But both these tendencies seem to me baked into the nature of the academy, and go all the way back to Aristotle pontificating at picnics to his audience of upper class scions, passing through the late antiquity monk scribbling away in the scriptorium weighing up arguments for whether reports of a bleeding host are credible, and the medieval university deciding whether St. Paul's letters were or were not conclusive evidence against heliocentrism (without, of course, themselves bothering to study the orbits of the planets in the sky above the steeple each night).
What may be more salient, perhaps, is less the nature of the academy per se, but our relationship to it -- that is, in *our* abilty to be emprical, to weigh the theories of the learned against practical experience, to discount the importance of title or pedigree of the author, and eloquence of the argument, and consider instead only the hard and measureable facts at hand. It does seem to me hat we are more obsequious to learning and eloquence than perhaps we used to be 50 years ago, more inclined to take things said by Brilliant People as gospel without subjecting them to anything so disrespectful as skeptical critique. (Or perhaps, we take things said by Our Brilliant People as gospel, and things said by Those Rat Bastard Fakirs the Other Trbe considers brlliant as dangerously seductive sophistry, to be rejected forthwith, and *also* not subjected to skeptical critique.)
Jefferson is alleged to have said the government you elect is the government you deserve. If the academy has become more scholastic and detached from real life (and real people), it could be that originates in how we reward them.
By the way, I found the exegesis of the nature of ASL to be really fascinating, thanks for writing that.
You bet!