Booklet 5: Getting an Education and Work

This booklet focuses on the deafblind person’s narratives about getting an education and a job. Precisely these two issues are so important in the Western world, that access to them is decisive when it comes to feeling as part of society.
Through the informants’ specific narratives about their experiences with the education system and the job market, it is possible to see how social resources in practice create options for or hinder participation. Nearly all informants have received some form of education, although it may not have been the one they desired, and all except for one have been on the job market, ranging from a few years to many years – except the younger informants who are still studying.

Younger informants find that getting an education is a lonely and demanding affair. Problems arise at several levels, but there is a basic lack of guidance regarding to what extent their functional reduction and the existing compensatory options make their wishes a realistic possibility. They lack help to inform the training centre of the need for relevant aids, which are known and ready at the beginning of the course, and they also lack coordination and monitoring, that can offer them support throughout. In general, the informant group has achieved a level of education as high as or higher than their siblings.

A thought-provoking fact is that 6 out of 10 deaf persons have a job, compared to only 3 out of 10 people with a hearing impairment. The informants that were on the job market had very different experiences. Regardless of whether they have a normal job or a job where there is awareness about disabilities, some experience that they are paid attention and taken into account, while others feel that they have to adapt as well as they can or are otherwise not welcome.

The main reason for leaving a job is in most cases that the informant him or herself does not consider that he or she is able to live up to his or her own demands and ideals as the vision reduction worsens. In some cases, we have observed that trying to cope with the job is so demanding that there is almost no energy left over to handle the housework or social activities. This makes the situation even worse when it comes to having to give up the job.

Participation is about individual possibilities in everyday life, but it also involves the possibilities of contributing to the disability agenda. The Nordic deafblind organisations are very important for the deafblind person’s possibilities of being participative, both as the spokesperson for a group of citizens, that otherwise could easily be overseen, as in the role of the organiser of social meetings for people with hearing and vision reduction and their relatives.

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