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The man was old and senile, and he ate without manners or grace. His daughter was ashamed and ordered him to eat in a corner apart from the others. There came a day when he broke his plate, and the daughter was angry. "My son shall not see such disgusting behavior," she said. "Since you eat like a pig, you shall be treated like a pig. In the future you shall eat in the yard from a trough." Her son was five, the thing in life she loved most. He asked for a hammer and boards.
"For what purpose?" she asked.
"To build you a trough," he said, "so that I may feed you when you are old."
So it has been through the generations, each teaching the next and then doubling back on itself for reinforcement-change coming slow and learning difficult. Yet, there come bends in the road, shifts in direction. It is not inevitable that each generation take hammer and boards to build troughs for the next. Among times there is a time that turns a corner, and everything this side of it is new. Times do not go backward. For the blind the corner has been turned, and the time is now.
As we approach the beginning of the twenty-first century and contemplate the start of a new millennium, it is natural for countries, organizations, and individuals to review the past and think about the future. This is particularly true of the International Council for Education of People with Visual Impairment since you are one of only two major international membership organizations concerned with blindness. The other, of course, is the World Blind Union, which deals with every aspect of blindness but necessarily concentrates on current problems of blind adults and their search for adequate training, meaningful rehabilitation, and equal status in society. You, too, must deal with the present; but your major focus is, as it should be, on the future-on the children for whom you plan and work and hope-on tomorrow's dream and not just today's immediacy.
This emphasis on the future is reflected in the theme of your conference, "Stepping Forward Together: Families and Professionals as Partners in Achieving Education for All." Today's reality is that organizations of the blind, parents of blind children, and professionals must work together in partnership. Otherwise, the prospects for our children are desolate and bleak.
If a partnership is to be real, certain conditions must exist as prerequisites. In the first place, the partners must be equals and must be accepted as such by each other. Beyond that, each partner must have a stake in the outcome of what is being undertaken and must have positive assets to bring to the table. Absent these basics, no partnership is possible, and any talk to the contrary is meaningless rhetoric.
For you there is something more. There has to be. Otherwise, why would you have an organization at all? Why not just have an international organization dealing with the education of everybody? The answer to that question, whether verbalized or not, is known to all of us. It revolves around the fact that in today's society blindness carries with it distinct and unique problems. And I am not talking about the physical condition of blindness, for if I were, this audience should consist of doctors, not educators. I am talking about attitudes and perceptions, the intangibles that hold the blind back, put us down, and keep us out. I am talking about the hammers and boards that through the centuries have built the troughs from which the blind even today too often still must eat.
As educators you have the responsibility of helping blind children acquire academic excellence and the skills of daily living; but for that, you require little help from parents or blind adults. It is in the broader arena of the everyday world that you need partnership-in society as a whole, where opinions are formed and where blind children will learn the self-image that will determine what they can do and be. Public attitudes about the blind inevitably become the attitudes of the blind, and this includes blind children. If the public believes that the blind are inferior and incompetent, the children will believe it too, and thus they will help it come true. They will take hammer and boards and build their own troughs.
Although we have made great progress in creating opportunity and changing public attitudes about blindness, the task still remaining is monumental. It will require the best efforts of us all-the educators, the parents, and the adult blind. When I say adult blind, I am not just talking about individuals but also and particularly about organizations of the blind, for the power of joint effort is required. We must pool our resources and act in concert.
Before I go further, let me say something about the United Nations. It always comes up for discussion in every international meeting, so let me have my turn at it and get it out of the way. The United Nations has a vital part to play in building the kind of world all of us want to live in, but if we expect from it what it was never designed to do or be, we will be disappointed and disillusioned. The United Nations is not a world government. It cannot require member states to adopt recommended programs of education or social welfare. It cannot require them to spend money. It can inform, persuade, bring moral pressure to bear, initiate economic sanctions, and sometimes conduct peace-keeping missions, but it cannot be a legislature for the day-to-day affairs and internal policies of constituent nations. It is a forum-to set tone, to create opinion, to stimulate activity, and to coordinate effort.
Why have I said all of this? I have said it to emphasize the fact that in the area of changing attitudes about the blind, we must not look to the United Nations. We must not look to our governments. We must not look to community organizations. We must look to ourselves. That is where change must begin-first ourselves, then the people immediately around us, and only after that the broader community. And make no mistake. All of us can stand improving. As Tennyson said, we are part of all that we have met. Every one of us has, at least to some extent, been contaminated by the mistaken public attitudes about blindness that abound everywhere in the world.
This contamination affects you as educators; it affects the parents of blind children; it affects blind adults; and it affects me. Sometimes those of us who are blind (even those of us who consciously work on a daily basis to change the status quo) accept the public view of our limitations without even knowing we are doing it. Sometimes we do it while in the very act of speaking to the contrary.
A few years ago I went to a cafeteria with a sighted associate. We took our trays and moved down the line. When we turned from the cash register and started for the table, an accident occurred. A glass of water fell from the tray and splashed on the floor. "There will be those," I said, "who will see this and think that the reason I spilled that glass of water is because I'm blind."
"You are right," my sighted associate replied; "for you didn't spill it. I did. It fell from my tray, not yours."
What I have already told you is bad enough, but there is more, and worse. I didn't leave it there: "How did you do that?" I asked.
This time my associate (who is as well-versed in the right kind of philosophy about blindness as anybody I know) responded with more than a touch of acid: "I did it the same way anybody else would," she said. "I tipped my tray. Do you think it is normal for the blind to be clumsy and the sighted to be graceful? Do you think sighted people don't have accidents? Why did you automatically assume that you were the one who spilled the water?"
It was a fair question, and it caused a lot of soul-searching. I reluctantly conclude that (despite all of my philosophy and knowledge to the contrary, despite all of my experience with this very sort of situation dressed out in other forms) I fell into the trap of social conditioning. I hope I won't do it again, but I can't be sure.
Let me not leave you with the impression that the sighted associate I have just mentioned (who, incidentally, is my wife) is invulnerable to the public attitudes that surround us. Shortly after the water-spilling incident, we stood together at a counter in a bank. I signed a document. My wife said to the teller, "Maybe I had better print his name below the signature, so that you can read it." Then, after printing my name, she put her signature on the document.
After a moment of embarrassed hesitation, the bank teller said: "Perhaps you wouldn't mind printing your name, too. I can't read your signature any better than his."
Why did my wife have no trouble recognizing that my signature might be illegible and not see that hers might not be any better? It was probably for the same reason that I automatically assumed that I had spilled the water.
My wife has normal eyesight. If she had been blind, her unreadable signature would have been attributed to blindness. Mine might have been due to haste, lack of attention, poor training, or any of a dozen other things, but it was chalked up to blindness without a second thought. Moreover, the bank teller probably surrounded the incident with connotations of inferiority. Blind people cannot write legibly. Sighted people must print their names for them. She has proof. I doubt that she remembered or even remarked the fact that my wife had the same problem. How easy it is to take the hammer and build the trough!
Not long ago when I went to a doctor's office for an examination, I had two or three things happen to me during the course of a few minutes that showed me how far we still have to come in changing public attitudes about blindness. In the examining room I was taking off my shirt and getting ready to hang it on a hook on the back of the door. I had my hand on the hook, so there was no question that I knew where it was. The nurse said: "If I close the door, will you be able to find it?"
I don't know whether she was talking about the door or the hook, but it really doesn't matter. I had my hand on both of them, and the door was only going to move a short distance. There is no way that I could have lost it.
I later learned that the nurse had gone out to the waiting room and asked my secretary, who had come with me so that we could work while I was waiting, whether she wanted to come back and help me take my clothes off. That is not all. When I was leaving, the receptionist said to my secretary: "Does he need another appointment?"
What should I have done? How should I have reacted? What I didn't do was become upset or hostile. The nurse and the receptionist were well-intentioned and kindly disposed. They were doing the best they could to be of help to me. Moreover, if I am so touchy and insecure that I can be upset by people who are trying as best they can to give me assistance, then I had better look within. Confrontation was not called for.
On the other hand, I shouldn't have just left the matter alone-and I didn't. I was pleasant and unperturbed, but I also took the occasion to talk about things I was doing and accomplishments blind persons were making. And I let the nurse see me tie my tie and find the door, trying to teach by example and not by sermon. In addition, I gave the doctor literature to put on the tables in his office, and for his staff to read.
One thing that may have helped me keep my equilibrium was an experience I had almost thirty years ago with a young blind fellow named Curtis Willoughby. He had just graduated from high school and was planning to go to college. He wanted to be an electrical engineer, and he didn't know whether a blind person could do it-and, particularly, whether he could do it. Of course, I didn't know either-but I hoped, put on a brave face, and did everything I could to encourage him.
Even though there were technical problems to overcome, he did extremely well in college. I continued to encourage him and talked now and again to his professors, assuring them that there would be no difficulty in a blind person's functioning as an electrical engineer. In reality they probably knew more about it than I did. Certainly they knew more about the technicalities of electrical engineering. But they seemed to need the reinforcement.
When Curtis graduated from college, I helped him make contacts and write job resumes. I talked to potential employers, assuring them that Curtis was competent and could do the work of an electrical engineer.
After about three months, Curtis was hired by Collins Radio of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He apparently did his work in a satisfactory manner since he received commendations.
A little while later, I was talking with a friend of mine who was a newspaper reporter, and he said to me: "Do you think Curtis is really pulling his weight at Collins, or do you think they are just keeping him for public relations purposes?"
I said, "I believe he is doing the job. I certainly hope so, but how can I be sure?"
The next spring another blind person graduated as an electrical engineer from Iowa State University, the same school from which Curtis had received his degree, and this blind person didn't have to wait three months for a job. He was hired immediately, and by Collins Radio. Incidentally, the reason he applied to Iowa State, the reason that the university was so willing to accept him, and the reason that Collins hired him without hesitation probably had to do with Curtis's success. If Curtis had failed, the consequences might have been equally discernible. Be that as it may, I hunted up my newspaper friend and said to him:
"I can now give you a firm answer. I think Curtis is pulling his weight at Collins, for if they need one blind person for public relations purposes, they don't need two."
A few years went by, and Collins fell on hard times. They cut their work force by more than half and were in serious financial trouble. Engineers were laid off according to seniority, and when Curtis's number came up, he didn't ask for special privileges-which is the way it should have been. He took his layoff like the rest. We of the National Federation of the Blind of the United States don't try to have our cake and eat it too-at least, most of us don't, most of the time. We want equal opportunity, but we are also willing to make equal sacrifices and accept equal responsibility.
Anyway, Curtis took his layoff, and then he applied for a job as an electrical engineer with the telephone company. As director of programs for the blind in the state of Iowa, I had the responsibility of trying to help Curtis get another job. I thought he was a good electrical engineer, but I didn't know whether he was as good a salesman as I was. So I scheduled a lunch with top engineering officials at the telephone company in Des Moines and talked about Curtis. I said he was a whiz at electrical engineering, and I did it with enthusiasm. They apparently believed me, for before we left the lunch, it was agreed that Curtis would go to work for the phone company.
He did, and after a time he was invited to spend a year at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. This is a prestigious appointment, one that is only given to the best.
When Curtis finished at Bell Laboratories, he came back to Des Moines and resumed his work as a systems design engineer with the phone company. One day without comment I received from Curtis a copy of a letter. It was written by top engineering officials with AT&T, and it said something to this effect:
"Mr. Willoughby has been dealing with Problem X, and his work is some of the best we have seen. Please put this letter in his personnel file."
I called Curtis and said, "Tell me in two or three sentences what you did. If you make your explanation longer, I probably won't understand it."
As I remember it, he said that in large installations, such as the manufacturing of farm equipment and the like, there were tremendous loads of electrical current and that these interfered with the phone system-sometimes causing static and other interruptions, and sometimes creating no problem at all. The filtering equipment necessary to remedy the problem was bulky and expensive. It would cost many tens of thousands of dollars if used widely throughout industry. Curtis had discovered a way to redesign the telephone systems at these large installations so that the bulky filtering equipment would not be needed, and another piece of equipment which had routinely been used could also be eliminated. The new design permitted more clarity in telephone conversations than would have occurred with the expensive filters or with the standard equipment.
After finishing this conversation with Curtis, I went into my office and literally locked the door. I sat at my desk and said to myself:
"You helped Curtis through college. You encouraged him in his search for employment. You did one of the best selling jobs in your life, convincing phone company officials that he could perform as well as anybody else as an electrical engineer. But deep down in your heart, have you ever really believed that he was fully and completely equal to a sighted electrical engineer?"
I wish I could say that my answer was an unequivocal yes. The truth is that I don't know. I had said it, and I had thought I believed it. But did I? After receiving the letter, I am certain that I did. But before that? I can't be sure.
This brings me back to the hook on the doctor's door. I have spent most of my life trying to convince blind people that they can compete on terms of equality with others, and trying to bring sighted people to the same belief. If under these circumstances I was still not certain that I believed in my heart that Curtis was pulling his weight, how can I possibly feel hostility, or blame others who fail to comprehend? And why should I doubt that your attitudes are as fallible as mine, needing the same review and the same introspection? What we want is compassion and understanding, not blame or bitterness. Although there are times when we must speak out and not equivocate, let me always remember the telephone company when I am annoyed by the hook on the doctor's door.
What do all of these things have to do with hammers and boards and the building of troughs? What do they have to do with your need to build partnerships with the parents of blind children and organizations of the adult blind? Nothing if you are not perceptive. Everything if you are.
Carol Castellano and her husband Bill are leaders in the National Federation of the Blind's organization for parents of blind children. They have two children-Serena, who is blind; and John, who is sighted. For both of these children the future is filled with exhilarating possibilities. With sparkle, pride, and belief Carol talks about those possibilities. Here is what she has to say:
"It took my daughter Serena a long time to decide just what she wanted to be when she grew up. Whereas, my son was only four when he decided that he would be a dinosaur scientist, it wasn't until she was seven that Serena realized that her destiny in life was to be a folk singer. She happily played the chords to her favorite song, "Michael Row the Boat Ashore," on my guitar.
Then came the U.S. Presidential campaign of 1992. Serena was eight. She sat rapt before the television, listening intently to the speeches of both parties. After the summer's two national conventions, she realized that it wasn't a folk singer that she wanted to be after all . . . it was a folk singing Senator. By late fall, having heard all three Presidential debates, Serena was going to be President.
Her barrage of questions about how she could learn to be President, and conversations about what politicians do, kept up for so long that my husband and I were convinced she really might go into politics when she was older.
In the late spring of the following year, Serena went out with her father to pick early snow peas from the garden. Coming inside with her basket of peas, she told me that she was very interested in gardening. "That's wonderful," I replied. "You'll be a big help to Daddy."
Overnight Serena's interest must really have taken root, because the next day she asked me if I thought the gardens at the White House were too big for the President to tend since the President is such a busy person. "Yes," I replied. "I'm sure there's a staff of people who take care of the White House gardens."
"Well, then, I won't be a gardening President," she told me. "I'll just be a gardener."
The desire to be a gardener was still but a tender shoot when Serena took a piano lesson-just a few weeks after picking those peas-and realized that it was a pianist she wanted to be.
Serena is at such a wonderful stage of life! Interested in everything, trying everything out, she sees the world as her plum, ripe for the picking. She believes in herself, as we believe in her. And since what people believe largely determines what they do, it is critically important for parents of blind children (and other adults in the child's life) to have positive beliefs about blindness and what blind people can do.
If we are told (in a journal article or by a teacher of the blind, say) that blind children usually do not or cannot learn how to do a certain task, and if we come to believe this, chances are we will not give our child the experience or opportunity anyone would need in order to do this task. And chances are the child won't learn to do it.
Imagine, though, if we-and our blind children-were never told that blind people couldn't accomplish a certain thing. Imagine what the results might be if everyone believed that blind people could do anything they wanted to do! Well, I believe this-and attending National Federation of the Blind conventions has solidified that belief for me. It is that belief which guides the way I bring up my daughter.
My husband and I know personally, or have heard speak, a blind high school teacher, a college professor, a mathematician, a scientist, a car body mechanic, an industrial arts teacher, a Foreign Service officer, an engineer, a high-performance engine builder, and a man who has sailed solo in races from San Francisco to Hawaii. This makes it possible for us to glory in the exhilarating feeling of watching a child look toward the future and see only possibilities."
So says Carol Castellano-and I say: The first thing you must do is surround yourself with positive images of blindness. Get to know successful blind adults, and disregard the negative articles that sometimes appear in the professional literature, articles that tell you in dressed up jargon that blindness means inferiority. Counter the negatives (whether from the literature or the all pervasive public attitudes) that appeal to your so-called common sense concerning the limitations of blindness.
As an increasing number of us who are blind go about our business from hour to hour and minute to minute, we know from personal experience that those negative attitudes are false. In our homes and our offices, in factories and laboratories, on farms and in universities, in places of recreation and forums of civic accomplishment, we live the refutation of those attitudes every day. While it is true that 70 percent of us in the United States, and even more of us in many other parts of the world, do not have jobs and that all of us (regardless of where we live) are routinely treated like children and wards, it is equally true that 30 percent of us in the United States (and some of us in every country) do have jobs and that all of us are coming to realize that our problem is not blindness but mistaken attitudes-both ours and the public's.
If even one of us can be a scientist (and many of us are), that does not prove that if an individual is blind he or she can be a scientist. But it does prove that blindness will not prevent a person from being a scientist. In short, it proves that blindness is not the barrier.
Sight is enjoyable; it is useful; it is convenient. But that is all that it is-enjoyable, useful, and convenient. Except in imagination and mythology it is not more than that. It does not have mysterious psychological implications; and it is not the key to happiness, the road to knowledge, or the window to the soul. Like the other senses, it is a channel of communication, a source of pleasure, and a tool-nothing less, nothing more. It is alternative, not exclusive.
You are the educators of blind children, the gatekeepers of the future. But if you try to do your work in a vacuum, if you try to do it alone, you will fail.
This brings me again to the concept of partnership. You have a stake not only in the education of blind children but also in what is happening to the parents and to blind adults, for if the parents do not believe in the future of their children, they will undo your work as fast as you do it. And if blind adults are denied opportunity and forced to live as inferiors, the world of tomorrow (the world which the children will inherit) is being irrevocably ruined. And we who are blind adults also have a stake. The children with whom you work may not biologically be our children, but morally and spiritually they are. At the deepest and most meaningful levels, they are our children, and we must help them have a better world than we have known.
All of us in the partnership must be equals-and we are. All of us must have a stake in the outcome-and we do. And all of us must have assets to bring to the table-and again, we do.
With positive images and living proof, the parents, the adult blind, and the educators must learn from each other, support each other, and reinforce each other. Through our organizations we who are blind must go to the government and the public to see that the educational programs are funded. You who are educators and parents must associate yourselves with us and our organizations to find role models for the children. All of us must join together to educate society and build new ways of thought. This is the meaning of partnership; this is the challenge of the twenty-first century; and this is the hope for blind children. It is not inevitable that this generation take hammer and boards to build troughs for the next. Among times there is a time that turns the corner, and everything this side of it is new. For the blind the corner has been turned, and the time is now.