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help me read it please!!!
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This paper consists of my own understanding of the deaf culture and knowledge acquired through readings as well as interacting with my deaf friends. I hope to provide an insight to the general readers who still remained a vast amount through out the world.
There is not much interesting about deafness, is there? I did not give too much thought about deaf until I met my dear friend Gina who lost her hearings in a very early age, and unfortunately or fortunately, did not acquire the ability of speech, speech in a narrowed sense.
The study of past four months had me spiritually visited the small town of Martha’s Vineyard where the hearings and deaf used sign together, to the Britain Oralism school Northampton, to the unique University for the Deaf Gallaudet, to the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. It opened up my mind and connected it to the great education pioneers, philosophers, and deaf literates of the time: Abbe Sicard, David Wright, Hughlings-Jackson, Harlan Lane etc. It gave me insights on language, community, mind development, and even humanity. Through the studying, I saw a struggling history of deaf achieving the equal positions of their counterpart, of knowledge defeating ignorance, of how we learnt to humbly defer natural instead of arrogantly confront it.
Deafness is not deficiency. It is a culture with its own complete history, ways of communication, techniques of survival, literatures and society codes. It is a unique way of life. It is a gift of natural. It is ethnic.
It is to the people who battered and are still fighting through the prejudices, unjust, ignorance to achieve the places they are now, I dedicate my paper to. And to Gina, who led me into the culture of deaf.
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