Special education for the people with special needs

Romania's hearing-impaired persons

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Roxana Vasile, 11.05.2022, 14:00

30,000 hearing-impaired people live in Romania, or
thereabouts. They have a fully-fledged right to integrate themselves in the educational
life with dignity, as well as in the professional or the social life. However,
they are low-profile, more often than not, for the simple reason that they do
not make noise. Nor can they voice their needs or complaints, either.

A lecturer with the University of Bucharest’s Faculty
of Journalism and Communication Sciences, Dr Florica Iuhas is one of those
people who have adamantly provided a staunch support for the hearing-impaired people.
Here is Dr Florica Iuhas herself, explaining why, for instance, a mere 1% of the
hearing-impaired people pass the baccalaureate exam for the Romanian Language and
literature exam subject.

Dr Florica Iuhas:

One of the big problems is that the
education system has not been tailored to suit their needs, since they think
and dream in the sign language, yet they have no choice other than take their
baccalaureate exam in the Romanian language. A hearing-impaired
person does not have prepositions in their vocabulary, nor conjunctions, they
will never be able to understand the difference between the present tense and
the past perfect, for example, because they have a visual culture, their own
culture. But at ministerial level, officials cannot
understand that, for the time being, at least. A hearing-impaired
person will never be able to have a full command of the
grammatical standards, because, for a hearing-impaired person, the syntax and the word
order in a complex sentence are very different from the word order in Romanian. So,
in effect, the sign language in Romanian will have to come first, for the
baccalaureate exam. Rote learning works perfectly well for the hearing-impaired people,
they can manage for Geography, for History, they can pass the baccalaureate exam
for the theoretical disciplines quite all right, they’re doing fine in
Mathematics, some of them are even successful IT specialists, but when it comes
to Romanian language and literature, they have serious problems, as their mind
and language are not structured according to the grammar of the Romanian
language we, the people with no hearing problems, can speak .

In other words, the present education law does not make
a clear-cut distinction between the people who can hear and the
hearing-impaired people. Both categories need to meet the same examination
standards. According to Dr Florica Iuhas, for the hearing-impaired people, the Romanian
language and literature exam should be replaced by an exam in the mother tongue,
which, in their case, is the language of the signs. As for the Romanian
language and literature exam, it should have a much lower level of difficulty.
By the same token, a self-sufficient department is needed, capable of training
teachers in the sign language, for the special-needs schools. Not just anybody
can have a command of that particular language, let alone teach it! That also
works for any other language!

There is another situation we need to take into
account: if the hearing-impaired people go to a front desk, they are unable to
communicate with the hospital employees, or, when in court, they cannot utter what
their complaint is or what exactly the wrongdoing is, that may have affected
them. To that effect, in the spring of 2020, in Romania, the so-called Saftoiu law
was promulgated, it bears the name of the former deputy Adriana Saftoiu, she
was the one who wrote it and promoted it among her colleagues in Parliament. Here
is Dr Florica Iuhas once again, this time summarizing what that particular law
stipulated.

Dr Florica Iuhas:

The Saftoiu law stipulates that all state
institutions in Romania must provide, for a hearing-impaired person, an
interpreter specializing in the gesture and mimicry language or in the Romanian
sign language, as in effect, that law certified the existence of that
particular language as the hearing-impaired persons’ mother tongue. If a Hungarian goes to
an institution and can communicate with a Hungarian-speaking person, for
example, in the counties of Covasna and Harghita, it is, however, impossible
for someone with a hearing impairment to communicate with the state authorities,
as there is no dedicated interpreter employed by the state institutions.

And, for such institutions, there was a two-year
period of grace, after the law had come into effect, for them to take all the required
measures so that as of April 2022, any deaf person entering a state institution
can have a dedicated interpreter. Notwithstanding, as we speak, there are still
very few interpreters of the sign language. Dr Florica Iuhas explains why that happens.

ʺBecause they are disheartened
by the institutions’ inability to pay them or to conclude collaboration contracts
with them, or hire them. So no step forward has been taken, actually, you can even
see that for yourselves on TV: the president who signed that law, whenever he
makes a speech in public, is not accompanied by an interpreter, which is not
okay. In any civilized country, joining the president, whenever they make a speech
to the nation, there is an interpreter, and that, because the president of a
country is everybody’s president. So what should a hearing-impaired person do? Do
the lip-reading as they watch the president speak? According to the law, not only
the television, but the institution must have an interpreter as well.

The TV stations are also faced with the same problem,
the limited number of dedicated interpreters. Dr Florica Iuhas is a sign
language interpreter herself. At the Journalism Faculty, she opted for teaching
a sign language course to those interested. However, it is the only such course
across the country.

Dr Florica Iuhas:

ʺ I have been asked, for instance,
by people working for the Mobile Emergency Service for Resuscitation and
Extrication, they asked me ‘could you also teach us, since we’re faced with
the situation of having to help families with those particular special needs
and we cannot communicate with them!’ And then the idea crossed my mind, to do
such a course with is open to everybody and not only to the University of
Bucharest students, because of the impending necessity for the people who can
hear to make themselves understood by the hearing-impaired persons, as you do
not know who you may interact with.

In Romania, that is a revolting iniquity, and that iniquity
has been lasting for a good number of years, given that for decades, 48
countries have officially recognized the sign language as the mother tongue of
their hearing-impaired citizens, the former deputy Adriana Saftoiu stated. A
language in continuous progress, the Romanian sign language has only 8 thousand
signs, as compared to the 38 thousand signs of the French sign language or to
the 50 thousand signs of the German sign language. Unfortunately, in Romania, there hasn’t even been such
a concern to develop this special language, to enrich it. There is no institute
or department where the Romanian sign language is studied.

Florica Iuhas:

ʺYet the hearing-impaired people are among
us and they also need to communicate, they need to develop that language. I hope
Romania will understand that it is important for such persons to be integrated
in the vast majority of Romanians, and that it should make an effort to develop
that language as well and to integrate the hearing-impaired persons.

It was
the conclusion drawn by Dr Florica Iuhas, a lecturer with the University of
Bucharest’s Faculty of Journalism and Communication Sciences, herself a voice
of Romania’s hearing-impaired people.

(EN)