I also used to ignore people who wanted to be acknowledged for their practical wisdom. I made them feel failures, and consequently I failed them. There is a substantial literature now on how children s multiple talents and strengths might be encouraged through new ways of teaching and learning interactions. Communication between Hearing and Deaf involves other modes, since sound is not available. It involves sight, emotional engagement, inspired guesswork, a convergence of understanding to try to construct mutual meaning.
Genuine goodwill is called for.
Yet that is what we do to people who we choose not to listen to. Perhaps in a less devastating way, but still in a highly disempowering way, society places children, teachers, women, the disabled , and other marginalised groups, in situations where they are supervised and stripped of autonomy in judgement, deliberately muted, with full personal knowledge of the power of their own contribution, yet denied every sign that they are valued or of worth. I remember, just after the accident in which I lost my hearing, being harangued vigorously by a young homeless woman, about the injustice of her situation and would I give her money. Obviously she did not know of my predicament, because my disability is not immediately discernible. She had no money for a roof over her head, while my future as a wage-earner had disappeared overnight.