Probably the largest and most pervasive issue in special education, in addition to my own personal journey in education, is special education’s relationship to general education. Cm to inches history has shown that this has never been a simple clear-cut relationship between the two. There’s been a lot of giving and taking or maybe I will say pulling and pushing as it pertains to educational policy, and the educational practices and services of education and special education by the human educators who deliver those services on both sides of the aisle, like me.
Throughout the last 20+ years, I have now been on both sides of education. I have seen and felt what it had been like to be a regular mainstream educator coping with special education policy, special education students, and their specialized teachers. I’ve also been on the special education side trying to get regular education teachers to work more effectively with my special education students by modifying their instruction and materials and having a tad bit more patience and empathy.
Furthermore, I have now been a conventional regular education teacher who taught regular education inclusion classes trying to figure out how to best work with some new special education teacher within my class and his or her special education students as well. And, on the other hand, I have now been a particular education inclusion teacher intruding on the territory of some regular education teachers with my special education students and the modifications I thought these teachers should implement. I can tell you first-hand that none with this give-and-take between special education and regular education has been easy. Nor do I see this pushing and pulling becoming easy anytime soon.
So, what is special education? And what makes it so special and yet so complex and controversial sometimes? Well, special education, as its name suggests, is really a specialized branch of education. It claims its lineage to such people as Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard (1775-1838), the physician who “tamed” the “wild boy of Aveyron,” and Anne Sullivan Macy (1866-1936), the teacher who “worked miracles” with Helen Keller.
Special educators teach students who’ve physical, cognitive, language, learning, sensory, and/or emotional abilities that deviate from those of the overall population. Special educators provide instruction specifically tailored to meet individualized needs. These teachers basically make education more available and accessible to students who otherwise would have limited usage of education as a result of whatever disability they’re struggling with.
It’s not just the teachers who may play a role in the history of special education in this country. Physicians and clergy, including Itard- mentioned previously, Edouard O. Seguin (1812-1880), Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-1876), and Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1787-1851) wanted to ameliorate the neglectful, often abusive treatment of an individual with disabilities. Sadly, education in this country was, more frequently than not, very neglectful and abusive when coping with students which can be different somehow.
There is even rich literature in our nation that describes the procedure provided to individuals with disabilities in the 1800s and early 1900s. Sadly, in these stories, in addition to in real life, the segment of our population with disabilities was often confined in jails and almshouses without decent food, clothing, personal hygiene, and exercise.
For a typical example of this different treatment inside our literature, one needs to look no further than Tiny Tim in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). In addition, often people who have disabilities were often portrayed as villains, such as in the book Captain Hook in J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” in 1911.
The prevailing view of the authors of now period was that one should submit to misfortunes, both as a questionnaire of obedience to God’s will, and because these seeming misfortunes are ultimately meant for one’s own good. Progress for our people who have disabilities was hard ahead at this time within this manner of thinking permeating our society, literature, and thinking.
So, what was society to do about these people of misfortune? Well, during much of the nineteenth century, and early in the twentieth, professionals believed individuals with disabilities were best treated in residential facilities in rural environments. An out-of-sight mind kind of thing, in the event that you will…
However, by the end of the nineteenth century, the size of these institutions had increased so dramatically that the target of rehabilitation for people with disabilities just wasn’t working. Cm to inches institutions became instruments for permanent segregation.