I. King Jordan on NPR

An Exploration of Deaf Culture - click on the link for more.
NPR.org, February 2, 2005 · This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.
The millions of Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing form a unique community, a culture, they say, shaped by their shared experience and their shared language. ASL, American Sign Language, is currently the second most taught language on college campuses. A major Broadway play using deaf and hearing actors is touring the country. At the same time, deaf culture is both changed and challenged by technology. There are plenty of divisions and arguments within deaf culture, but the deaf and hard of hearing share another universal trait--the incomprehension of the hearing world around them that sees their condition as a disability, as a handicap. For those who live without sound, that absence is the starting point of an identity.
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However, what I generally disagree is Carol Padden's remark:

CAROL: Yeah. So the point was that as a major focus of this conference at Swarthmore College, there was tremendous amount of time and energy given to the
pursuit of oral education, which was continued to be, 35 years later, the same kind of feeding on the fears and ignorance of hearing parents that let me waste the first 10 years or so of my children's life by staying away from deaf people, away from sign language and away from deaf culture. And it wasn't until that turned around by my watching what they needed from their perspective and not from this so-called hearing professionals and medical people who really didn't know what they were doing. That changed and that's when their literacy levels shot up and skyrocketed, once they got their language and their culture, which I've come to believe is the birthright of every single deaf child in the world....

I wouldn't say literacy levels "shot up and skyrocketed" knowing that the general reading and writing skill levels among deaf/hh kids are still around the 4th grade level among 17 and 18 year olds as reported in the Gallaudet Research Institute website, no less.