Disability as a Social Construct: Legislative Roots

5 Disability and Education: Physically Handicapped Children

CHAPTER 5 Disability and Education: Physically Handicapped Children He, whose Mind directs not wisely, will never take the right Way; and he, whose Body is crazy and feeble, will never be able to advance in it. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education.1 The thesis central to this book is that early public policies have created a disabling atmosphere that helps to translate physical defects into social defects. This chapter further illustrates that argument by showing that the truthfulness of Locke's prophecy frequently depends not on physical inabilities but on inferences promoted by American education. Historical analysis suggests that educational institutions create this effect by transmitting beliefs that individuals with physical impairments belong to a category called "the handicapped." This labeling process and its consequences in turn indicate that stereotypy and segregated education have become so interrelated that one set of practices both justifies and generates the other. To the extent that this sequence causes the dysfunction of physically impaired people, it is a major source of disability. The first section of the chapter focuses on public education from the colonial era to the first half of the nineteenth century. Records of the early years of this period do not indicate the existence of handicapped children in public school^.^ While such records might of course mean that the statistics of the time did not specify the physical condition of students, they may also indicate that some handicapped children failed to survive until of school age. The case of Philadelphia shows how this latter alternative may have operated. Education in that city was as accessible to children as any place in colonial America, with the exception of some Massachusetts towns. Philadelphia's ar~hives,~ however, offer no indica- Disability and Education 87 tion that handicapped children were among them. The count by the United States Census of 17904of 5,270 "free white males under 16 years" in. dicates that approximately 10,000 children lived in the city. The inability to prevent or combat infections suggests that many children with physical infirmities would not have survived for more than days or weeks. If the incidence rates of major physical abnormalities-congenital or acquired by disease or accident-were similar to those of today, few handicapped children existed. This medical likelihood, however, does not tell the whole story either. A third determinant is possible: America's prevailing view of education as an instrument for realizing a child's economic potential resulted in handicapped children having been excluded from school. A variation on this possible cause can be seen in Pennsylvania's Constitutional Convention of 1837. The debates of this convention suggest that defining education as an economic tool encouraged the general society to believe that physically impaired people are necessarily marked by the attributes of moral deficiency and civic incompetence. Another related cause of the failure to provide for educating handicapped children, may have been the view that the dependence of these children was an immutable physical fact. Although each of these beliefs has been alluded to earlier, this chapter will look at them further by showing their relationship to institutionalized segregation. Several portions of these same debates suggest that another aspect of disability derives from the political process of dealing with a minority group. This possibility also was introduced earlier when it was suggested that an address by Theodore Roosevelt had shown that majoritarian processes can impose political impotence on a statistically small segment of the population. However, the treatment of handicapped people as a political minority suggests another cause for their marginal status: attributions of inferiority are stimulated by a quiet, passive, acceptance of a subordinate social position. This process of "self-infliction" seems analytically distinct from the often-discussed process in which society's accepted views teach handicapped people to identify themselves as inferior. The second part of the chapter centers on the debates concerning education in the proceedings of Pennsylvania's Constitutional Convention of 1873. These debates permit the argument that delegating the education of handicapped children to private organizations both prompted their separation from ablebodied children, and advanced a view that these children did not need-or perhaps merit-publicly initiated education. It seems likely, therefore, that the later practice of endorsing and incorporating the educational schemes of private charities taught physically ab- 88 DISABILIn AND EDUCATION normal children to think of themselves in terms of "worth." Moreover, while government's institutionalization of the position of the beneficiary may well account for one component of "the handicapped...