brianriley4

ciavmom,

You're confusing cause and effect. The reason reading levels have been low is due to the influence of oral methods of instruction in schools for the deaf. If deaf students had been allowed to learn ASL from birth on, then the reading levels would have been normal all of these years.

Even if *some* people are lucky enough to do well with cochlear implants, that does not justify depriving deaf babies of the opportunity to be exposed to language at birth by allowing them to learn ASL. There is absolutely no justification for that.

It does not make any sense at all to deprive deaf babies of access to a natural (visual) language while waiting for them to be implanted.

Cochlear implants allow *some* deaf children to succeed as handicapped hearing people, while American Sign Language allows *all* deaf children to develop normally, in both the cognitive and emotional sense.