Mark's Notebook


	To define recursion, we must first define recursion.

As Town for Deaf Takes Shape, Debate on Isolation Re-emerges

New York Times

Monday 21 March 2005, 10:21 am
Keywords: News Articles , Health Topics

By Monica Davey

SALEM, S.D. - Standing in an empty field along a wind-swept highway, Marvin T. Miller, who is deaf, envisions the town he wants to create here: a place built around American Sign Language, where teachers in the new school will sign, the town council will hold its debates in sign language and restaurant workers will be required to know how to sign orders.

Nearly 100 families - with people who are deaf, hard of hearing or who can hear but just want to communicate in sign language - have already publicly declared their intention to live in Mr. Miller's village, to be called Laurent, after Laurent Clerc, a French educator of the deaf from the 1800's.

"Society isn't doing that great a job of, quote-unquote, integrating us," Mr. Miller, 33, said through an interpreter. "My children don't see role models in their lives: mayors, factory managers, postal workers, business owners. So we're setting up a place to show our unique culture, our unique society."

While deaf enclaves, like the one that existed in Martha's Vineyard decades ago, have cropped up throughout the nation, this would be the first town expressly created for people who sign, its developers say. Even the location, in sparsely populated South Dakota, was selected with the intent of rapidly building political strength for the nation's millions of deaf and hard-of-hearing people, a group that has won few elected offices around the country.

But in the complicated political world of deaf culture, Laurent is an increasingly contentious idea. For some, like Mr. Miller; his wife, Jennifer, who is also deaf; and their four deaf children, it seems the simplest of wishes: to live in a place where they are fully engaged in day-to-day life. Others, however, particularly advocates of technologies that help deaf people use spoken language, wonder whether such a town would merely isolate and exclude the deaf more than ever.

Over the past 15 years, he said, it has become easier for the deaf and hard of hearing to grow up using spoken language, because of a steady rise in the use of cochlear implants, more early diagnoses and therapies for deaf children and efforts to place some deaf children in mainstream schools. That fact has set off intense political debate over what it means to be deaf and what mode of communication - signing or talking - the deaf should focus on.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/21/national/21deaf.html