Who Benefits From Special Education?

Remediating (Fixing) Other People's Children

Ellen A. Brantlinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781135601591
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Who Benefits From Special Education?: Remediating (Fixing) Other People's Children addresses the negative consequences of labeling and separating education for students with "disabilities," the cultural biases inherent in the way that we view children's learning difficulties, the social construction of disability, the commercialization of special education, and related issues.

The theme that unifies the chapters is that tension exists between professional ideology and practice, and the wishes and expectations of the recipients of professional practice--children, adolescents, and adults with disabilities and their families. These voices have rarely taken center stage in formulating important decisions about the quality and characteristics of appropriate practice. The dominant view in the field of special education has been that disability is a problem in certain children, rather than an artifact that results from the general structure of schooling; it does not take into consideration the voices of people with disabilities, their families, or their teachers. Offering an alternative perspective, this book deconstructs mainstream special education ideologies and highlights the personal perspectives of students, families, and front-line professionals such as teachers and mental health personnel. It is particularly relevant for special education/disabilities studies graduate students and faculty and for readers in general education, curriculum studies, instruction theory, and critical theory.

Chapter 1

Place, Profession, and Program in the History of Special Education Curriculum

Scot Danforth
Steve Taff
Philip M. Ferguson

University of Missouri, St. Louis

One does not have to go that far back into the history of curriculum in special education before confronting an earlier, more fundamental topic. Curriculum comes into play only when teaching is attempted, and teaching is attempted only when learning is thought possible. Only then does the question of “What do I teach?” arise. So, before a curriculum or “course of study” becomes relevant, there must be a presumption that learning can occur. However, it is precisely this presumption that was late to emerge in the history of the education of children with disabilities. Even in its gradual emergence over the last two centuries or so, the presumption has been granted and withdrawn with waves of professional optimism soon followed by new proclamations of irremediability for an unteachable remnant. A largely custodial discourse would then replace the aggressive tone of experimental treatment and active instruction. Certainly each cycle would leave a smaller group consigned to failure than before, but the cycle of optimistic intervention to pessimistic neglect has remained remarkably durable. Even today, while the federal mantra is to have “No Child Left Behind,” and the legislative mandate is that all children can learn and are, therefore, entitled to a “free, appropriate public education,” the course of study for students with disabilities is often governed in practice by a system of presumptive labels that determine what they will be taught, by whom, and in what type of educational setting.

Throughout history, then, the questions asked about the education of children with disabilities have often had a kind of time lag quality about them, distorted echoes of questions already asked and answered for most children. Although the discussion of public support of private schools through vouchers continues among politicians and policy analysts, there has been a consensus for a century or more that school of some sort is the proper place for children to spend their days. Equally universal is the assumption that in school the children should receive instruction from professional educators. Finally, while debate rages over how standardized and measured it should be, most would agree that there is a broad program of study that schools should follow: a general curriculum that designates in broad strokes what we hope all of our children come to know, value, and use as educated citizens. However, for students with disabilities, these shared assumptions are precisely what seem most contentious. The assumptions become topics of heated debate and conflicting proposals. (a) Where should students with disabilities be taught? Are self-contained schools or classrooms preferred, or should we emphasize general education classrooms? (b) Who should teach these students? Are only those specialists trained to work with specific types of disabilities suitable for teaching such children? Or can elementary and secondary teachers take an active role in their instruction as well? (c) What should these students learn? Should educators focus on a set of functional survival skills and individually designed programs or should we assume that these students should also have access to the general curriculum that their nondisabled peers explore?

In this chapter, we explore how these three topical threads—referred to here as questions of place, professionalism, and program—have woven their way through the history of special education. We argue that these themes have played out over the last 200 years in the United States in a way that provides a helpful explanatory narrative for the evolution of our policies and practices for children with disabilities.

Our narrative looks at three key eras. First, we look at the influence of the French Enlightenment on American social activists in the middle of the 19th century. This was a time when the theme of place held sway as the dominant narrative thread. The optimism of a new generation of doctors and educators emphasized what might be called a curative geography, where the placement of children with disabilities was determinative of outcome. There was a strong belief that new specialized asylums and residential schools would reveal a capacity to learn by children who were deaf, blind, or idiotic. This separation, which began as curative, however, became quickly custodial—the optimism of intervention was replaced by the burden of control and maintenance.

Next we move to the Progressive era and the dominance of the theme of a bureaucratic professionalism and rampant specialization of expertise.¹ In public schools, we see the rise and administrative recognition of special education classrooms with specially trained teachers to staff them. As with the earlier period (probably all periods), the reforms of the Progressive era, in how we responded to children with disabilities, reflected the larger culture, with a faith in social engineering as the common answer to both fears of social decay and demands on social conscience.

Finally, we look briefly at the period running roughly from 1975 to 2000, and we review how the final thematic strand of our triad gained prominence. If the middle of the 19th century was led by the creation of new places for children with disabilities, and the Progressive era was strongly characterized by a proliferation and empowerment of professionalization, then the last quarter of the 20th century, and specifically the changes associated with the implementation of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), can be approached as an era when programmatic elaboration came to encompass both place and profession in the context of a mandated and expanded system of public special education. It is this consolidation of place and profession within the purview of the special education system that represents the most fundamental development of the most recent decades.

Our framework is, of course, an idealization of a much messier and complex process. Moreover, our point is not that each era we examine is totally defined by only one of the three themes we identified. We want to emphasize throughout our discussion of all three eras that our three themes—where we should teach children with disabilities, who should teach them, and what they should be taught—may be seen as interweaving threads in the history of special education. Each thread is always present, but more visible in some patterns of official response than in others.

THE THEME OF WHERE IN SPECIAL EDUCATION: CURATIVE GEOGRAPHY AND THE INSTITUTIONAL STATE, 1800–1850

The historical development of special education in the United States began in Europe. Prior to the mid-19th century, there was no distinctly American tradition regarding the public care and education of persons with disabilities. Professionals in the United States initially appropriated the majority of their approaches from European sources, especially the traditions and methodologies of the French. In particular, it was the dramatic developments of the French Enlightenment and its applications to practice in some of the earliest experiments in special education that have relevance for subsequent U.S. efforts. Indeed in many ways, it is the Enlightenment culture of revolutionary France that first delineated the three themes that, we argue, have dominated the discourse of special education for the last 200 years. It was the French who first viewed their disabled children and adults and thought it worthwhile to ask the central questions of treatment and education: Who does what and where should they do it?

Place, Profession, and Program: The Emergence of Intertwining Concepts

By 1800, France had a well-established tradition of public custodial care for their mentally ill and disabled populations dating back to 1656 and the establishment of the Bicetre and Salpetriere hospitals (Shorter, 1997). Previously cared for mainly by the family in the home, children with disabilities began in increasing numbers to move into institutions and specialized schools for the deaf or blind. Although many of these institutions’ schools remained purely custodial in nature, a shift also occurred in how these places were portrayed by the specialists who ran them. Knowing where to treat or teach was the essential evidence of who was qualified to deliver that treatment or instruction. The new facilities were now put forth as convenient laboratories for the great Enlightenment experiment—“improving” people via education (primarily of the senses) and “moral treatment.” An intertwining process of mutual reinforcement developed. The new institutions and schools needed a new generation of trained professionals for appropriate staffing while the burgeoning cadre of specialists needed an equally specialized setting to demonstrate their expertise. Both simultaneously demanded an ongoing elaboration of exactly what would be done by the professionals once established in their specialized settings.

However, in this early era of special education and curative treatment, the trinity of intervention was unified in the obsession with therapeutic placement. Cure could be found through careful arrangement of a specialized environment: a curative geography, as it were. It was this where of intervention that initially subsumed the who and the what in the rhetoric of Enlightenment reforms. Here we see the genesis of a theme that appears consistently throughout the history of special education: the notion that “place”—the location of “treatment” and education—emerges as the first key to remediation and the surest evidence of professional expertise: Control the setting and you can control the mind.

The Delineation of Place

In the first half of the 19th century, the place or location of early special education—as practiced primarily by the emerging profession of psychiatry—was in most cases a specialized institution for “the insane” or “idiots” (as these two groups were called) or perhaps a specialized school for the blind or deaf. It was in the institution—both geographically and functionally—that the notion of a “therapeutic community” developed. In this self-contained and often out-of-the-way setting, professionals and patients acted out the theater of Enlightenment ideology. It is important to remember that, with few exceptions, the customary view held that existence in this place—the segregated therapeutic community—was a tremendously vital contributor toward the “perfectibility” of the residents (Shorter, 1997). Certainly protopsychiatrists (usually physicians with a special interest in mental illness) practiced in small numbers outside the auspices of the institutions, but it was the creation of therapeutic places that truly carried the Enlightenment worldview from abstract intellectualism to concrete practice. Thus, we see the early origins of a “curative geography,” where place single-handedly acts as both a social reform and an individual remedy. It is ironic, however, that the classic therapeutic setting was not so much a community as it was an isolated, artificial, and professionalized configuration— one that came simultaneously to espouse both Enlightenment ideals of perfectibility and equality and their antithesis of deviance and exclusion.²

Before 1800, professional specialization within the medical field was practically nonexistent (Shorter, 1997). Prior to the intellectual and social shift forced by the Enlightenment, mental illness and disability were considered predestined—an innate distortion of nature. As such people with disabilities were “incurable,” at least in the sense of being largely beyond the help of human intervention (miracles were always possible). This limited any possible impetus for the development of medical professional specialties (Winzer, 1993). However, in the early 1800s, things began to change. The uniquely human attribute of rationality gained acceptance as a force that could literally “change the world” for the better. The consequences of human action on the world became, as it were, more consequential. There was a socially responsible prerogative to meet the scientific and social standards set by the Enlightenment worldview. To meet the needs of a newly egalitarian society imbued with the responsibility of uplifting the weak and disadvantaged, specialized expertise was needed as well as ways to disseminate that expertise on a widespread basis. In France (soon to be followed in the United States), the first major medical specialty to rise to the challenge of the Enlightenment project was psychiatry (Rothman, 1971; Shorter, 1997).

Professional Developments: The Emerging Claims of Specialized Knowledge

Psychiatrists in early 19th-century France concentrated on “perfecting” those with disabilities via sense education and moral treatment, as introduced most notably by Pinel. Moral treatment as a form of therapy was eminently compatible with the concept of therapeutic community because it both appeared benevolent and sanctioned institutional isolation (Dowbiggin, 1991). Enlightenment thinking provided the “therapeutic optimism” (Goodson & Dowbiggin, 1997) that drove early psychiatrists. However, the professionalization of psychiatry was even further advanced by the struggle to allege a somatic or biomedical cause for insanity and “idiocy.” To claim legitimacy in the medical field, a bodily pathology was essential. If madness had no physical basis, then matters of the insane fell into the province of competing groups such as academic psychologists and the Catholic Church. As physicians, psychiatrists had been “granted important privileges in the diagnosis and treatment of madness, even though they had displayed no conclusive competence in either capacity” (Dowbiggin, 1991, p. 8). Dowbiggin (1991) referred to the professionalization of French psychiatrists as a continual struggle against marginalization due, in large part, to a glaring gap between bestowed social power (as physicians) and their own lack of technical effectiveness in curing the insane.

By the 1850s, therapeutic optimism began to diminish, gradually replaced by a renewed pessimism regarding the curability of madness. In the context of this pessimism, psychiatry experienced a shift in purpose toward a “collectively oriented moral treatment that stressed surveillance and conformity to moral norms rather than activist therapy” (Goodson & Dowbiggin, 1997, p. 88). This shift in professional function necessitated that psychiatrists become less attentive to residents’ mental health and more concerned with protecting others from the mad through classification, segregation, and other forms of control. Next to this shift, there occurred a subsequent recognition by the psychiatric profession that their legitimacy as physicians was in imminent danger. To combat this legitimacy crisis, psychiatry increasingly catered to those with political and social power, in an attempt to ensure that resources for sustaining the institutional system did not go the way of therapeutic optimism (Goodson & Dowbiggin, 1997).

Programmatic Developments: Curriculum, Methodologies, and Purpose

As we undertake a basic sketch of programmatic strategies utilized in the first half of the 19th century, one must remember that “place” played a defining role in the development of such strategies and provided an environmental context conducive to the type of controlled experimentation that would not have been possible in individual homes. We now turn our attention to perhaps three of the most prominent and influential early professionals who worked with the mentally ill and/or disabled: Jean-Marc Itard and Edouard Seguin in France, and Samuel Gridley Howe in America. In this section, we briefly discuss the curricular approaches and pedagogical methods that each one utilized. We also touch on the extent to which they believed persons with disabilities could be educated, and the purposes of such an education. To begin to answer these questions, we must again journey back to France, where Itard (1801/1962) accepted the challenge of educating the "Wild Boy" of Aveyron (see also Lane, 1976; Shattuck, 1980).

Itard. The Wild Boy of Aveyron embodied all the attributes necessary for the quintessential Enlightenment experiment, supposedly putting Locke’s (1975) theory of tabula rasa to the test. For the French empiricists and the burgeoning scientific community, the capture of an apparently feral child (whom Itard later named Victor) granted...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftile
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Place, Profession, and Program in the History of Special Education Curriculum
• 2 Failing to Make Progress? The Aporias of Responsible Inclusion
• 3 The Big Glossies: How Textbooks Structure (Special) Education
• 4 How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Race, Disability, and Exclusion in Educational Policy
• 5 Multicultural Education: Not Needed in the Suburbs!
• 6 The Impact of Reform on Students With Disabilities
• 7 Marcus and Harriet: Living on the Edge in School and Society
• 8 No Place Like Home
• 9 Winners Need Losers: The Basis for School Competition and Hierarchies
• 10 Conclusion: Whose Labels? Whose Norms? Whose Needs? Whose Benefits?
• Author Index
• Subject Index