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Editor's note: Let us
begin by conceding that there really are some legally blind children
who are appropriately being taught to read print. If the child can truly
engage in sustained reading of normal print in most light with comfort,
and if the strong likelihood is that the youngster's vision will remain
stable, there is no sensible argument for insisting that Braille be
taught unless the child or parents wish to have it done. But there are
thousands of blind adults today (and our numbers are growing) who deeply
regret that no one required us to learn Braille at a period in our lives
when mastering it would have been relatively easy.
Many parents and children, wrestling with the denial that is an inevitable
part of coming to terms with significant vision loss, cling to the presence
of whatever tiny amount of residual sight there may be as an indication
that their worst fears at least have not come to pass. To the public
mind blindness is synonymous with helplessness, hopelessness, and incompetence.
Facing their children's blindness for the first time, parents, who are
after all members of the general public, can be forgiven for reacting
out of ignorance and on incorrect information.
The betrayal of blind children that is harder for knowledgeable blind
adults to forgive is that of many special education teachers who should
know better. But even here we must remember that they too are the product
of their past inadequate education and their current environment. These
educators are not the first professionals to confuse correlation with
causation: given a choice between learning print and Braille, children
with residual sight will usually choose print. The conclusion to which
virtually every teacher incompletely trained in Braille is eager to
jump is that the cause of this behavior is the difficulty and complexity
of Braille. Or again, offered the chance to be excused from doing assignments
in Braille, blind children will almost always opt for less work. The
conclusion is that Braille is slow and inefficient.
The actual cause in both these examples is that blind youngsters are
normal kids, who like to be a part of the gang and who are delighted
to get out of homework whenever possible.
A little honest reflection about this situation suggests that the real
culprit here is the inadequate and inappropriate education of the special
education teachers, most of whom are not competent or confident themselves
in using Braille and who also believe that their students should not
be expected to compete successfully in school or in life.
We of the National Federation of the Blind know just how damning and
demeaning such a wholesale dismissal of blind students really is. There
are too many studies of children's conforming exactly to their teachers'
expectations for us to observe this phenomenon with unconcern. Recognition
of what is happening to today's blind students fuels the Federation's
state-by-state effort to require teacher competence in Braille reading
and writing for those educators devoting their careers to teaching blind
and visually impaired students. We must take every opportunity to educate
and encourage good teachers about what they can do to assist and support
their blind students, and we must confront those who would dismiss our
efforts to improve the educational possibilities for these youngsters.
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