The Education of the Disabled

The Education of the Disabled

As I prepare another book for publication I discovered an article I wrote in my freshman (College) English Class it is a topic I remain passionate about all these years later:

A young boy stands assisted with a tilt table. A young girl with Down Syndrome sits struggling to learn to read simple words, a young girl prone to violent seizures, with the mentality of about an eighteen month old sits strapped into a special chair, for her own safety, because she has been known to bolt from the room and run in front of a school bus. Someone has to keep constant guard over her. The rest of the small class sits at their desks working on simple math problems. This was a scene in a Special Education for the severely handicap at the upper elementary level classroom in 1995, the school was not a special school but a public school, where these kids could mingle with peers without disabilities.

If we go back to the mid twentieth century we will see the drastic changes that have been made. We now have programs that allow both disabled children and non disabled children to attend the same schools. We no longer believe that disabled children need to be hidden away from society, like we once believed.

When I was in highschool I spent time in both the classrooms for the disabled and regular classrooms, and saw the work first…