A Class by Themselves? The Origins of Special Education in Toronto and Beyond by Jason Ellis (review)

In this valuable contribution to the scholarship on special education, Jason Ellis uses the case of Toronto to offer the first historical synthesis of Canadian schooling for children with physical, intellectual, and emotional disabilities during the first half of the twentieth century. Among the many strengths of Ellis’s study is its inclusion of children’s own voices wherever possible, as well as the voices of parents or guardians. Such perspectives are difficult to find in the historical record, so Ellis deserves high praise for making them such a central part of his analysis. Indeed, his painstaking archival work has enabled him to revise several longstanding historiographical assumptions about the evolution of education for children with disabilities, not just in Canada but across North America.

Ellis divides his book into six tightly organized chapters, each of which advances a key finding. The first, on the role of eugenics in early programs for the disabled, argues that school reformers in Toronto saw many benefits in the creation of “auxiliary” educational programs for students considered mentally “backward,” even as they saw little use in programs for mentally “defective” students with more severe disabilities. Their goal in the 1910s was to isolate these students from regular classes to prevent the disruption of non-disabled children and yet also to compensate for cognitive difficulties. Ellis’s second chapter, on the rise of IQ testing during the 1920s, shows how tests originally attuned to psychometric nuances were quickly hijacked by Stanford professor Lewis Terman and his followers to promote more simplistic assessments of (allegedly innate and intractable) mental capacity. The result was a narrowing of diagnostic methods and, in turn, a widespread belief that IQ scores could help teachers decide whether a child with a lower IQ belonged in school at all. In this and other chapters, Ellis offers lively portraits of the major characters in his story: not just Terman but also Leonard Ayers, Peter Sandiford, Eric Kent Clarke, and Helen MacMurchy, among others.

Chapter 3 considers the consequences of the IQ craze for the creation of new programs for students with cognitive difficulties—for example, “junior vocational schools” (not to be confused with existing technical and commercial schools). These programs were usually cast as progressive aids to meet children’s diverse needs, with curricular differentiation frequently correlated with gender, ethnicity, and social class/parents’ occupations. Here, Ellis’s exploration of Jewish immigrant girls’ supposed affinity for vocational schooling— despite its questionable benefits in Toronto’s labor market—is particularly well done. While students’ movement from auxiliary classes to vocational schools was not always straightforward, one effect of IQ-dependent placements was that children with a wide array of presumed disabilities were now lumped into one group.

The fourth chapter therefore broadens the scope of the analysis to look at students whose disabilities were not mental but physical and the ways in which these students—more often presumed to be “educable”—sometimes welcomed classroom integration and sometimes preferred separation (with parents variously aligned with their children’s wishes). This chapter is especially compelling, not only because of its vivid use of sources, such as deaf student Julius Wiggins’s memoir No Sound, but also because of its sensitive treatment of the dilemmas of “mainstreaming” for student identity and agency. Readers from the field of disability studies will surely appreciate the subtle and sympathetic interpretations that Ellis brings to students’ “acceptance, avoidance, and ambivalence” toward special educational placements and services (142).

Chapter 5 shows how early assumptions about the relation between IQ and educability fell apart during the 1930s as cognitive scientists and reading specialists discovered that many students’ disabilities were limited to specific subjects. Ellis pushes back against historians who have stressed the “medicalization” of disability in this period and the idea that reformers sought to restrict students’ educational opportunities or social mobility. On the contrary...