What Is It Like To Be A Bat Essay

The question of how acquisition of language takes place in children seems to me to be fundamental to the approach we take in education. Indeed, language is the medium through which we communicate with children, and the medium through which they begin to understand themselves and their culture, and begin to form their own identity. The Cox report (1989), recorded views of teachers on the importance of language in their profession, and the results show that this recognition of the importance of language is ubiquitous; statements such as the following show just how inextricably linked language is with not only a child’s development, but their wellbeing and sense of personal identity: "Language embodies social, cultural values and also carries
In the context of this question, we can ask if it makes any sense at all to approach the teaching of language to blind children in the same way as language teaching is generally approached. As Thomas Nagel argues in his lecture ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’ (1974), we can clearly understand that people who perceive the world through different primary senses can have “experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own”, but these experiences “may be denied to us by the limits of our nature.” This paradox seems particularly important in regard to literature, as so much of what is taught relies on imagery, metaphor and symbolism. With so much of what is taught about language relying on visual elements (descriptions of people, objects and places, similes and metaphor), it seems pressing to understand how blind children use and relate to these linguistic tools. What can it mean to a child blind from birth to say “O my Luve's like a red, red rose”, when they have no experience of the qualities of a rose, or even redness. Such questions are not frivolous, as it is the connection between objects and language that solidifies our sense of place in the