Without special arrangements, students who are deaf constitute an oppressed minority similar to a variety of language minority groups for whom standard education is inaccessible. That I begin this chapter with such an explicit statement of ideology, informed by the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, is testimony to the progress made by educational and political leaders who are deaf. I intend to do three things in this chapter. First, I will give a brief description of Freire's work and its relationship to contemporary thought about minority education. Second, I will attempt to show the connections between minority education and the education of students who are deaf. Finally, I will relate some of the concepts from Freire's philosophy to the specific process of the mathematics education of students who are deaf.

Freire has said that education is never neutral. Whether or not we acknowledge it, we always work from a philosophical perspective about the world when we teach. It would be a mistake to ignore the ideology inherent in Freire's work. His best-known book is entitled Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), and he does not use the concept of oppression metaphorically. He is referring to specific instances of power and domination of one group of people over another. As difficult as it may be for many of us to imagine, Freire dreams of a world in which no group of people would be under the control of another. He sees education as holding the possibility for obliterating oppression.