-
4. Bad or Backward?: Gender and the Genesis of Special Education
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
C h a p t e r 4 Bad or Backward? Gender and the Genesis of Special Education When a Chicago Italian gang leader, the Cat, recalled his school experiences in the 1920s, he remarked disdainfully about his placement in a class for “subnormals .” Cat and the other kids had heard rumors that “the sub-normal room was where the guys was off their nuts,” but in his opinion “the ones in this room were just the ones that won’t listen to the teachers and get in a lot of trouble.” Cat told sociologist Clifford Shaw that there had been one or two such rooms in every school on the West Side, where boys from the neighborhood would congregate and plan their delinquent escapades.1 Subnormal, incorrigible, truant, backward, maladjusted: a sequence of labels justified the placement of troublemakers in separate classes in urban school districts during the early twentieth century. Even though only a small percentage of children were enrolled in special education, up to two-thirds of the special education population in urban schools was composed of boys—a figure that is similar to today’s statistic.2 The story of Cat, a boy who cycled through special education classes and the juvenile justice system, was not terribly unusual in the early twentieth century city. Historians of education cannot fail to notice the difficulty that unruly boys caused teachers or the preponderance of boys in special classes.3 Yet although this phenomenon is in plain sight, the gender implications of these stories are seldom directly addressed. Have historians taken their cue from past educators and reformers who seemed to take it as a given that there would always be a substantial group of boys who were slower learners, troublemakers, or apt to repel educators’ best efforts to teach them? Boys were put at risk not only by their gender, but by poverty, ethnicity, race, and immigration status.4 Even so, girls who suffered the same conditions were less apt to be singled out for placement in special classes or the criminal justice system. Charles Berry, head of special education in Michigan , speculated in 1926 that when a teacher was asked to identify the mentally retarded she “picks out the ones that are giving her the most trouble, and the 94 The Boy Problem two are not always synonymous,” leading to an overrepresentation of boys in the classes.5 Low-achieving girls, who were thought to be more pliant learners, could be more easily integrated into the classroom. Cat was exceptional in that he moved through his youthful indiscretions to become a full-fledged criminal, while most boys matured into a more settled existence, including marriage and full-time jobs, as they entered their late twenties . Yet Cat’s difficulty with school was shared by many of his peers and posed a challenge to urban school districts as they sought to expand their constituency. Cat’s story also resonates with those of contemporary boys who cycle through special education, suspensions, expulsions, and the justice system. Being diagnosed with a special education label during the 1920s did not confer many rights to boys, other than that of having access to an education: a right that many youth would willingly have given up. But insofar as child savers and special educators construed education as one of the rights of childhood, they saw the provision of special education to be of service, not only to teachers and children in the regular classroom, but to the children who inhabited special education classes. By labeling boys who were difficult or troubled as in need of special education, were early public school systems guaranteeing troubled boys rights to an education that boys without such a diagnosis lacked? Instead of being kicked out of school, boys were forced to stay in school: whether for good or for ill it is difficult to conclude. Instead of expelling children who were difficult, or letting overage, truant, or slower-learning children drop out, special education allowed the “regular school” to function more effectively for compliant students who were at grade level.6 The misbehavior of some of the boys who posed disciplinary problems, along with their ineptitude with academic subject material, placed them in an ambiguous category that straddled the boundaries between backward and delinquent. Were delinquents bad because they were backward in their school subjects and frustrated and humiliated by their poor performance? Were students of limited intelligence more prone to delinquency by virtue of their inability...