“Disabled” Education Reform and Education Reform’s “Disability” A Case Study of an NGO’s Deaf Education Program in China

Amity is a proponent and practitioner of deaf education reform. Challenging traditional approaches, it advocates progressive Western deaf education philosophy – bilingual and bicultural education philosophy – in order to change the old appearance of deaf education. Traditional deaf education is called “compensation education” and aims at providing deaf children with special, additional education plans and services to lead them to a normal life, to expand the opportunities and rights that they have lost because of their disadvantaged position. However, Amity goes one step further. It promotes the social status of deaf people, elevating them from a negative existence of receiving “compensation” to a more positive position, with more agency. Its strategy of promotion gives prominence to sign language as a language in deaf education, as well as to concerns in deaf culture. As a corresponding educational practice, Amity launched a deaf education reform program.

This program began in 1996, when Amity initiated the collaborative “Deaf Children Bilingual Bicultural Education Experiment” (Shen, Wu, and Chu 2005, 10). Bilingual and bicultural were thus coupled together in the early stage of the program. However, as the program progressed, language moved further and further ahead of culture. In the end, language played a solo role in the program. In 2004, with the support of the Norwegian Signo foundation, Amity began to collaborate with the Jiangsu Provincial Special Education Special Committee, initiating another round of deaf education reform. The title of this program was Zhong Nuo Shuangyu Longjiaoyu Hezuo Xiangmu (SigAm bilingual deaf education project) – without the three characters that spell shuangwenhua (bicultural). In other words, bicultural, which appeared in the title of the 1996 program, was missing from the title of the 2004 program.

Zhang Ningsheng, a well-known special education expert and a consultant for the bilingual deaf education program, has coedited a book titled Introduction to Deaf Culture. He recalled, when explaining why he wanted to compile this book, that he “had already recognized [the value of] deaf culture after [studying] dual grammar. Because bilingualism walks side by side with biculturalism” (Zhang et al. 2010, 1). He also wrote, “The overall environment of opening and reform allowed me to have contact with several programs of international collaboration on ‘bilingual biculturalism for deaf children.’ We clicked almost right away” (2). We can tell from Zhang’s memory that Amity was not the only organization with a bilingual cultural program. Related international collaborations were really flourishing.⁽¹⁾

However, language and culture, which had walked together along the way when it came to Jiangsu in 2004, finally parted ways.⁽²⁾ Indeed, rather than saying that they parted ways, it would be more accurate to say that language threw culture far behind or even was afraid of being associated with it in any way.

It was not Amity’s intention not to put longwenhua (deaf culture) in the title of the 2004 program. Amity is an advocate and promoter of bilingual biculturalism. In the introduction to the Sino-Norwegian bilingual deaf education program on its website, one can still see a clear stance of bilingual biculturalism: advancing recognition of Chinese Sign Language as the mother tongue of deaf people in China.⁽³⁾ The program aimed to create teaching agendas and methods for deaf education from preschool through the compulsory education grades (through age fifteen) and to ensure deaf children’s right to receive basic education in their own language. Schools in the program taught in sign language and developed bilingual and bicultural education agendas to guarantee that the first group of students in the program received instruction from the beginning to the end of their compulsory education according to the plan designed for the program.

The word bicultural, however, does not appear in the title of the China-Norway collaborative bilingual deaf education project. That “deaf culture” does not appear in the name was probably not the intention solely of Norway. Professor Stein Ohna of the University of Stavanger, also a consultant on the project, summarized the SigAm experimental program (SigAm 2004–9) from the perspective of Norway in his article “Communication and Participation in Chinese Deaf Schools: Experiences from a China-Norway Collaboration Project on Sign Bilingual Education”:

Bilingual biculturalism is a well-known concept in international deaf education. But it has to be reinterpreted in the context of Chinese education. The project introduction pamphlet of Amity clearly defines this concept: “Bilingual biculturalism refers to the sign language of deaf people in China and Mandarin Chinese, and the corresponding deaf culture and culture of people with normal hearing [respectively].”…

The theoretical foundation of Norway’s management of SigAm comes from social culture theory. Social culture theory emphasizes that human knowledge and institutions are created and maintained in the dynamics of a specific cultural and historical background. In order to help understand human activity as a process of construction and reconstruction of social structure, it is necessary to explain the tools that actors use, in which language plays a crucial role. What do we do with language? What does language mean to us? These are questions that are really worth analysis. (Ohna 2009, 62)

“What does language mean to us?” Through this question, what the Norway side wanted to say was that the concern was the cultural features of language rather than its instrumentality. Ohna recalls in this article (62–63), based on his field notes taken during his participation in the first year of the project,

after a few years’ preparation, SigAm began in May 2001. At the early stage, the project carried out two very important activities: holding a conference in Nanjing to introduce to the Norway side the situation of deaf education development in China; and holding a conference in Suzhou to introduce to participants on the China side bilingual deaf education thoughts in Norway…

Cheng Yiji [a member of the SigAm coordination team] also shared some thoughts on the incoming deaf education curriculum reform. A basic principle of the new curriculum is to change the situation in the past that focused only on teaching content and specific pedagogies. These pedagogies in fact put teachers in a dominant position but ignored students’ learning capacity. The new curriculum, however, stresses students’ “self-learning, collaboration, and exploration.” It actually emphasizes the importance of students’ communication and participation in education….

In the Suzhou conference of principals from deaf schools in China, Norwegian specialists introduced core concepts and theories of deaf education and sign bilingual education development. At the request of the project coordination team, the lectures of the Norwegian specialists focused on the following three topics:

In our lectures, we dug into the first two topics directly but could only indirectly touch upon the third topic, classroom teaching. Deaf education and bilingual bicultural teaching can be approached from these three angles. The first is to understand them via the United Nations’ goal of everyone being able to receive education. The focus of the first lecture was thus deaf education relevant to Norwegian education policies. Second, bilingual bicultural education is related to functional bilingualism, so the second lecture stressed that Norwegian Sign Language is just one type of human sign language. It also talked about the bilingual education of deaf students. The third angle is to discuss bilingual bicultural education from the standpoint of deafness and deaf students. This lecture emphasized that deaf education has to adopt diversified paths and that deaf people’s participation in deaf education is necessary. The Norwegian specialists intentionally did not introduce specific pedagogies in their earlier lectures, because it is not appropriate to discuss a certain seemingly universal teaching method that is in fact out of touch with local cultural traditions.

It is not hard to see several things in this precious firsthand memory: First, the term culture appears with high frequency, and biculturalism is in two of the three lecture topics. Second, the Norway side intentionally reminded of us the correlation between culture and pedagogy and made every effort to avoid talking about pedagogy just for the sake of talking about it. Furthermore, the China side focused on teaching methods and students’ learning methods, seemingly wanting to understand the meaning of language only at the instrumental level of classroom teaching.

In the beginning, the SigAm project carried out its experiments in Jiangsu Province, in five special schools in Nanjing, Suzhou, Changzhou, Zhenjiang, and Yangzhou. On September 1, 2004, Amity signed project collaboration agreements with five deaf schools, including the Nanjing School for the Deaf, ensuring basic consensus on project goals, requirements, report systems, financial regimes, and so on. Each school in the experiment would receive a certain amount of money from the SigAm bilingual project every year for five years.

This article’s purpose is not to review the entire course of Amity’s deaf education reform but rather to discuss “disabled” education reform and education reform’s “disability” through the phenomenon of language moving along without culture. It aims to demonstrate that education reforms targeting “the deaf” (in this case definitely deaf people) have purposefully or accidentally exposed the “disability” of these reforms themselves in the process of implementation: education reform was supposed to walk on the two legs of language and culture, yet what we have seen in the process of deployment has been the separation of language from culture. What is sociologically meaningful is that the separation was not the intention of reform advocates. However, as a result of the complicated interaction of all sorts of social factors and forces, the advance of bilingual education reform, at least in Jiangsu Province, had to draw attention away from deaf culture as a precondition of moving forward. The diverging force of such a separation ultimately led to “crippled” deaf education. This article concretely presents that force through the textual analysis of a round table’s minutes, on the basis of which the author also provides a deeper discussion of “disability” and education reform.

Amity organized a team of six specialists to conduct research in three deaf schools, including deaf school Z, on October 11 and 12, 2005. Amity’s bilingual deaf education project (SigAm) hired six consultants to participate in the research and supervision of the project, two of whom were on the specialist team. The other four team members were from the special education research section of a professional technology college in city N. SigAm schools were using textbooks designed for regular schools. This research aimed at collecting feedback on new textbooks from teachers at the forefront of the project, with their content to be adjusted based on the regular-school textbooks and their use in these schools. The specialists mainly audited a first-grade Chinese class. As for the round table, its purpose was for the vanguard teachers to express their opinions and get answers to their questions. What is presented here are excerpts from a transcription of the audio record of the round table with the relevant teachers of school Z, held after the specialists had audited two sessions of a Chinese class (the full transcript appears as an appendix to this article).

Deaf school Z, the focus of this research, was previously a private deaf school, established in 1937. It was made a public school and renamed Z Deaf School in 1952. In 1995, the government invested six million yuan (about one million U.S. dollars) to relocate the school and construct new buildings for it, nearly 5,000 square meters on 13,700 square meters of grounds, creating a “Z special education center.” In September 2012, it became a comprehensive medium-size special education school, with education for both the deaf and the hearing impaired, in which deaf education consists of preschool education, compulsory education, and advanced midlevel education, with a length of schooling of fifteen years. At the time of the research, the school had 21 classes, 185 students, and 59 staff. It had joined the SigAm project in 2004.

Representatives of school Z in the round table included Principal R, Director of Education and Administration Z, Director of Discipline W, normal-hearing teacher C and one deaf teacher, both from the Chinese course for the first-grade bilingual class, one normal-hearing teacher and one deaf teacher from the preschool bilingual classes, and normal-hearing mathematics teacher X. The specialists audited mainly one Chinese course of the first-grade bilingual class that normal-hearing teacher C taught.

Of the four members of the specialist team, Division Chief C and Principal Z were the two key figures. C is the vice–director general of the special education committee of the Chinese Education Association, the head of the National Deaf Education Curriculum Reform Research Team, and formerly a major leader of the Basic Education Department of J province’s Board of Education, as well as the director general of J’s Provincial Association of Special Education Studies. At this time, he was appearing as the director of J’s Provincial Committee of Special Education. Principal Z was the principal of another school, deaf school N, and the director of Amity’s Rehabilitation Center for Deaf Children in Nanjing, and served as a member of the Hearing and Language Rehabilitation Committee of the Rehabilitation Association of Chinese Disabled Persons, a member of the Special Education Committee of the Chinese Education Association, the vice-director of J’s Provincial Committee for Hearing and Language Rehabilitation, and the vice–director general of N’s Municipal Association of Special Education Studies. He was at the round table as an expert member of J’s Provincial Committee of Special Education.

At the beginning of the round table, three “don’t know”s of Director of Education and Administration Z of school Z were very impressive:Teacher C:

Today’s class is eight characters in the [textbook] section “Please Read” [ren yi ren]. It requires students to read those eight basic characters. When preparing the lesson, our purpose was to ask whether students recognize and know their meaning, and therefore are able to connect the illustrations, characters, and gestures together. [We] designed the class along these lines. Then in order to correspond with bilingualism, not to correspond… [Laughs.]

C first introduced the teaching goals of this class, as well as his/her great confusion in preparing and teaching it. We can tell from the first paragraph that recognizing Chinese characters and using hand signs to present their meaning had long been the goal of teaching. However, this bilingual teaching experiment messed up the teaching designs passed down from the past. C used “correspond” to express his/her confusion. In reaction to C’s “to correspond with bilingualism” and expressions of confusion over how to do so, Director Z used three consecutive “don’t know”s – “don’t know how to teach,” “don’t know what to do,” and “[don’t] know how to run [bilingual class]” – as notes on C’s statements, giving the whole conversation an extremely strong negative color. Readers can tell from this conversation, especially the consecutive negation of “not,” what kind of negative and passive feeling the correspond that C used reveals. The reform of bilingual education, maybe because it was just in the beginning stage, had not received the wide acceptance of front-line teachers and was not something to which they had positively and willingly devoted themselves. To some extent, the reform was an intrusion of outside influence, precisely because of which, just as we see in C’s case, “to correspond” seems to reflect what was an awkward position. To summarize, using Director Z’s words, the teachers “[didn’t] know what to do.” The awkwardness of “corresponding,” one can tell from the round table, was due more specifically to the change from one teacher to two teachers, one of whom was deaf, in order to cope with the class’s audit by the specialist team. Indeed, having two teachers for one class was not the convention but an ad hoc “let’s try it today.” C said, “What are we going to do…? We figured we need the assistance of a deaf teacher to do this, then.” “This” in “to do this” refers to coping with the audit. And what was audited was not an ordinary class but a bilingual class. Therefore, here comes a deaf teacher. However, in the modal particle here translated as “then” in “the assistance of a deaf teacher to do this, then,” one can sense a strong feeling of helplessness. It is safe to say that even in an experimental bilingual school, the appearance of deaf teachers clearly prompted confusion and helplessness in the consciousness and language expression of an education participant in the round table. What was behind this helplessness, however, was the reality of deaf teachers’ almost nonexistent position in the education sector.

Deaf teachers are at the margins of deaf education, and their difficulty in reaching the stage of the classroom is a widespread phenomenon. This was also one of the “three major questions” listed by W, the director of discipline of school Z. The other two concerned textbooks and pedagogy. However, those three are closely interconnected.Director W:

Three major questions are: first, the new textbook; second, how deaf teachers should participate; third, how to handle the textbook. Without a textbook, how do we use a deaf teacher, then? We used to use a textbook for deaf schools. We were quite accustomed to it, whether in the teacher’s teaching or the student’s acceptance. The current textbook is less targeted. It does not target us. We have to start from scratch. We have to take care of language and Chinese characters simultaneously. School education also can’t keep up with the schedule. The first-grade class of regular school is designed to connect regular kindergarten classes to not only the language issue but also the entire knowledge system. There is simply no way to teach mathematics. If you can’t keep up with the schedule, then it surely can’t be effective.

Regarding issues with the new textbook, W pointed out that “we used to use a textbook for deaf schools. We were quite accustomed to it, whether in the teacher’s teaching or the student’s acceptance. The current textbook is less targeted. It does not target us. We have to start from scratch. We have to take care of language and Chinese characters simultaneously.” However, the expression “accustomed to” in “We used to use a textbook for deaf schools. We were quite accustomed to it, whether in the teacher’s teaching or the student’s acceptance” still met with correction and criticism. As an important member of the specialist team, Division Chief C made a guiding remark:

In 1982, western and northern European countries identified their failures in deaf education: compromising too much with regards to the requirements for deaf students and stressing compensation for defects too much while not placing potential developments in an important position. I think these two conclusions fully apply to us. Previous textbooks replaced some vivid material and instead taught deaf students with dry material. We would need six, seven, eight, or nine classes to finish with even a short essay. We expected students to understand integrated knowledge only by repeatedly reading “out loud” and made integrated knowledge fragmented, considering the defects of deaf students too much and lowering our expectations [for them]. So our deaf students did not learn very well.

Division Chief C aptly caught the core issue of “accustomed to”: “accustomed to” was accomplished at the price of progress and quality. Traditional deaf education excessively lowered the requirements for deaf students, overemphasized compensation for defects, stressed the training of reading “aloud,” and cost too much class time. The knowledge level of traditional deaf education textbooks is several years lower than that of textbooks for normal-hearing students. The deaf Chinese course lost its highlights and became “dry.” Division Chief C therefore said determinedly,

“It is fair to say that past teaching was not successful in either progress or method. With either eight or nine years of deaf school education, it is a frustrating result….. Our fourth-grade students are far behind students of the same grade in regular schools. They completely failed the exam designed for fourth-grade students of regular schools.”

The new textbook, however, aimed to rectify this, targeting the compensation education of the past. It had more content and a higher difficulty level and approached closer to a normal school’s standards. It can be said that this is a new direction in deaf education reform. However, questions also followed. Using the new textbook raised issues in teaching. As the round table shows, being asked to use normal-school textbooks confused teachers so that they could not keep up with the schedule and finish all the content that ought to be finished.Director Z:

“But it is hard to strike a balance in class, because the textbook is for regular schools. Plus, [you have to] keep up with the schedule. It is really difficult.”

Division Chief C also thought new the curriculum really “posed a big challenge for the teaching, textbook, and pedagogy in our deaf schools.” But, he insisted,

we should not excessively lower the requirements for [deaf] children. The problem in the past lies in that we lowered our expectations too much. In the past we could spend a couple of days teaching the Pinyin of one character or the character itself. So we should reflect in this regard. Because we are doing an experiment, at each stage we should consistently remind ourselves to reflect on pedagogical concepts, teaching methods, and teaching tools. Also to reflect and find strategies for the development of students in every respect. Here I hope you will still follow the schedule, and always reflect. Differences do exist for deaf students, but we don’t have to use traditional ways to think about today’s teaching.

“Should not excessively lower the requirements for [deaf] children” means that deaf education should not walk the traditional path of compensation education. Division Chief C stressed, “We don’t have to use traditional ways to think about today’s teaching.” Then how can one “not excessively lower the requirements for [deaf] children” while “better, fully develop[ing] [their] body, mind, virtue, intelligence”? Bilingual deaf education here became an experimental choice.

Bilingual deaf education, rather than a pedagogy of taking care of language and character simultaneously, refers to a bilingual education of oral expression and sign language.

There have been intense debates surrounding what roles sign language teaching should have and whether sign language, especially deaf sign language, which is considered “natural sign language,” should be used as teaching languages or not. The situation in mainland China is that sign language was long taken as forbidden in the zone of deaf education after the government established “oral language as the center” as a principle of deaf education in 1956. Oral language pedagogy has thus kept absolute dominance all along. (He 2006, 93). Only in recent years has bilingual deaf education become a focus of attention and an educational reform experiment and practice in certain schools in certain regions, resulting from reflection on compensation education and the influence of European and American deaf education concepts and thoughts.

The concept of bilingual deaf education recognizes social language and cultural diversity, fully acknowledges the deaf group and deaf language, sign language and deaf culture. It insists that deaf sign language is the first language that deaf children must master; on using deaf sign language as a tool in teaching, including in teaching deaf children the languages of their own countries (oral and written language), using this approach to teach a second language; on the importance of deaf people’s equal participation in deaf education; and on having high expectations of deaf students with the hopes of raising them to be people who can do anything except have normal hearing. (Shen, Wu, and Chu 2005, 159)

However, even with the consensus that bilingual deaf education is a very good choice “to better, fully develop body, mind, virtue, intelligence” while “not excessively lower[ing] the requirements for [students],” the understanding of its meanings is not without fractures.

At the round table, one person, though not present, existed in the consciousness of every participant. This person A is an Amity sector manager and the manager of the SigAm bilingual deaf education experiment. A is a key figure in Chinese bilingual deaf education reform. Not only has he translated and introduced Western bilingual deaf education thoughts and concepts into China, but he has also implemented these thoughts and concepts, as in preparing and carrying out this bilingual deaf education program. There was an interesting conversation regarding A at the round table.Division Chief C:

We still have to use Chinese Sign Language when teaching sign language, though we may use natural sign language to explain it. We must stick to standards in the teaching of sign language. Yours [ours] is Chinese teaching. Natural sign language has to be auxiliary, functioning as a tool.

One can surmise from what Director Z said that A is not only an advocate of sign language education but also a determined advocate of natural sign language. He is not just promoting bilingual deaf education but also paying special attention to the roles and functions of deaf people in deaf education.

Though they all participated in and promoted the experiment and practice of bilingual deaf education, those who were in the round table were clearly different from A in their attitude toward natural sign language. Division Chief C maintained that “we must stick to standards in the teaching of sign language. Yours [ours] is Chinese teaching. Natural sign language has to be auxiliary, functioning as tool.” Because of this, Division Chief C said, “[we] have to break through the authority of deaf teachers in sign language. Does knowing sign language alone mean that one can be a teacher? Similarly, can one be a teacher as long as one can talk? Many farmers are illiterate but very good at speaking. They are still farmers. Language is just a tool. It does not reflect one’s level of knowledge…. To learn [Chinese] characters before learning Pinyin does not fit the rule of education…. Focusing on natural sign language is equal to focusing on deaf people.”

Principal Z, another major member of the specialist team, to show his attitude, followed with: “We should keep what deserves keeping, and do things how they should be done.”

Director Z spoke in a roundabout way and raised doubts about bilingual deaf education: “The guiding principle of the experiment is quite vague. Should we concentrate on sign language or on the development of deaf people? We overthrew all previous paradigms and we got cold feet, all for emphasizing bilingualism.”

Therefore, under the principle of “we should keep what deserves keeping, and do things how they should be done,” a dividing line was drawn between education officers and practitioners on one side and Amity on the other, although they are all in the same camp of bilingual deaf education. Let us see where this line was drawn.

One can tell from the record of the round table that on the side of education officers and practitioners, even those advocating bilingual deaf education, sign language teaching is only a method and tool. The full development of students’ body, morality, and intelligence is the concept and the purpose. Of course there is nothing to fault in this. However, such an abstract concept has to be realized at a concrete level. When it is implemented at such a level, Chinese is no longer just a sign language – it becomes concept and purpose. Division Chief C said, “Our bilingual teaching is not done to teach sign language for the sake of learning it. It is a tool but not the purpose of teaching itself. The purpose is to better, fully develop body, mind, virtue, intelligence. From the perspective of teaching, it is to develop [the students’] thinking, to better master Mandarin Chinese, to better attain knowledge.”

It is safe to say, even though these education officers and practitioners and Amity are all engaged in bilingual deaf education reform, they apparently have different attitudes toward sign language, especially natural sign language. It is worth further thinking about whether to take sign language teaching only as a method or as concept, the difference between these two approaches, and what that difference implies.

The bottom line of “we should keep what deserves keeping, and do things how they should be done” was drawn at “Our bilingual teaching is not done to teach sign language for the sake of learning it. It is a tool but not the purpose of teaching itself.”

Those who would not yield an inch with regard to this bottom line were participants in the round table, mainly officials of educational sectors and normal-hearing teachers. They emphasized the integration of deaf people into mainstream culture and took sign language teaching only as a method, stressing that the purpose of deaf education is for deaf students to better develop their thinking and better master Mandarin Chinese. Amity expects to have a breakthrough, but without abandoning its bottom line, and has conducted various reforms. Although acknowledging the importance of deaf people’s integration into mainstream culture, it has not given up the conviction that the first language of deaf people should be their natural sign language. The organization emphasizes the equal participation of deaf people in deaf education and insists that deaf sign language in education should not stay at the level of approach but should be the purpose of the education itself.

It is still very difficult for many who are education officers or practitioners to accept the view of deafness as a subcultural or transcultural existence, at least for now. The content of the round table shows that whether they are administrators or teachers, everyone focuses on how to better use sign language to help deaf people learn Chinese and develop their thinking. Here the word thinking means not “thinking as deaf people” but rather “thinking as normal-hearing people,” allowing deaf people to think and understand questions just as normal-hearing people do. For instance, Principal Z, as a major member of the specialist team, mentioned, “Our deaf students’ thinking is often stiff. What is the natural sign language of deaf people? Should we call it ‘natural sign language’ as long as it is different from finger language?”

“Our deaf students’ thinking is often stiff.” This “stiff” thinking is without question the problem that has to be overcome. Only education that transforms deaf people into being like normal-hearing people deserves to be called education.

Of course, it should be noted that following traditional pedagogical thought, such as the idea that only changing “stiff[ness]” can be called education, was not Amity’s original intention. As an NGO, what Amity insists on is the principle of social work, which here departs from traditional pedagogical thought. The latter presumes subjects of education (students), sets value standards and goals for them from the position of educator, and then helps them break away from so-called uncivilized status via a whole set of procedures. In contrast, social work stresses thinking about issues from the position of the subject. First of all, it requests the understanding of the subject and his or her situation and needs, and helps him or her from the bottom up rather than indoctrinating him or her from the top down. Here the object is not an “uncivilized” existence. Deaf people became a disadvantaged social group because many social, historical, cultural, and other factors trapped them in an inferior position. Taking the subject as “uncivilized” or as part of a disadvantaged social group are two distinct types of attitude that lead directly to the debate about whether deaf education should be reformed as bilingual education or as bilingual bicultural education.

The point of this article is not just to show readers via the analysis of the record of a round table the internal splits and differences of opinion within the camp of bilingual deaf education. It is not just to question and to criticize as “uncivilized” traditional pedagogical thought that takes its subjects (students) as “uncivilized” either. Any efforts to participate in bilingual deaf education reform and reveal that previous compensation education and oral expression teaching have limitations and that bilingual education and sign language are beneficial to deaf people, at least those whose hearing is impaired or congenitally lost, deserve attention and praise. The goal of this article is to present the transcript of a round table as fully as possible and to analyze via this text the spirited process of deaf education reform and the influence and participation of an NGO as an important social organization in education reform. The term spirited implies complication and hardship. As the history of education in China repeatedly shows, influential educational reform often appears as top-down directives and is very difficult to achieve from the bottom up. This time, however, in the realm of special education, the NGO Amity wants to accomplish something. Its efforts, because of their complication and hardship, provide an excellent case for the sociological analysis of deaf education reform.

In a careful reading of the transcript of the round table (please refer to the appendix), at least three points, in content and style, are worth attention.

First of all, the participants were all powerful figures in the forefront of education, including former officers of the Basic Education Department of Jiangsu Province⁽⁴⁾ and principals and heads of the deaf schools in the experiment. These midlevel cadres, who are at the level of policy implementation, directly determine whether top-down education reforms are carried out correctly or not. The folk wisdom of “Whenever there is a policy from above, there will be a countertactic from below” implies that however good the macro policies are, there will always be realistic revisions at the micro level when it comes to the grass roots. It is those chiefs and principals who determine whether to revise or not. Education reform is not an exception. However perfect the design of education reform is at the top, it will always be revised, distorted, or even rewritten when it is implemented at the very forefront of the micro level.

Second, bilingual deaf education in this case was not designed at the top before implementation. Amity is an NGO. The reform concept that Amity advocates cannot have the effect on education officers, principals, heads, and vanguard teachers of instructions and restraints from the government’s top level. Civil education reform is not an exception, as even its official policies meet the issue of “Whenever there is a policy from above, there will be a countertactic from below.” The last sentence of the round table, “We’ll be smarter next time – we will decide what to teach based on who is coming,” is from the mouth of the principal of a school that was part of the experiment, which, amid laughs, indeed reveals the “flexibility” of the reform participants. The concepts of education reform never entirely determine whether it will be successful or not. Even with advanced concepts, reforms needs to resonate with and inspire the voluntary and positive devotion of education officers and teachers at the forefront to succeed. As this round table shows, although they were part of an expert investigation organized by Amity, major members of the specialist team and teachers at the participating schools did not entirely understand or fully agree with Amity’s concepts. Especially when the concept was expressed as “bilingual biculturalism,” bilingualism drew attention from the round table participants, yet biculturalism remained highly controversial. Even though the word culture did not appear anywhere in the entire round table, the points that participants made regarding natural sign language and the thinking of deaf people expressed their recognition of this culture. The complication and hardship that their “flexibility” reveals might well be the status quo of reform. The acceptance and internalization of new concepts cannot be done in a day. The saying “Where you sit determines what you think” is a sarcastic and vivid folk wisdom summary of a prominent phenomenon in contemporary Chinese society. For all practitioners of education reform, their previous positions, their current positions, and the interests associated with those positions will determine how deeply they will understand the reform concept and how far the reform practices will go.

Finally, a remarkable feature of the round table is that members of the specialist team, especially Division Chief C, predominantly occupied the discussion. In sharp contrast, although deaf teachers were present, they did not voice their opinions. The silence of the deaf teachers, of course, does not mean that even if they had wanted to speak they would not have gotten the chance. It is more likely that they were not consciously eager to have a chance to voice their opinions. The normal-hearing specialists and teachers took this for granted and would not raise it as an issue to the level of their consciousness. What this phenomenon suggests is that many participants in deaf education reform subconsciously think that it is a matter for normal-hearing people. Marx has a famous line in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented,” which Said uses as an epigraph for his Orientalism (Said 1999, no page number). The transcript of the round table precisely expresses such a message: deaf people cannot represent themselves; they must be represented by normal-hearing people, who must speak for them.

To call attention to the above three points is not to criticize incompleteness in reform practices or the understanding of concepts but to make people understand the complication and hardship of reform in a situation in which reform will always “be altered, twisted, or even reversed,” in which where you sit determines how you think, and in which one “has to express and present oneself via others.” Bilingual deaf education reform is not something to be done all at once. If society has not reached a certain stage, its people will not have experienced a leap in their consciousness and value system. Hence it is very difficult to have a fundamental breakthrough or a complete change in the appearance of deaf education reform. Complication and hardship may be the normal state of reform, but returning to the previously normal state can also be an extremely long process. Because of this, there is more positive, practical meaning in thinking about how to live with the senses of suffering and helplessness that accompany complication and hardship in this process.

In the title of this article, I use the expression “education reform’s ‘disability.’” As I state above, it first refers to the “crippled” status of deaf education reform in China: the separation of culture from language and the lonely path of language. However, with further thinking, the term canji (disability) has a second meaning. What this layer expresses is that the suffering and helplessness of “disability” will always accompany deaf education reform. We say that deaf education reform is inevitably “disabled,” in the sense that reform will always “be altered, twisted, or even reversed,” in the sense that where you sit determines how you think, and in the sense that one “has to express and present oneself via others.” However, it is better to say that pointing out inevitability in the second layer, rather than spreading an air of desperation, helps to find a certain positivity in the desperation that “being inevitably ‘disabled’” appears to represent, as well as the suffering and helplessness that grow from desperation.

It was Kiyotsugu Takeda, who has a distinct reading of the “disability” issue, and Hakyeong Kim, a writer whom Takeda highly esteemed, who taught me to think about the positive meaning of the suffering and helplessness of “disability.”

The name of Kiyotsugu Takeda is almost unknown in China. In Japan, however, especially in the circle of literary critics, he has quite a reputation. In the 1980s and 1990s, when postmodern discourses became popular, he directly countered the trend and criticized postmodern thinkers famous at the time, such as Shiguéhiko Hasumi, Kōjin Karatani, and Akira Asada. His writing always gives a sense of his speaking to his heart’s content. Of course, his fame has another reason – he is “Korean in Japan,” in addition to having the courage to challenge people like Shiguéhiko Hasumi and his indeed thought-provoking critics.

Most literary critics have writers whom they love. Takeda is no exception. Hakyeong Kim, whom Tekada admired, was yet another Korean in Japan. When Kim committed suicide on January 4, 1985, Takeda wrote an essay to eulogize him, titled “The Source of Suffering – in Memory of Hakyeong Kim,” which is worth reading and provoked discussions of the suffering and helplessness of “disability.”

Kim was “Korean in Japan.” In other words, although he was born, grew up, and lived in Japan, he was relegated to the margins of Japanese society because his father or even his grandfather was Korean; suffered various forms of discrimination; could not integrate into Japan; could not become Japanese. To a certain extent, “in Japan” means humiliation in social identity and can be directly replaced by the word “disability.” Being born, growing up, and living in Japan but not being able to become Japanese forms a salient self-identity – which is an outstanding social and historical issue concerning discrimination and anti-discrimination in Japan – and is a “source of suffering.” For Kim it was even worse, because he had a disability of body: frozen mouth.

Regarding the issue of Zainichi⁽⁵⁾ (in Japan), most “Koreans in Japan” basically have two options escape the quandary of being socially disadvantaged. The first is to fight against their reality and more or less chase the slim hope of standing out in Japanese society through extraordinary efforts. Takeda, for instance, grew up to be a professor in a reputable private university and a prominent and young (back then) cultural critic. He still had considerable reservations that he could psychologically solve his issues of integration and identity, even though he was several levels higher in social status than his father or grandfather had been. The second option is to create a reference group and turn it into a group of affiliation via action, not only psychologically but also psychically returning to one’s homeland – South Korea or North Korea in this case – and devoting oneself to a community of shared destiny that can accommodate and embrace one. However, as Kim was doomed to simultaneously face two “disabilities,” “in Japan” and “frozen mouth,” he had whole new understanding of “disability” (in both physical and social senses), the suffering that disability brings about, and the overcoming of suffering, which is distinct from the two aforementioned options to escape social suffering. Kim thus had a unique style of writing. And it was exactly this style of writing and the extremely deep thoughts it contains that touched Takeda. He said that Kim “brought such an amazing literary experience to me for the first time” (Takeda 1998, 4) and was “an author who motivated me to write” (3).

What kind of style is it? Takeda wrote,

There is suffering from one’s existence, which is often discussed as ‘the issue of staying in Japan’ or ‘the issue of discrimination.’ But these terms have nothing to do with one’s ‘suffering.’ Here [Kim] discards very cautiously, one by one, those social meanings attached to his own suffering and attempts only to deeply depict the nature of suffering… only to describe the nature of suffering and the concreteness of suffering. This depiction allows the depicter to gain a whole new understanding of self, and therefore enables them to live” (3–4).

Kim described his hardship with stuttering in his first publication, Frozen Mouth. However, his writing is best construed as narrating, using an extremely subtle style, how people with a stutter actually feel rather than describing the suffering of having a stutter…. Stuttering does solely mean inconvenience in expression. It is best related as a strange experience: creating “the cage of self-consciousness” deep inside one’s mind after witnessing “rejection in the eyes” of others. The difficulty in dealing with such a cage is that even having understood the causation of disability, one can never overcome [the suffering of disability] as long as one has had to carry the disability of frozen mouth in reality. The suffering of frozen mouth is a special “experience” that is impossible to share with others and whose brunt one can only bear oneself. In other words, stuttering in essence has an unproductive pain without “exchange value” between others and you. (17)

Kim’s writing style is unique in that he did not intentionally romanticize the suffering of “disability” (either social or physical) or its social meanings. Instead he calmly described self-feeling – “discard[ing] very carefully, one by one, those social meanings attached to his own suffering,” “using an extremely subtle style,” “only to describe the nature of suffering and the concreteness of suffering” – in order “to gain a whole new understanding of self.” This “whole new understanding of self,” in other words, is also a whole new understanding of disability – “Even having understood the causation of disability, one can never overcome [the suffering of disability] as long as one has had to carry the disability of frozen mouth in reality. The suffering of frozen mouth is a special ‘experience’ that is impossible to share with others and whose brunt one can only bear oneself.”

The pain of “impossible to share with others and whose brunt one can only bear oneself” is not limited to frozen mouth. The helplessness of “can never overcome” is also not unique to people with frozen mouth and applies to all incurable disabilities (in a medical sense), including hearing disabilities. In other words, making extraordinary efforts and returning to the collective may well be colorful delusions that others enable out of compassion. Delusion in fact represents one’s helplessness. And helplessness is indeed a major source of suffering. However, the delusion that views overcoming helplessness as a necessary means of passing through suffering is just a fundamental cause of suffering. The profundity of Kim’s and Takeda’s thoughts is to tell us that helplessness is not something that can be overcome.

We should instead learn to have awe inside and think of living and coexisting with helplessness as destiny. At first glance, to live and coexist with helplessness is seemingly fully of negativity, but it actually has a thoroughly positive side. It might be put this way: Expecting education reform to provoke a fundamental change in overcoming the suffering of disabilities such as frozen mouth or impaired hearing is essentially too optimistic and too naïve. Ultimately, one can only describe what the experience and feeling of “disability” are to the people involved, “using an extremely subtle style.” As a matter of fact, to speak in a forward-looking way, we should approach deaf education reform from this perspective and think more deeply about it. Anyone who dreams of overcoming and entirely solving the complication and hardship of reform is too optimistic and naïve. This complication and hardship seem to be deeply rooted in “the national soul,” which has invoked numerous slogans of reform and renovation for a century but essentially not changed even for a bit. They are beyond the efforts of a single field or the good intentions of social work, sociology, anthropology, and perhaps education studies as well. It therefore appears more important to strive to describe, “in an extremely subtle style,” the “disability” of deaf education reform and especially to describe the experience of deafness to the people involved – that is, to every participant in deaf education reform. In this reform, of course, deaf people are very important.