Wiles is a teacher with over twenty years of experience in secondary education. In the following essay, he explores the characters' individual attitudes toward hearing, speech, and deafness in Children of a Lesser God.

"In the beginning, there was only silence," James Leeds says at the very beginning of Children of a Lesser God, "and out of that silence there could come only one thing: Speech. That's right. Human speech. So, speak!'" he could not have been more wrong.

In this opening speech, James appears to establish silence, and by extension deafness, as "bad," and speech and sound (and hearing) as "good." This is the distinction which most deaf people learn at a young age. Sarah learned this distinction from her mother and her teachers, but chose as an adult to reject this explanation and establish a definition of her own: "Deafness [is] a silence full...