SHCY Newsletter #8 (Summer 2006)

New Research Directions in History of Children with Disabilities

Mona Gleason, University of British Columbia

Below is a brief synopsis of my next research project that combines the history of children with the history of disability and education. If you are working in a similar area, please feel free to contact me, mona.gleason@ubc.ca. Comments, suggestions, and advice are most welcome.

Troubling “Normal”: Education and the “Disabled” Child in Canada, 1850-1970[1]

In 2000, the Canadian Council on Social Development conducted a survey of experts regarding the level of support for special education across the country. In a context of economic restructuring and cut-backs in provincial funding for education, an overwhelming majority of informants (82%) reported that special education service delivery, including that for disabled children, had been severely compromised. Despite provincial variations, the expert informants agreed that “their education systems were not meeting the needs of children with special needs.”[2]

In the judgment of many advocates, parents, and educators in Canada and internationally, educational equity continues to elude many disabled children and their families.[3] Crowded out by concerns regarding fiscal constraint, educational standards, and student achievement, meaningful public dialogue about the purpose and value of education in the lives of disabled children and their families is too often missing. Historical studies in the Canadian context perpetuate the same neglect. No comprehensive view of the evolution of attitudes towards the education of disabled children in the Canadian context exists. My research project entitled “Troubling ‘Normal’” is an attempt to begin to address this considerable gap. I hope to do so in two ways. In the first, this research investigates professional attitudes, specifically on the part of medical and educational experts, towards disabled children between approximately 1850 and 1970 in Canada. A second focus explores how disabled children and their families responded to professional opinions regarding their capabilities and limitations. The study queries professional reactions to a range of disabilities that had very different meaning (and response) depending on age of onset, duration, and whether they were perceived to be mental (illness or developmental “delays”) or physical (from cerebral palsy to polio, to broken limbs). This new research explores how and why professionals, regardless of the opinions of the disabled themselves on their own bodies, either collapsed differences into the single category of “disabled” or made arbitrary distinctions amongst disabilities. [4]

My time frame incorporates milestones of central importance to the history of disabled children in Canada. The first benchmark year, 1850 marks when schooling for youngsters in Canada West (later Ontario), one of the first provinces to join Confederation and commonly a leader in educational matters, became compulsory. This included an extended, albeit intermediate, period of institution and asylum building to house children with disabilities. Two World Wars, in turn, ushered in considerable medical, technical, and attitudinal change in approaches to disability. By the late 1960s ideas about the rights of disabled children to be educated with “the same opportunities and protection that the State accords it more fortunate citizens” found unprecedented advocates and signaled developments that preoccupy parents and experts today. The onset of that change, together with new technologies, such as amniotic testing, provide an appropriate moment to end an historical study of Canada’s evolution of thinking and practice with regard to the education of children judged disabled.[5] Three overarching questions drive the study: How did medical and educational professionals conceptualize disabled children and their “suitability” for learning, and how and why did this shift over time? What were the consequences of expert knowledge for disabled children and their families? What does this history teach us about the purpose and value of education for all children? If current iterations of a discourse of “hopelessness” regarding educational equity for disabled children are to be challenged, the lessons of the educational past must be excavated.[6]

ENDNOTES

[1] Italicizing the terms “normal” and “disabled” highlights not only the changing and contested terrain of both of these labels over time, but also invites readers to consider the ways in people with “disabilities” retain competencies in various aspects of their lives. While these terms will not be italized throughout, I intend them to be read as contested. Francophone Canadians, particularly in the province of Quebec, have a unique history including the evolution of public schooling and the treatment of disabled children that deserves a separate study. This project is therefore focused on the English Canadian experience.

[2] Angela Gibson Kierstead and Louise Hanvey, “Special Education in Canada,” Perception – Journal of the Canadian Council on Social Development 25, 2 (Fall 2001): 1-6.

[3] See for example the report by Charlie Naylor for the British Columbia Teachers Federation entitled “B.C. Teachers’ Views of Special Education Issues – Data from the Spring 2001 BCTF Worklife of Teachers Survey Series 2. Special Education,” BCTF Research Report, June 2002. British Columbia is Canada’s western most province and third most populated. Others include National Council on Disability, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Burden of Proof: On Parents or Schools? (Washington, 2005); Hyunsoo Kwon, “ Inclusion in South Korea: The Current Situation and Future Directions,” International Journal of Disability Development and Education 52, 1 (March, 2005): 59-68; AnneMaree Carroll, “Review Essay: Inclusive Practices in Australia,” International Journal of Disability, Development and Education 49, 4 (December, 2002): 421-24; Peter Mittler, “Educating Pupils with Intellectual Disabilities in England: Thirty Years On,” International Journal of Disability, Development and Education 49,2 (June, 2002): 145-60.

[4] See the essays in The New Disability History – American Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2001) edited by Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky. The editors summarize in their introduction that "(p)eople with disabilities themselves, as individuals and in organized associations, have, in all eras, struggled to control definitions of their social identity, to direct their social careers." (p. 2)

[5] Aldred H. Neufeldt, “Disability in Canada: An Historical Perspective,” in Henry Enns and Aldred H. Neufeldt, eds. In Pursuit of Equal Participation: Canada and Disability at Home and Abroad (Concorde: Captus Press, 2003), p. 41-44.

[6] The notion of “hopelessness” as a lingering and historically conditioned response to disability is discussed by Peter M. Ferguson in “Notes Towards A History of Hopelessness – Disability and the Places of Therapeutic Failure,” Disability, Culture, and Education 1, 1 (2002): 27-40.