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Jan 1, 1400
Martin Luther & John Calvin
Belief that people with disabilities were possessed by the devil. -
Virginia hospital
First hospital for people with mental disabilities built in Virginia. -
Wild Boy of Aveyron
Feral child who lived in the wild before being studied by Jean Marc Gaspard Itard. -
Massachusetts boarding school
Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth (experimental boarding school) -
Report of the Committee on the Supervision of Schools for Special Instruction
It is evident that the present system . . . imposes upon . . . teachers an undue share of labor and trouble. The very existence of such a class of schools, composed of children whose early education and moral instruction have been neglected, or who have not been favored by an ordinary share of intellectual endowments, naturally tends to abuses which no regulations . . . can prevent. -
Board of Supervisors for the Boston Schools
Here, in charge of a teacher who has not more than thirty-five pupils, they can receive the individualized attention they need. . . . Their mental and physical condition demands a consideration that they cannot receive in a Primary classroom, where they will aimlessly repeat work with little children, to whose companionship they are as ill-suited as they are to the Primary-School desks and chairs. -
Superintendent Edwin Seaver of Boston Schools
First, the true imbeciles, who ought not to be kept in public schools at all; second, feebleminded children who show the marks of an abnormal mental condition; and third, normal but very dull children who are nevertheless not beyond the reach of class-room instruction skillfully administered. -
Dr. Alfred Binet
Identified "slow" or "retarded" children through IQ test. -
James T. Byers: “Provision for the Feeble-Minded"
You know who these children are. You see them every day. They are a drag upon you, a drag upon the class, and a drag upon the school, day after day and year after year. -
J.E. Wallace Wallin
Disabled students represent an unassimilable accumulation of human clinkers, ballast driftwood, or derelicts which seriously retards the rate of progress of the entire class and which often constitutes a positive irritant to the teacher and other pupils. -
Franklin D. Roosevelt
32nd President of the United States has physical disability of polio. -
"Segregation gives any human being..."
Segregation gives any human being a skewed culture. The handicapped needs special understanding rather that special class. . . . Special education today is in the unenviable position of tempering evil winds to the most closely shorn victims of outmoded and inadequate educational provision for all children. -
"Child-centered and integration approaches..."
Child-centered and integration approaches to special education represent the good of wishful thinking. -
E. Deno
By providing the regular system with a respectable out for its failure to give every child equal opportunity to realize his potential, special educators may be perpetuating systems that ought to be challenged to change. -
"I feel so strongly about it..."
I feel so strongly about it. It’s really to me a civil rights issue. It’s just the right thing to do to make sure all kids indiscriminately have the right to learn. -
Robert Bogdan
"Is mainstreaming a good idea?” is a bit like asking, “Is Tuesday a good idea?” Both are wrong questions. It’s not so much whether mainstreaming and Tuesdays are good ideas as what we make of them . . . . For some things, we need no evidence. -
IDEA & ADA
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act & Americans with Disabilities Act -
"For the sake of an abstraction..."
For the sake of an abstraction known as the “mainstream,” deaf children are denied the solid and tangible fellowship, culture, language, and heritage of the deaf community. -
Christopher Kliewer & Linda Mary Fitzgerald
A huge segment of America’s children construed as intellectually disabled continue to face harsh and delimiting educational segregation. . . . Children are told, “you are a broken version of what we wish you to be, and we will attempt to fix you to whatever degree possible in basement workshops out of the way of the general household.”
