The Silent Prison: How Parents and Teachers Hold Back Deaf Children

Literature is Freedom- The Cost When Deaf Children Are Denied It

We often say that literature teaches “critical thinking,” as if it were a skill to be measured, like a standardized test with the right answers already printed at the back. But the truth is literature does not so much teach us to think critically as it invites us into the practice of thinking, of living with questions that do not demand immediate answers.

Children, perhaps more than anyone, are ready for this invitation. They do not have years of experiences behind them, and this lack is a gift: it gives them the freedom to see differently. Where adults see a moral or a lesson, children often sense something else, an image, a phrase, a feeling. Even when they cannot explain it, it stays with them, shaping how they imagine and understand life. Their thoughts may appear abstract, but the impressions remain. Years later, long after the details are forgotten, a line of poetry or a book character still lives inside them, shaping how they imagine the world.

And yet, more and more, we give children books not to open their minds, but to deliver messages about kindness, about resilience, about diversity, about whatever idea adults most want them to hold. These ideas are often good, even necessary, but when literature is treated as a "delivery system" for targeted values, something essential is lost. Children are left with conclusions rather than questions, with answers instead of wonder. And as we know, critical thinking is less about finding the right answers than about cultivating the art of asking the right questions, questions that open the way to learning and growth.

The gift of literature is not certainty, but space. Space to reflect, to misinterpret, to circle back later with new eyes. A child who reads a story is not only decoding words, but they are also discovering themselves. They test emotions they have not yet lived through. It allows them to feel joy, grief, courage, betrayal, all in the safety of words. In this way, they begin to form the foundations of judgment and empathy.

Stories invite children to see reflections of their own experiences, emotions, and questions. Through characters, plots, and imagined worlds, they explore who they are and who they might become. In this way, literature becomes both a mirror and a window: a mirror that shows them aspects of themselves, and a window that opens to new perspectives.

Critical thinking, if we must call it that, begins here, in sensing complexity. It begins in learning that a character can be both selfish and kind, that beauty can carry sorrow, that love can be fragile and strong at once. These are not targeted lessons but living contradictions. And children, far from being confused by them, accept them as truth.

Perhaps, as adults —parents, teachers, writers— we often feel we must explain stories to children, point out the lesson, or make sure they “understand” the message. But maybe our real job is to step back and let the story itself do its work overtime.

Stories don’t always teach right away. They plant feelings, images, and questions that grow slowly inside a child. Our job, is not to explain too much, but to trust that a child can hold a question for years, until life gives them the experience to answer it. To trust that the stories that puzzled or unsettled us as children were not wasted, they were seeds, and seeds take time to grow.

This absence of freedom through literature becomes even louder in the lives of deaf children. Too often, they grow up without access to stories in a language that allows them to wander, to wonder, and to reflect. The persistent struggles with reading and writing are not a reflection of their ability, but of the limitations we have placed upon them, when parents and teachers offer language only as a tool of correction rather than liberation. Instead of opening doors, we build walls.

And so, deaf children who long to explore find themselves trapped, not because they cannot think critically or feel deeply, but because we have not given them the keys of language with which to thrive. In this way, we “prison” them, when all they need is the freedom of words to join the endless conversation that literature makes possible.

For deaf children, this “gift to reading/signing stories” is often interrupted before it even begins. In many schools for the deaf and mainstream as well, literature is almost absent from their education. The focus is placed on correcting skills rather than opening doors to imagination.

Deaf children often reach very low levels in English reading and writing. And this becomes a wall. It blocks their access to the very stories that could shape their thinking and spirit. In many ways, it is as if they are treated like “immigrants” in their own land: standing outside the language of literature, looking in.

And we, as their parents and teachers, carry the responsibility for this. We have not given them full access to the language in which those stories live. Without English, they cannot read the books, poems, and worlds that other children grow up inside. And when sign language is also left out as a bridge, the gap only grows wider.

Literature gives us room to breathe in a world crowded with instructions and noise. For deaf children, that room may be the most necessary gift of all. It is the place where they learn not what to think, but that their thinking matters, that their questions, their wonder, their silence, all have a place in the essential conversation of being human.

George Schinarakis

Teaching English As a Second Language Specialist