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Where Are the Deaf Children at Aladdin?

Yesterday I sat in the New Amsterdam Theatre for the interpreted performance of Disney’s Aladdin. The show was fine. The interpreting was fine. Neither held my attention the way the audience did. It was Scouts Day. The hearing children came dressed as princes and princesses, sashes weighed down with badges, parents fussing over phones and snacks. The aisles filled with the small chaos that always attends a children’s matinee. Within all of that, in a designated seating block to the side, sat the Deaf audience. I counted, roughly, sixty of us. The youngest among us looked sixty herself. Most of those sixty people were between sixty and eighty-five years old. A handful of hearing family members translated stage business in side conversations. Deaf children were absent from the section. Deaf teenagers, if any were present, were too few for me to identify in a careful sweep.

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Foreign Faces in American Deaf Schools

As the American medical community continues to “heal” Deafness — by surgically altering Deaf infants at four months of age with cochlear implants — we must begin to wonder what will happen to Deaf schools in America that were founded in the aftermath of the 1960s rubella plague that deafened and/or blinded an entire generation of children.

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Cochlear Devices & the Deaf Community: Hearing Within

by Tammy Tillotson

“I saw clearly that it was useless to try to teach her language or anything else until she learned to obey me. I have thought about it a great deal, and the more I think, the more certain I am that obedience is the gateway through which knowledge, yes, and love, too, enter the mind of a child.” — Anne Sullivan, teacher of Helen Keller

Cochlear Devices: An Obedient Decision
As medical professionals have found that deaf children between the ages of one to three are more likely to respond well to cochlear implants, will this parental decision of technological obedience adversely affect the child’s experience within the Deaf Community and Culture?

The answer is largely a matter of personal perspective based on two main arguments.

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