Free Vintage Sacks by Oliver Sacks Page B

eminently educable, and they rapidly showed an astonished world how fully they could enter into its culture and life. This wonderful circumstance—how a despised or neglected minority, practically denied human status up to this point, emerged suddenly and startlingly upon the world stage (and the later tragic undermining of all this in the following century)—constitutes the opening chapter of the history of the deaf.
    But let us, before launching on this strange history, go back to the wholly personal and “innocent” observations of David Wright (“innocent” because, as he himself stresses, he made a point of avoiding any reading on the subject until he had written his own book). At the age of eight, when it became clear that his deafness was incurable, and that without special measures his speech would regress, he was sent to a special school in England, one of the ruthlessly dedicated, but misconceived, rigorously “oral” schools, which are concerned above all to make the deaf speak like other children, and which have done so much harm to the prelingually deaf since their inception. The young David Wright was flabbergasted at his first encounter with the prelingually deaf.
    Sometimes I took lessons with Vanessa. She was the first deaf child I had met. . . . But even to an eight-year-old like myself her general knowledge seemed strangely limited. I remember a geography lesson we were doing together, when Miss Neville asked,
    â€œWho is the king of England?”
    Vanessa didn’t know; troubled, she tried to read sideways the geography book, which lay open at the chapter about Great Britain that we had prepared.
    â€œKing—king,” began Vanessa.
    â€œGo on,” commanded Miss Neville.
    â€œI know,” I said.
    â€œBe quiet.”
    â€œUnited Kingdom,” said Vanessa.
    I laughed.
    â€œYou are very silly,” said Miss Neville. “How can a king be called ‘United Kingdom’?”
    â€œKing United Kingdom,” tried poor Vanessa, scarlet.
    â€œTell her if you know, [David].”
    â€œKing George the Fifth,” I said proudly.
    â€œIt’s not fair! It wasn’t in the book!”
    Vanessa was quite right of course; the chapter on the geography of Great Britain did not concern itself with its political setup. She was far from stupid; but having been born deaf her slowly and painfully acquired vocabulary was still too small to allow her to read for amusement or pleasure. As a consequence there were almost no means by which she could pick up the fund of miscellaneous and temporarily useless information other children unconsciously acquire from conversation or random reading. Almost everything she knew she had been taught or made to learn. And this is a fundamental difference between hearing and deaf-born children—or was, in that pre-electronic era.
    Vanessa’s situation, one sees, was a serious one, despite her native ability; and it was helped only with much difficulty, if not actually perpetuated, by the sort of teaching and communication forced upon her. For in this progressive school, as it was regarded, there was an almost insanely fierce, righteous prohibition of sign language—not only of the standard British Sign Language but of the “sign-argot”—the rough sign language developed on their own by the deaf children in the school. And yet—this is also well described by Wright—signing flourished at the school, was irrepressible despite punishment and prohibition. This was young David Wright’s first vision of the boys:
    Confusion stuns the eye, arms whirl like windmills in a hurricane . . . the emphatic silent vocabulary of the body—look, expression, bearing, glance of eye; hands perform their pantomime. Absolutely engrossing pandemonium. . . . I begin to sort out what’s going on. The seemingly corybantic brandishing of hands and arms reduces itself to a convention, a code which