Open Letter to the Editors of the New York Times

By now, most of you are probably aware of the OpEd piece that appeared this past week in the New York Times, which reiterated the same-old-same-old, tired arguments against all methods of typing/spelling for communication.  What strikes me every time I read these sorts of things is the complete lack of rational thought they reflect.  Below is a letter I wrote in response, which I sent to the editors of the Times, but which won't of course be printed. 

One more point I could have added is this:  because of several (maybe 4 or 5) instances of false reporting which occurred about 40 years ago, our opponents claim typing to communicate is "dangerous."  Following that logic: 

1.  How many instances of false claims were there per capita in the speaking population over the same period of time?  No one ever lets us know those statistics. (False reporting of abuse is, in fact, just as likely in those who speak, because unfortunately, people lie to promote their own ends.  One of our students lives in a group home where a speaker called OPWDD once or twice a week reporting false abuses because she felt like it.)

2.  Dangerous?  Really?  Is it less dangerous for our nonspeakers to have no method of communication?  I venture to say that our children who have been abused (listen to just one example: Anthony Piccolino's story which was aired on the podcast, Amplifying Nonspeaking Voices, which is now also on his blog) would disagree with that assessment.  There are safeguards in place to verify allegations of abuse.  But there are no safeguards in place to protect those who cannot speak to report abuse. 

So back to my letter: 

Dear Sir or Madam:
I am a New York State licensed special educator and a mother of a 32 year old nonspeaker who types to communicate. As both a professional who works in the field, and as a parent, I found Dr. Amy Lutz' recent OpEd extraordinarily logically faulted. 

I understand healthy skepticism. I had my own grave doubts about typing for communication. I had unsuccessfully tried for 25 years to teach my own son the alphabet - or so I thought. To say I was skeptical when I started this process is an understatement: it's more accurate to say that I quite literally could not imagine a reality in which my son had language and was not profoundly cognitively impaired. What drove me to give it a shot is that it certainly could not hurt to try - if nothing else, we would be practicing letter recognition. There are no words to describe the shock when my own son showed me that I was 100% wrong: every notion I had about who he is, who nonspeakers are, was polar opposite to the reality.

I opened the Mouth to Hand Learning Center here in Westchester, NY, where I have now taught hundreds of nonspeakers to spell/type for communication. In my now 30 years in autism, it is the only teaching method that actually produces results - not just in terms of communication. So many of the "behaviors" (aggression, self-injury, destruction of property, etc.) that lead people to dismiss our children as cognitively impaired, vanish. 

There are several questions I think those who unilaterally dismiss these methods need to consider: 

1. Is it possible that a profoundly cognitively impaired individual, who does not have language, can read cues that are so subtle that no one can actually see (including Dr. Lutz) so that they can write 2000-word essays in front of proctors, as my son did to pass his high school equivalency exam?  Bear in mind that there are 33 characters on an ordinary letterboard and 80-100 keys on a keyboard. This means that every time a student hits a letter correctly on a letterboard, she had a 1 in 33 chance of doing so.  Calculate then the odds of typing 10,000 letters correctly...with cues so subtle that no one has actually ever been able to establish what those cues are.  

2. Is it possible that every professor, at institutions ranging from Rollins College to Cal Berkeley to UCLA to Columbia University to Harvard, etc. from which nonspeakers have graduated are all so unbelievably stupid and gullible that they were bamboozled by their nonspeaking students?  Apparently, only Amy Lutz is intelligent enough to KNOW that this is all a con job.

3. Are the thousands of parents who are of normal to superior intellect, many with advanced degrees from illustrious institutions, all delusional? We are talking mass psychosis on a global scale at this point.

4.  Why are the studies that support the veracity of spelling dismissed? It's not that she included them in her piece. And more than that: all science starts with an observation and that leads to the formation of a hypothesis.  Let us then look at Amy Lutz' hypothesis:  thousands and thousands of nonspeakers around the world, all of whom are profoundly cognitively impaired with no language, are managing to spell/type coherent English utilizing a system of prompts that are impossible to actually see, but which must be there because these individuals are cognitively impaired and have no language.  

Then let's consider an alternative hypothesis to explain the facts: thousands and thousands of nonspeakers around the world are spelling/typing in coherent English because they are not, in fact, cognitively impaired and have language, and are instead, severely motor challenged (which aligns with the literature on autism, which acknowledges that almost 90% of those with autism have a motor impairment) which inhibits their ability to communicate.  

The fact is that what we know about what we now call "autism" is a minute fraction of what we need to know. To summarily dismiss the experience of thousands and thousands of people, many of whom are professionals in the field, is not science.  In fact, it is not actually rational.
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Sincerely,
Judy Chinitz