EmailFor Paddy Ladd - writer, academic and activist - school was a desperate strain. As one of the first deaf children in mainstream education, he was not taught to sign but forced to use his eyes and wits to work out what was going on. He recalls: "I was told: 'You're not a deaf child - you're just a hearing child who can't hear'."
The edict devastated his self-image. When he struggled to cope, he reasoned that he must be stupid. He withdrew from the world and buried himself in books. "I lived in a state of numbness with no thoughts as to what I could become," he says.
What Ladd became was a pioneer. He initiated deaf television programming in Britain in the 1980s; worked as the first deaf presenter of BBC television's See Hear!; created the world's first sign language pop video and devised the first masters course in deaf culture. He signed songs at Bob Dylan and Grateful Dead concerts in the US, learning the words by heart and being cued when each line started.
"It was wonderful the number of hearing people that moved seats just so they could watch the signing," Ladd recalls. "I can't describe the feeling of respect and acceptance deaf people get at these concerts."
Ladd the activist has tirelessly rallied against "oralist" policies and attitudes that, he argues, prevent deaf children and their parents from learning or using sign language to communicate. His latest book, Understanding Deaf Culture - published today - presents a scholarly case for why deaf people are a linguistic minority, rather than a group of people needing to be "cured". Drawing on examples from philosophy, visual art and literature spanning the history of western civilisation, he argues that oralism is relatively recent and that sign language was once greatly respected - even revered - by deaf and hearing people.
"The reason for this is the worship of scientism, technological obsession, the corporatisation of medicine, the rise of colonisation and the labelling of the things of 'nature' as belonging to a bygone era of savages and primitivism," he says.
Hearing people have forgotten how a signing community can enrich the way a society communicates, Ladd argues. They view deaf people as a group in need of help. His mission, in short, is to resurrect the old vision of signing.
To those uninitiated in deaf activism, Ladd's ideas seem provocative. He argues that oralism is causing illiteracy and mental health problems and should be regarded as nothing less than child abuse. "This is a system that effectively prevents children from being able to develop their own basic thoughts," he says. He rails against the use of cochlear implants in deaf children, calling for a five-year moratorium on operations and detailed research into their physical, psychological and social effects.
Ladd, 51, is now director of graduate studies at the centre for deaf studies at the University of Bristol. His writings and activism have received international recognition. In 1992, he became the first and only non-American to hold the most prestigious chair in deaf academia, at Gallaudet University in Washington DC. It was his own scholastic journey - at 18 he read English literature at Reading University - that he considers to have saved him. "Luckily it was the 60s and my friends there, being hippies, saw difference as something positive and interesting," he says.
As a graduate, Ladd applied to become a teacher of deaf children. "But the very same people who told me I wasn't deaf now turned round and said: 'You can't be a teacher of the deaf because you're deaf'. That was an epiphany - an incredible shock to learn that I'd been lied to so profoundly," he says.
Instead, he became a social worker with deaf children and their families. Crucially, at 22, he learned British Sign Language (BSL). "That was my entry into the deaf community, my life's path, being home where I belong," he says. He also saw that his terrible school experiences were not unique: that other families were suffering. "If they failed to get their child to speak, they were told it was their own fault for not trying hard enough."
Wanting to devote all his energy to campaigning, Ladd left social work and, together with other deaf activists, set up the National Union of the Deaf in 1976. It succeeded in getting sign language on television and enabling deaf children to be educated in sign. Four years later, he became the national administrator of the British Deaf Association, which continued to fight to have BSL recognised. He then went into television and later set up a deaf film company.
But it was his desire to articulate to a wider audience the notion of "deaf culture" - that deaf people have collective beliefs and views - that drew Ladd back to academia 10 years ago. As he says: "All cultures need a clear, calm, rational intelligentsia - especially minority cultures - if they are going to present their message in ways that balance reason with emotion."
· Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhoood is published at £24.95 by Multilingual Matters (01275-876519).
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