The History Of Special Education In The Twentith Century Essays

The History Of Special Education In The Twentith Century During the twentieth century, drastic changes were made to vastly improve the special education system to ensure that all students, regardless of their ability, were given equal rights according to the Constitution of the United States. During early colonial America, schooling was not mandatory and it was primarily given to the wealthy Anglo-Saxon children (Carlson, p230). Children were mainly taught in the home or in a single room schoolhouse. Therefore, children of limited mental capability were not likely to be schooled. Also, in a non-graded schoolhouse, children of differing abilities did not pose problems. With the beginning of mandatory education in 1852 and the influx of large numbers of immigrants with their children (Reddy, p5), America was faced for the first time with educating a heterogeneous group of students. These children had diverse social and cultural backgrounds, as well as something the educators of the previous, homogenous schools had not been forced to deal with. Many of these children showed signs of various learning, developmental, physical, and emotional/behavioral problems. During the 1920s, separate schools were established for the blind, deaf, and more severely retarded (Reddy, p5). However, students that were considered mildly disabled were educated in regular schools, just thought to be slow learners. Soon educators started to develop separate classes for disabled students. The reasoning for taking them out of the normal classroom (exclusion) has not changed in the last eighty years. People today, who are still in favor of exclusion, have the same justification for their belief. It was thought that students with special needs required separate classrooms, where they would receive individualized attention and instruction. In these special classrooms, a specially trained teacher would provide the instruction. As ideal as this might sound, it is hardly what did occur. The optimism of the educators to successfully teach the disabled students faded during the 1930s and the 1940s. Special education classes were held under horrible conditions. The rooms were insufficient, with limited resources, the teachers were poorly trained and the curriculum was inadequate. Schools also often classified students as having disabilities when they did not. Additionally, students were often labeled with one type disability when they had another. This practice (misclassification) (Turnbull et al p16) was a common discrimination in American schools. One might wonder why the conditions were so deplorable. Why were the teachers so terribly unqualified? It appears that the common perception of the disabled students was like that of Quasimodo, in Victor Hugos The Hunchback of Notre Dame. They were misunderstood, and considered to be monstrous--something to be hidden away, shunned and rejected by normal people. The publics attitude with disabled children was one of fear, as if the disability was somehow contagious. They were looked upon as crazy people. This general outlook set the standard for educating students with special needs. They were classified as inferior, so why should the school system bother to work with the retards? The mind-set was that these students were untrainable (Koch, p907) so they were not of worthy satisfactory conditions and competent teachers. In the course of the 1950s, parents started to become vocal about the outrageous conditions of the special education classes. Then, greatly encouraged by the Civil Rights movement, advocates for students with disabilities began to sue state and local officials. Their main argument was that exclusion and misclassification violated the students rights to an equal educational opportunity under the United States Constitution. In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court decided that schools are not allowed to segregate their students by race. In view of that, the advocates argued, schools may also not segregate students by their ability. After all, students are students, regardless of their race or ability. The advocates for equal right in education, proved to be successful in pleading their case. On October 7th, 1971, a federal court ordered Pennsylvania to provide a free public education to all retarded children (PARV v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania). The next year (August, 1972), a federal judge ordered Washington, D.C. to offer educational facilities to all handicapped and emotionally disturbed children (Mills v. Washington, D.C.). These legislations served three main purposes. The first was to provide a free and appropriate education to all students