By Michael Curran on 22nd January 2006.
Hi everyone, Over the last couple of months YBCV (Young blind Citizens Victoria) has been pretty quiet in terms of organising events etc. however over the last few weeks, some of the committee, and some other members have been meeting up to talk about blind youth issues, not as YBCV, but just as Victorian blind youth.
I personally have been getting more and more worried about why YBCV exists, and if it does exist, why I should be spending time on it. Is it fulfilling a need? Is it tackling things in the right way?
Some of the talks I have been organising have been to see firstly what YBCV means to people, do they think it is doing the right things, how has it changed over the years, is it helping Victorian blind youth.
I have got back some interesting answers so far. I would like it if anyone who I haven’t yet talked to (individually or in meetings) to try and think about the above questions, and drop me an email with their thoughts in the near future.
YBCV members could also do this publicly on the email list, perhaps we could also talk about it on other wider blind email lists, but please remember, this is not negatively blaming people etc, but a philosophical discussion on whether the branch as a whole is the right way to go.
What we have also been talking about, and this to some extent is the more important thing, is really what issues exist for blind youth, and how exactly can we fix/prevent these issues.
There are many different issues that blind youth face each day, but over the past few weeks, certain issues have been becoming more apparent to me and others. A general explanation of the issues is as follows:
Today more and more students, in hi school, and more disturbingly in Primary School, are being forced to use qwerty/speech as their main means of reading and writing rather than Braille because of the lack of knowledge of teachers and other people when they plan for what technologies a blind student would need to successfully go through their schooling. Laptops with speech are cheep, and there is a lot of information on how they work and how the student can work with them. However technologies such as Braille displays and even simple Braille transcriptions these days, are quite expensive and a lot of people would skip over these options for this reason. Braille has been proven to be extremely important to a student's development in reading, spelling, and even in things such as mathematics. A lot of us older youth may have gone through our schooling with ok Braille support, but these days, and in future generations to come, I fear it will be much different. Braille transcription will stay quite expensive, and technologies such as Braille Displays will be overlooked through lack of understanding. Blind student's literacy skills will go down hill further than they are now. How can you learn to spell when you only hear spoken word each day? How can you confidently read passages out to the rest of the class, or even read in presentations at your workplace with only a screen reader with speech?
This issue is important to all blind people, but more importantly to youth since image of other blind people is what moulds them as they grow. Many blindness organisations, through their websites, ads and other publications constantly create an image of blind people which is far from the truth, or at least, is talking about people way way below the average. I constantly read passages like: "Just imagine if you were blind. How could you do so many daily tasks? How could you count money, how could you use computers? Imagine what it would be like to eat as a young blind child ... Imagine the shock of putting hot soup in your mouth". And then pictures of a young blind child clapping their hands, and a sentence or two saying how you too can help this child achieve his/her dreams ... Or in some version, even just survive in this cruel and dangerous world. I'm sure I don't need to give more examples, we all experience the general public each day, and every time we meet a person who treats us like it is so good we are putting one foot in front of the other, it’s not just because of ignorance, but also perhaps because of image that blindness organisations are putting out there. It is understandable that this type of image certainly brings in more money, and with more money, they can offer us much better services. But really, you must ask, which is more important, better services, or better image in society that may in the end make society much better so perhaps we may not need as many of the services we depend upon anyway.
One hundred years ago, blind people were pretty much all taught in specific blind schools. Today many students are taught in the main stream system and only a few are still being educated in blind schools. However the difference is now that most of these blind schools are for not just blind or vision impaired students, but also for students with extra, or different, disabilities. This is probably because of lack of numbers, and possibly lack of funding, that students with all different types of disabilities have to be taught together. From my very little research that I have done, it seems that blind schools that cater for many disabilities are still taking in some students with blindness as their only disability. In general it is up to the parents whether they think their son or daughter should attend a blind school or a main stream school, but I still believe there would be a lot of confusion as to what is better. In a blind school your child would get constant education in a format that they can understand and comprehend. And main stream school, your child is taught the same curriculum as abled students, plus some extra curricular skills to do with their blindness (depending on funding). Main stream of course also has the advantage of the student interacting with abled students and this is thought to greatly improve their overall social skills. But at the end of the day it is up to the parents. Because a lot of blind schools take students with other serious disabilities, they always say that they "tailer the education to the needs of the individual student". This is all nice in principle, but quite a lot of the time a blind student can be miss-judged, or perhaps the blind school may not even follow the education departments national benchmarks for student literacy etc. I understand that some students have special needs, but if you got any student whether they had a disability or not and didn't judge them against an average education standard, and you didn't challenge them, I believe that most likely they would end up being much below the average level. I fear that this is happening to a lot of blind students who learn in blind schools, and this may be a reason for why a lot of blind people lack a lot of confidence and skills they really should have.
Most sighted children have brothers and sisters they can look up to, family members, even famous people. Blind children also have all these people, but most likely, they are not blind. Blind children do not have many blind role models and perhaps this could be easily fixed. For a blind person to grow up in this society, I believe it is important that they get to talk to, interact with, blind people older than themselves, people who have achieved what they want to achieve, people who are happy with their own lives. I remember taking classes with in a blind school, and a lot of what the teachers were saying made some sense, but in terms of occupational therapy, there were some things I totally disagreed with in terms of the logic. As a blind child I still had one advantage over the teachers ... I was blind. I think I would have liked more blind people older than me to show me how they did things, what is successful for them, and for someone who I could ask questions of, bounce ideas off of, rather than just questioning some sighted teacher's scientific education.
There are a few organisations made up of parents of blind children. This is definitely a good thing, and it certainly does help spread knowledge about how to care for your blind child, how to advocate for him or her. But to my knowledge, there isn't too much support for these organisations from actual blind people. As in, no blind people to give them constant support in showing them what their child could grow up to be, to explain to the parents how they liked to be taught, treated, cared for. What things worked for their parents.
Parents can advocate for their blind children, and to some extent, so can visiting teachers and other specialist services. But what if the problem is actually with the parent, or with the specialist service, or what if the problem is at a higher level, but the child still doesn't want their parents involved. Who can a blind child / teenager ask for help? Currently blind advocacy organisations such as BCA etc have no real in-built support for young blind youth. There are branches such as YBCV, and of course the BCA staff are more than happy to speak with kids. But are the staff really trained in dealing with younger people? Do they really have a knowledge of the issues to do with blind youth? Do kids want to ring up a big scary organisation like BCA and talk to the same person as the big old blind foaggies as they may see us as? This last issue leads in to one idea in how we may be able to start tackling some of these very important issues.
Organisations such as YBCV are very good in developing social networks, running social events, and small information sessions, but do they have the power to deal with the bigger issues? All the people in YBCV and other blind youth groups work completely on a voluntary capacity, and also most people are also in the middle of some course or another, or perhaps already working somewhere full time. What a few of us feel, is that perhaps there needs to be a full time youth officer, perhaps associated with BCA, perhaps not. But a youth officer that can coordinate projects to start working on these issues, but of course also to liaise with blind youth to solve their daily issues or to help them organise social events, other learning seminars, camps etc, and to just talk to blind youth and find out their needs and issues etc. also the youth officer could be the hub between all the blind youth groups that exist now or in the future. The youth officer could coordinate blind people who wish to be blind mentors / role models, they could coordinate blind speakers to speak at various places such as blindness organisations and other education institutes, they could coordinate blind people to help out with the parent groups ... Really just be a hub, and a pair of hands that wouldn't fade away because of starting a new course, or a new job etc. Or even because of politics. This is just one idea, and of course all the issues I have ranted on about above are really only issues that I and a few others have experienced, or seen in our lives so far. I think a lot more research needs to be done in to these issues. Perhaps they are not as bad as I think, but then perhaps they are. Research should be done, then we can find out once and for all if blind people are growing up to the capacity they really can be. Perhaps a youth officer can also help with organising this research.
Whether it’s the youth officer, or it’s some other idea, most likely this is all going to call for a lot of funding from somewhere. If people have ideas on even just where we may be able to get funding, we'd be very interested in hearing from you. Also people who are confident in writing funding submissions etc.
We would definitely like to hear from anyone with ideas, criticisms, suggestions, other issues, general brain storming. So we can really find out if these issues are the most important ones, and if not, what are. And of course find out better ways of solving them.
I know these are very very large issues, and a lot of people have already said to me that it might be easier if we just tackled the issues of older blind youth, such as employment and tertiary education, but I believe that that way of thinking is only fixing the problem, why just fix it when we have a chance to prevent it all together. If these problems are prevented, I have no doubt that employment will rapidly increase for blind people in future generations, and also blind people won't have as harder time in tertiary education.
Please email me with your thoughts, or even give me a call if you have the time
Just as I also said at the top, even with this topic of blind youth issues, I think it very healthy to publicly talk about all these issues, on email lists etc, even if it’s just to talk about where blind people are today, are people happy with how the blind image is perceived etc.
Thank you for reading this very long-winded email I believe we can make a change if we really want to.
I look forward in speaking with many of you. Mick