Possibly the most significant and most pervasive a significant special education, as well as my own journey in education, is special education's romantic relationship to general education. Background has shown that this is never {a fairly easy} clear cut relationship between the two. There has recently been a lot of providing and taking or maybe I should say drawing and pushing in regards to educational policy, and the educational practices and services of education and special education by the human being educators who deliver those services on both attributes of the isle, like me.
Over the previous 20+ years I have been on both similarly sides of education. I actually have seen and experienced what it was just like to be a regular main stream mentor dealing with special education policy, special education students and their specialized educators. I have also recently been on the special education side looking to get regular education teachers to work more effectively with my special education students through changing their instruction and materials and having a bit more persistence and empathy.
Furthermore, I actually have been a popular regular education teacher who taught regular education introduction classes trying to determine out how to best work with some new special education teacher in my class great or her special education students as well. And, in contrast, I have recently been a special education addition teacher intruding on the territory of some regular education teachers with my special education students and the modifications I believed these teachers should implement. I actually can tell you first hand that none of this give and take between special education and regular education has been easy. Nor do I see this pushing and tugging becoming easy anytime soon.
Therefore, 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 a specific subset of education. That claims its lineage to such people as Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard (1775-1838), the doctor who "tamed" the "wild boy of Everyone, inches and Anne Sullivan Macy (1866-1936), the teacher who "worked miracles" with Sue Keller.
Special educators educate students that have physical, intellectual, language, learning, sensory, and emotional skills that deviate from the ones from the general population. Unique educators provide instruction specifically focused on meet personalized needs. These teachers fundamentally make education more available and accessible to students who otherwise would have limited access to education due to whatever impairment they are struggling with.
It's not merely the educators though who play a role in the background of special education in the us. Physicians and local clergy, including Itard- mentioned above, Edouard O. Seguin (1812-1880), Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-1876), and Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1787-1851), desired to ameliorate the neglectful, often abusive treatment of individuals with problems. Sadly, education in America was, more often than not, very neglectful and harassing when dealing with students that are very different somehow.
Presently there is even a wealthy literature in our country that describes the treatment provided to many of these with disabilities in the 1800s and early on 1900s. Sadly, in these stories, along with the real world, the segment of the population with disabilities were often confined in prisons and almshouses without good food, clothing, personal cleanliness, and exercise.
For a good example of this different treatment within our literature one needs to seek out Tiny Tim in Charles Dickens' A Holiday Carol (1843). In addition, many times individuals with afflictions were often portrayed as villains, such as with the book Captain Hook in J. M. Barrie's "Peter Pan" in 1911.
The prevailing view of the authors of this period of time was that one should post to misfortunes, both as a type of obedience to The lord's will, and because these seeming misfortunes are in the end intended for one's own good. Progress for our people with disabilities was hard to come by at this time with this way of considering permeating our society, literary works and thinking.
Therefore, what was society to do about these people of misfortune? Well, during much of the nineteenth {hundred years|100 years}, and early in the twentieth, professionals believed individuals with disabilities were best treated in residential facilities in rural environments. A great out of sight away of mind kind of thing, if you will...
However, right at the end of the nineteenth century the size of these institutions experienced increased so considerably that the goal of rehab {for folks} with disabilities just wasn't working. Institutions became instruments for long lasting segregation.
I have some experience with these segregation plans of education. Some of it is good and some of it is not so good. You see, I have recently been a self-contained teacher on and off throughout the years in multiple conditions in self-contained classrooms in public areas high schools, middle colleges and elementary schools. I possess also taught in multiple special education behavioral self-contained schools that totally segregated these troubled students with disabilities in managing their behavior from their popular peers by putting them in completely different structures that were perhaps even {in several} towns from their homes, friends and friends.
Through the years many special education professionals became critics of these institutions mentioned above that separated and divided our children with afflictions from their peers. Irvine Howe was one of the first to endorse taking our youth away of these huge organizations also to place out residents into families. Unfortunately this practice became a logistical and pragmatic problem and it was a little while until a long time before it could become a viable alternate to institutionalization for our students with disabilities.
Right now on the positive part, you may be enthusiastic about knowing however that in 1817 the first special education institution in the us, the American Asylum for the Education and Instruction of the Hard of hearing and Dumb (now called the American School for the Deaf), was founded in Hartford, Connecticut, by Gallaudet. That school is still there today and is one of the top schools in the area for students with auditory problems. A true success history!
Nevertheless as you can already imagine, the lasting success of the American Institution for the Deaf was the exception and never the rule during this time period. And to add to this, in the late nineteenth century, public Darwinism replaced environmentalism as the primary causal description for those individuals with disabilities who deviated from those of the basic population.
Sadly, Darwinism opened up the door to the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. This kind of then led to even further segregation and even sterilization of people with disabilities such as mental retardation. Sounds like something Hitler was doing in Germany also being done here in our own country, to the own people, by our very own people. Kind of scary and inhumane, wouldn't you concur?
Today, this kind of treatment is obviously undesirable. And in the first part of the 20th {Hundred years|100 years} it was also undesirable for some of the adults, particularly the parents of these disabled children. Therefore, concerned and angry parents formed advocacy groups to help bring the educational needs of children with disabilities into the general public eye. The general public had to see firsthand how incorrect this eugenics and sanitation movement was for our students that were different if it was ever before going to be halted.
To be Continue............