Children of a Lesser God, Essay Example

Children of a Lesser God:Barriers to Communication between Deaf and Hearing Cultures

When considering what constitutes a different culture, people often believe this has to do only with location, background, ethnicity, race, or other similar identifies.The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, defines culture as “the shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understanding that are learned through a process of socialization.”This definition does not appear to require that a group of people need to be directly from or descended from people who lived in a different location, instead emphasizing the importance of socialization in developing a cultural identity.Socialization also helps to shape how people view their world.It has been proposed by many that a cultural world view is strongly influenced by language.The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis states that language is significantly related to how people perceive and interact with the world around them (Otto).This hypothesis demonstrates the importance of language in cultural identity and suggests that lack of a shared language is a barrier to communication.

When considering language, people often fail to include non-verbal language in the definition, in particular American Sign Language used by those who are deaf.Many believe that people who are deaf share the same culture as those who can hear, as the difference between hearing and non-hearing individuals raised in the same society is believed to be only sensory oriented.Yet deaf individual have been shown to have their own culture and many choose to use ASL exclusively, teaching it to their children, as the view it to be a critical aspect of maintaining deaf culture (Gallaudet).

The movie Children of a Lesser God explores how hearing individuals may view those who are deaf and questions how individuals from a hearing and non-hearing culture can maintain attitudes preventing them from communicating with each other.The story centers on a teacher named James who teaches at a deaf school and falls in love with a former student of the school named Marie.He decides she can improve her life circumstances by learning to speak pressuring her to do so despite her resistance and she refuses to lip read even though she can do so presenting an argument suggesting that she feels that it would impinge on her placement in the deaf culture.Despite the fact that they want to establish a relationship each one refuses to compromise in a way that would allow them to fully communicate focusing on trying to change each other rather than relate to each other.

As the story progresses, it becomes apparent that both characters reason for their individual views and insistence that they are correct is more complex than cultural sensitivity alone.James is committed to his unorthodox teaching methods, zealously pursuing the path of helping deaf student learn to speak, underneath which he seems to be driven by what it would mean for his life’s work if he admitted that his approach may not be perceived as a positive goal by those he is working with.Marie, on the other hand, prefers a world of silence rather than to risk straying from the deaf community where she feel comfortable to interact with others who she believes belong to a society that is cruel and will hurt her.This points out that often the barriers to communication between people from different cultures may be the result of individual motives outside of culture.Miscommunication between cultures can be the result of people who use perhaps initially struggle towards cultural identity but come to use this as an excuse to cover individual fears, prejudice or lack of confidence navigating the larger world outside their own culture.

Barrier to communication between cultures may also come from ethnocentric perspectives which can blind individuals to the values of cultural diversity and lead them to be patronizing or to condescend to people in other cultures.An ethnocentric attitude can also cause people to refuse to acknowledge the validity of a culture based on their own set beliefs of what is necessary for a group of people to be defined as members of a unique culture.When people are too stubborn to entertain other points of view, perspectives, definitions, and belief systems they will stop growing and learning new ways of seeing things.Similarly, when members who make up a culture view those outside their group as hostile or judgmental and keep themselves separate from anyone from an alternate culture, they are engendering the prejudicial attitudes and stereotypes they find so offensive..When people are comfortable with their own cultural identity and are self-aware or their own strengths and weaknesses they can explore other cultures in an open manner without feeling threatened by differences they encounter.This will lead to empathy and understanding among cultures such that the increasing trend towards globalization will result in a richer world instead of a world marred by miscommunication based on ethnocentricity.

Works Cited

The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition. “What is Culture?”Web. 2010.

Gallaudet University. “About American Deaf Culture.” Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center. Web.

Otto, Berthold.“Culture and Language.”Education.com.Web. 2013.