The saddest part about hearing people not knowing anything about the deaf or deaf culture, is most of them really don't care. It is awful, but true. They are not deaf, so they don't think they need to know anything about it. True ignorance is all it is.
For more awareness to occur, they would have to become interested in it. Sadly it can't be forced on them, cause then they won't care more. The hearing people that care about it and learn about the culture are the most important ones. The others can be ignorant all they want, just means they will receive the same disrespect they dish out, since they obviously wouldn't understand a deaf person trying to communicate with them.
It would be cool if some text books, like history class in high school, briefly covered some deaf history. When I was in high school, we learned about AG Bell, but I didn't really know anything except that he invented the telephone (even though that is a lie), until I took a Deaf History class in college. I think just a brief over view of important events would be good. Schools should just toss it in there in chronological order since history books in hs tend to talk about events year to year. So DPN could be thrown in that years chapter, etc.
Sadly, the only hearing people that are not going to be ignorant about the Deaf community are the ones that get involved.
