American Sign Language for all students? Hear me out

Credit: Suriyawut Suriya / Vecteezy

If we could teach American Sign Language to all students, including hearing students, from kindergarten to 12th grade, the benefits would be extraordinary. It would not only eradicate the biggest problems and heartaches for the Deaf community, it would also give a significant, far-reaching gift to hearing people.

Many hearing people seem to crave ASL. I meet people daily who have either a personal connection to sign, or a strong desire to learn it. Ruefully they say, “I know a little ASL; I love it!” or “I’ve always wanted to learn ASL!” while hard-of-hearing and deaf adults lament, “I wish I’d learned it in school.”

There are many realistic ways it could be implemented if only we would change our monolingual, ableist mindset. Some will say things like:

• Schools don’t have the capacity/budget/resources to add a subject.
• ASL for language credit, OK. But we can’t require it.
• Teaching ASL to all deaf kids, fine. But to hearing kids, that’s not practical.

But 48.3 million Americans have significant hearing loss. And our biggest problems are rooted in communication.

Look at the most insidious issues of the Deaf world, not only in the U.S. but worldwide.

Ninety percent of deaf children are born into hearing families. Their parents, well-intentioned, frequently get bad advice from medical and educational specialists. They’re told to repair their child’s hearing by any means possible — especially cochlear implantation — to teach their kid speech, and consider ASL only if the technology “fails.” Parents are uniquely primed to follow that advice because it syncs with their fears, wishful thinking and lack of information.

But this is a dangerous mistake. Language is essential to brain development, and the window for children to learn their first language is both vital and brief (roughly age 0-5.) Focusing on gadgets rather than on deaf children’s natural visual strengths puts them at high risk for language deprivation syndrome. This results in damaged cognitive skills, and it’s an epidemic.

Despite the proven benefits of Deaf schools, 85% of deaf students are mainstreamed into hearing schools. There, they miss out on huge swaths of instruction and often become withdrawn and socially isolated.

Unemployment among members of the Deaf community is high. Friends of mine sometimes apply to 50 or 100 different jobs and are turned down by all when they mention being deaf. Being left out of conversations, which happens in nonsigning families, is one of life’s most painful experiences. Mental health problems and drug abuse are 50% more prevalent among deaf people, and very few therapists sign fluently.

By 2025, half our population is projected to have some kind of hearing loss. Yet many, having not learned ASL, will feel painfully disconnected from the Deaf community. If ASL was taught as part of the U.S. school curriculum from K-12, all these problems would evaporate like ice on a hot sidewalk. The benefits would be profound, with no real downside. School is the ideal time for language acquisition because children absorb language incredibly fast. Integrating it with other academics, as bilingual Spanish/English programs do, would mean nothing was sacrificed. Elementary students could learn ASL via games, ASL-taught art and PE classes, signed poems and stories. Middle schoolers would increase their vocabulary and conversational skills with deaf instructors and Deaf-made videos, study Deaf history and collaborate on projects with students at Deaf schools. In high school, group projects would be done in ASL, and community service could be carried out in collaboration with the Deaf community. At all levels, students would be tested before moving on.

Let’s look at the impact of ASL for all: With a working knowledge of ASL, the fear and grief new parents usually feel on learning their child is deaf would be greatly mitigated, for they’d have seen successful, healthy Deaf adults on videos and in person during their schooling. Once they got over their shock, they would simply code-switch to ASL. And when a deaf child has access to early language via ASL, research shows their brain development, vocabulary and mastery of literacy and speech all increase.

In public schools, interaction between the deaf and hearing students and staff would be intuitive and easy, eliminating the rampant, abysmal educational levels and self-esteem/social problems among our mainstreamed deaf children now.

Deaf people would have a booming industry teaching and developing ASL materials for public schools. And when seeking employment in other fields, they could be interviewed by the employer directly, in ASL. And co-workers could sign, as needed. ASL would eliminate the isolating, traumatizing experience of communication problems within families, as well as with the greater Deaf community, and with therapists, who’d simply sign whenever they had a Deaf client. It empowers hearing babies, too, because they are physically capable of signing far earlier than they can speak.

Hearing people, too, would benefit in many ways. The other day I was in the pool, and instead of shouting to my husband to bring me my book (because I am crazy enough to read in the pool), I just signed to him. How grateful I was to ASL then. Perhaps this situation reflects the yearning I see in hearing people to sign, the desire for a visual language. ASL enables easy communication in noisy places, from a distance, through glass, and without interrupting someone else’s need for silence.

And hearing people could get to know Deaf people, which is a gift that I cannot begin to do justice to in this article.

But there’s a hidden beauty to this plan that goes even deeper — a changed mindset. Having grown up seeing and communicating with thriving Deaf people, students’ views of coping with adversity, and accepting and celebrating physical differences would be altered. Something viewed now as a hardship would instead become recognized as actually having lavish, humorous and cool cultural features.

We’d have done what now often feels impossible; reversed the persistent ableism/audism — so entrenched in society’s thinking — that has given rise to so many serious problems.

What are we waiting for?

•••

Rachel Zemach is a Deaf former San Francisco Bay Area teacher and the author of a new memoir, “The Butterfly Cage,” about her 13-year career as a teacher. She will be reading from her book on Aug. 26 at 11 am at Book Passages, in Corte Madera.

The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. Commentaries published on EdSource represent diverse viewpoints about California’s public education systems. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.