Thread: Helen Kellar
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Old 10-07-2003, 03:32 PM   #11 (permalink)
raeanna74
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She also did learn to read braille eventually. Reading it in books would have been much easier to understand than the slow laborius spelling in her hand.

I have worked with blind and deaf persons. Was even engaged to a deaf man at one point.

When it comes to abstract concepts or ideas such as socialism they can understand just about as much as you and I do. It's the physical world that they aren't as in touch with. The mental one is completely open to them.

I asked a blind man (who had been blind from birth) who was a friend of mine what it meant to him when someone described things with colors. He said color meant absolutely nothing to him. He pretty much just ignored it when they talked about color. Sure he wished at times that he knew what people were talking about but because he'd never enjoyed the pleasure of seeing color he "didn't know what he was missing".

To me, using sign language can be as expressive as speech. Communication is simply the expression of symbols. The symbols first occur in the mind of the speaker, are translated into words (or in the case of signlanguage symbols again) which are heard or seen by the hearer and interpreted once again into another symbol. If someone says the word "siren" there are so many different "sirens" that people think of that every hearer has a slightly different Picture in their mind.

Being deaf and blind ONLY affects your perception of the physical world. Unless the thing that caused you to be deaf and blind also cause brain damage then you have as much or more of a capacity to understand philosophy and concepts like socialism as much as anyone else.
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