- Joined
- Dec 28, 2004
- Messages
- 1,440
- Reaction score
- 4
Those who are born deaf all become senseless and incapable of reason
Okay, I know this is going to be unpopular, but I believe there is a germ of truth in this obviously ridiculous statement. When this belief was held, there were no efforts made to provide any kind of real language to deaf people. Language is a necessary tool for humans to be able to process the world and for normal mental and emotional development. When language is withheld entirely, this development can be stunted.
So deaf people may not have been provided with the necessary tools to be able to process information in a normal way -- i.e. language -- and so they were literally retarded in their mental development. Compare the cases of "feral children" who were either not raised with humans or were raised in horrific situations of abuse where they were not exposed to human language; in many situations they were never able to function normally.
Thus I think that statement was a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that deaf people were expected to be stupid, and so no one bothered to provide them with language, and so their mental processing suffered.