Cultivating blind independence

 Radical training for the blind, from Andrew Leland:

In 2020, I heard about a residential training school called the Colorado Center for the Blind, in Littleton. The C.C.B. is part of the National Federation of the Blind, and is staffed almost entirely by blind people. Students live there for several months, wearing eye-covering shades and learning to navigate the world without sight. The N.F.B. takes a radical approach to cultivating blind independence. Students use power saws in a woodshop, take white-water-rafting trips, and go skiing. To graduate, they have to produce professional documents and cook a meal for sixty people. The most notorious test is the “independent drop”: a student is driven in circles, and then dropped off at a mystery location in Denver, without a smartphone. (Sometimes, advanced students are left in the middle of a park, or the upper level of a parking garage.) Then the student has to find her way back to the Colorado Center, and she is allowed to ask one person one question along the way. A member of an R.P. [retinitis pigmentosa] support group told me, “People come back from those programs loaded for bear” — ready to hunt the big game of blindness. Katie Carmack, a social worker with R.P., told me, of her time there, “It was an epiphany.” That fall, I signed up.

Also:  The N.F.B. developed a method that came to be known as ‘structured discovery’: students learn to pay attention to their surroundings and use the information to orient themselves. Instructors were constantly asking Socratic questions, such as ‘What direction do you hear the traffic coming from?’ and ‘Can you feel the sun warming one side of your face?’ 

“[One participant] told me, of what he learned by spending a year at a center, ‘Confidence isn’t a deep enough word. It’s a faith in your ability to figure it out.’ He added, ‘Until you get profoundly lost, and know it’s within you to get unlost, you’re not trained—until you know it’s not an emergency but a magnificent puzzle