Special Education as a serious approach to dealing with students with certain limitations is actually a relatively new field.
In the past, pre-1970s to be exact, there were three basic types of special needs, and each had places where these people would be sent.
The visually impaired (Blind) were sent to places like Perkins institute for the Blind, those who had hearing impairments (Deaf) were sent to schools for the deaf, and those with a severe mental handicap (Mental Retardation as it was called) were sent to institutions where they were treated like oddities and simply kept occupied and alive.
Those who could not get put away in the big residential settings went to public school and were considered “Special Class” usually hidden deep in the bowels of the building out of eyesight of everyone else on campus.
Laws were enacted to give Special Needs Kids as much of an equitable education as their status would allow, and as the field and laws evolved with new studies, it was found there were more limits to regular education than eyesight, hearing, and IQ. There were other types of “disabilities” that are not as obvious but just as limiting.
Regardless how a child might be classified according to their presented need, all Special Needs children experience some degree of anxiety, frustration, and emotional overlay just dealing with their limitation in a world of expectations, but this is multiplied among those children whose limit was not as obvious and so went unaddressed. There is a possibility of emotionally approaching a situation through frustration and this was a major problem when those in charge of school districts, uninformed by age or lack of willing ness to learn, gathered the obvious Special Needs kids and sorted them out and grouped them in locations where no one had to deal with them.
I was there in the early years of state and national laws being passed, and some school administrators had a difficult time accepting the various gradations within any single group and a real hard time accepting that there were more forms of Special needs than the historically recognized three-Blind, Deaf, and “retarded”.
What they did not understand they often lumped together according to their limited or non-existent experience and ignored the teachers who were informed, trained, but unfortunately ignored.
Autistic kids were usually placed in some classrooms on the mistaken belief they were “Mentally Retarded” and the placement made things worse for these kids.
Kids whose emotional problems, whether an innate problems or ones created by environment, were considered kids with discipline problems and punishing them was preferable to a special placement where the problems could be addressed.
For the longest time after a school district had to start a class for kids with Emotional Disturbance and I was hired, I was held responsible for the district’s not being allowed to expel these kids for bad behavior like they could do in the old days, and whenever I attempted to bring my class to an assembly for Special Needs kids, I had to often argue for admittance for the “bad kids” who should not even be in school.
More than once when teaching students with Emotional Difficulties, improvements to the program or proposed approaches based on student needs were often turned down because time, energy, and money should go to the good Special Ed kids and not the criminal element.
A program based on the Sheltered Workshop model that would have taught the ED students ways toward self-control and self-discipline, math, banking and finance as important skills, money and time management, and the skills needed to get and hold a job had an uphill battle for acceptance because the school should not be rewarding criminals with financial opportunities. When the program was finally allowed, the student who worked the hardest, was the most organized, and who consistently met the requirement of all pre-lunch class work must be successfully completed before spending an hour after lunch to do the piece work for a local founding company who paid a decent piece rate wage, and astounded the other students with the amount of money he made was the Autistic kid who was placed in my class because Autism was so far beyond administration’s understanding that they just plugged him into a room that was not filled with the Blind, Deaf, or Mentally Challenged.
The wages of the other students rose when they began to model their piece work and schoolwork effort to his.
As those set in their ways and either could not ,or would not learn beyond that with which they were comfortable began to retire or die, more informed people entered school district leadership and eventually correctness was reached.
I had been there in the beginning in Massachusetts, taught during the middle years in Los Angeles, and ended my Special Education Teacher career in Oklahoma City when things had advanced far beyond the early days and there is little reluctance to accept new categories of educational needs.
It did take time, decades, to morph from glorified babysitters keeping the Special Needs kids occupied in the basement room by the boiler and understanding the layers of the field and willingly seek ways to educate all students as equitably as was possible.
As things evolved in schools, so they did in society and much of what was obstructed in the past because it was not the way it had been, the various categories of Special Education, are just part of a school’s landscape and not remarkable or controversial anymore.
Accusing the less obvious Special Needs kids, like the ones with dyslexia who were considered lazy or stupid, the kids with Emotional Difficulties being treated as “bad kids”, or the Autistic kid placed among those labelled “Mentally Retarded”, of playing the system was a common claim by the uninformed, and writing them off not only did not help the child but also exacerbated the presenting problem and without possible help these kids lived limited lives they could have risen above.
Beyond the acceptable trinity of Blind, Deaf, and “mentally retarded’, over the years 13 disability categories have been established which in reality has always been there but went unknown- Specific learning disability (SLD), Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), Emotional disturbance, Speech or language impairment, Visual impairment, including blindness, Deafness, Hearing impairment, Deaf-blindness, Orthopedic impairment, Intellectual disability, Traumatic brain injury, and those with Multiple disabilities.
Before the 1970s most of these needs went unaddressed, and anyone who attended school from that point on would have noticed an increase in Special Ed classrooms and most taxpaying adults whose towns are building more up to date schools will have noticed that there are classrooms dedicated to specific disabilities and the boiler room is now only for the boiler.
For a while, from the 1970s to more recent times, those in charge were more comfortable having all the required paperwork filled in properly with less care and attention going to educating the students.
Intelligent people would be happy, and seem to be, with this progress and growth and its effect on the lives of those labelled Special Needs.
And now, here we are decades past the beginning of Special Ed and accepting new information and while those who slowed the progress in that area are gone, the attitude and attendant actions based mainly on the refusal to broaden information and accept there are many things we do not know about now or even knew existed in the past is back.
Although Gay people have been around in abundance, they had to hide from those who oppressed them, and when we started becoming visible you would have thought that we were spontaneously generating in huge numbers when the suddenly appearing crowd had been there all the time hiding in the shadows, ala Film Noire.
Mainstream society had to get used to these non-heterosexuals who they had, heretofore, been able to be keep out of sight because we were standing up for ourselves and our rightful place as citizens of the United States.
The initial euphoria brought about as Gays and Lesbians became more acceptable and reluctantly part of the bigger society, was somewhat tempered by the realization that just as earlier generations had done with Special Needs kids, the extent of acceptance only went to recognizing Gay men and Lesbian women, but beyond that, just as had been with Blind , deaf, and mentally handicapped, there was nothing further.
Heterosexuals are men and women, so it was easy to accept that non-heterosexuals had them too. A mirror image of themselves.
Once the veil of unacceptability was removed from gender study, it was found that, just as beyond the easy trinity of Blind, Deaf, and “Mentally Retarded”, there was more to special needs than the obvious, it was appearing there was a lot more to gender than male and female Gay or Straight.
To be clear, this is not to say that there is a similarity between Special Needs and Gender Variance, but to point out that the same attitude that had been detrimental to the students in the past until reality was accepted is the same attitude upon which the refusal to accept gender variance is based- the fear or refusal of people to accept new information beyond the familiar and act according to it.
Gay men and Lesbian women is easy to accept, but it does not mean that is all there is, and this is important when dealing with students still in their formative years before adulthood and it does not require 100% understanding by 100% of the people.
How many people who, not knowing the details about a category, and decide to a mistreat someone based on that are still be acceptable to the rest of us? How acceptable would it be if someone did not like Deaf people and acted on that at every opportunity?
So, with gender. None of us has to be a gender expert to see why personal feelings toward new information is not the criteria for its reality. I don’t have to understand every nuance of everything for it to be accepted or rejected by me. There are somethings I will never fully grasp and I should not base my actions and justify them on the basis of my not understanding something but feeling free to act on my professed lack of knowledge.
I watch the far right going ballistic about new gender information and attempt to pass legislation to prevent reality from existing.
You can ban Homosexuality, but it will not end Homosexuality.
And you can pass laws that deprive a certain group of students of a full education putting them under bushel baskets because you fear the unknown but knowable.
Since the closet door has been open and gender studies have progressed, the simple non-heterosexual being Gay and Lesbian paradigm has been found to be just one of humanities variants.
There have been 68 gender variants delineated so far, and everyone does not have to understand fully every one of them to render them real nor should being uninformed by chance or choice be acceptable reasons for depriving non-heterosexual students anything that a school has to offer.
68 is a big number and no one is expected to be fully versed on all 68, but the expectation is that where one might fall short in the understanding of all categories one should not use that as an excuse for mistreatment and abuse.
During the years with my autistic student, with his disability not being understood by the vast majority, as odd as some of his behavior might have seemed, it was not an excuse to treat him as a lesser even if the powers that be took no steps to understand Autism.
Some are easy to understand while others are more complicated but their reality is not dependent on universal understanding.
The learning of information is not an acknowledgement of embarrassing ignorance, but a realization that there is something to learn
If her father had not been a stubborn man yet willing to learn and apply something new, Helen Keller and all that followed would not have happened as she would have been let to wander around aimlessly in a silent and dark world caning chairs and selling pencils until such time as her time was up.
The world learned that a disability was not all controlling and dealing with one makes all involved better, the individual and the society to which they contribute. As soon as society learned this, the better it became.
As soon as school administrators moved away from the past and learned about kids with disabilities and the various forms they take, the better it was for all. What they clung to had to be abandoned first.
The same is happening now with old people making decisions about young people and new information as if unwilling or unable to move on which is amazingly anti-education.
People in charge of passing on knowledge in both cases refused the knowledge to be passed on and acted on that choice.
The people in charge of schools, as they had done in the past with Special Needs kids, are repeating this mistake with all non-heterosexual students.
A lack of knowledge, especially when facts are readily available, should not determine another’s future when making polices that affect every kid who enters a school building.
Years from now as happened with Special Ed kids, their parents, and the teachers, when the keepers of the past move on and schools act on facts not politics, people will look back on the foolishness and ask what it had all been about.
Special Ed was also once a political football.
See how acceptable teaching these kids according to their needs has become.
