We’ve looked at the first public school in the U.S., what education was like in the Massachusetts Bay Colony circa 1635, and what the Bray School tells us about education around the time of the Revolutionary War. We also looked at the Lancaster Monitorial system from the early decades of the 19th century before shifting to the Common School Movement and how it shaped U.S. Education. We talked about the one-room schoolhouse and some of the shifts it embodied. We looked at an 8th grade exam from 1895 that didn’t begin to approach the level of content expected of modern 8th graders and we’ve looked at the abuses of the Indian Boarding School system. We went back again to look at the parallel-but-very-unequal development of Black schools in the U.S. between the Civil War and Brown v. Board and we took a look at an 8th grade exam from 1912. We looked at the European roots of Kindergarten and how Kindergarten flourished in the U.S. We also discussed the high school movement. Today we are going to look one last aspect of public education that involves a large group of children who were excluded from public education until comparatively recently: children with special needs.
For most of the history of education, children with special needs were simply excluded from all public (and most private) schooling. They might learn a trade, but formal education activities like learning to read, write, add, and subtract were not available to them. Individuals with disabilities (and all children, really) were entirely the responsibility of their families. What a child did or didn’t learn was determined by the resources and temperament of the people charged with caring for them. Until fairly recently, the condition of most people (unless they were wealthy, White, and male) was to be uneducated, so those with special needs weren’t that different from everyone else, at least in terms of access to learning. The progress toward a general understanding that children with special needs could and should be educated was a long, slow journey, complicated by a lot of apathy and ignorance.
Because of the sheer variety of special needs, tracing that journey is complicated. Hang in there.
Deaf and Blind Education:
Deaf children signing Start Spangled Banner, 1918.
Deafness and the ability of deaf people to learn has the longest documented history. Plato wrote in the 5th century about a sign language used by deaf and non-speaking people and noted that although they couldn’t speak, they were intelligent. Sign language existed in monasteries across Europe starting in about the 10th century to enforce vows of silence. A Spanish monk in the 1500s used those signs as the basis for finger spelling to teach deaf people. But real, systematized education began in the 1760s, when the first school for the deaf opened in France* and French sign language was fully developed. That led directly (if not very quickly) to the opening of the American School for the Deaf in 1817, by Thomas Gallaudet, of Gallaudet University fame. Other schools followed. Although this meant there were now options for deaf children to be educated, only families with sufficient resources could avail themselves of them because all such schools were private and expensive.
Annie Sullivan finger spelling to Helen Keller. Image in the public domain.
Documented, formal education for blind students began in 1784 when the Institute for Blind Youths was opened in Paris. Its creator, Valentine Haüy, experimented with raised Roman letters to teach students how to read. A similar school opened in Liverpool, England in 1791. Frenchman Louis Braille’s invention of a raised-dot alphabet system (1824) made it easier and more efficient to teach blind students to read and write. Braille’s technology crossed the Atlantic fairly quickly and the Perkins School for the Blind opened in Massachusetts in 1829. It educated both blind and deaf students and — famously — deaf-blind students. Annie Sullivan was a sight-impaired student there and went on to serve as a private tutor for Helen Keller, who also attended Perkins. In 1880, when Helen lost her sight and hearing at age 2, the prevailing opinion was that a deaf-blind child could not be educated because of the severity of their disabilities. Sullivan proved that to be false, but Helen Keller’s intelligence was still an object of wonder for the duration of her life. Both blind and deaf schools drew many of their teachers from their pool of former students, who were skilled in sign or Braille, or both.
However, education for the blind and deaf-blind was still entirely private and expensive. Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House on the Prairie fame wrote about her sister Mary, who went blind at age 14 as a result of scarlet fever. In 1881, Mary began attending the Iowa College for the Blind. Her family was not wealthy and had to make significant financial sacrifices to send her there. Laura herself mended shirts 12 hours a day to help pay Mary’s tuition. The college provided Mary with a rigorous academic education and taught her a skill that helped supplement the family income: fly net tying. Students also learned knitting and piano tuning.
Intellectually and Physically Disabled Education
Boys making shoes at a school for the intellectually disabled, Pennsylvania, circa 1866. Public domain.
Intellectual disabilities is an extremely broad term that prior to about 1950 could have included brain damage, birth injuries like cerebral palsy,** Down Syndrome, autism, and developmental disabilities. Yet again, we have the French to thank for the movement to educate these children. In the 1840s, Edouard Seguin believed that “mental deficiency” could be cured by developing the muscles and senses. He provided physical training for students to improve their motor and sensory skills, basic academic training, and instruction in social and self-care skills. Two schools founded on his ideas opened in the U.S.: In 1848, the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth opened in Boston, and a similar school with an equally awful name opened in New York in 1851.*** These kinds of schools provided training for the children in practical skills like laundry and at least one offered instruction in musical instruments. It’s impossible to know at this remove what the students’ conditions were. At least some could read and write, as letters in the school archives attest. Virtually all were capable of performing relatively skilled labor like making shoes.****
Rosemary Kennedy as a child. Public domain.
But a child with an intellectual disability might be sent down a completely different — and highly damaging — path. Instead of a school, they could be sent to live in a state hospital for the mentally ill. The child would spend the duration of his or her life there, usually without education or any attempt to develop their skills. Supervision was often minimal and socialization was not a concern. Even access to sufficient food was not a given. Children were often housed with mentally ill adults, which left them vulnerable to abuse. Since these places were funded by the state and there was great stigma around having a child with an obvious disability, parents were often urged to choose this option to place such a child out of sight or to relieve the family of the burden of caring for the child. Even wealthy parents used this option. Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of President John F. Kennedy, was born in 1918 with intellectual and developmental delays^^, though she was able to participate in family activities and could read and write at about a 4th grade level. At age 23, a botched lobotomy meant to improve seizures left her with the intellectual capacity of a toddler, completely unable to speak, walk without help, or care for herself in any way. The stigma was so great her parents hid her disability for years; after the lobotomy, they distanced themselves from her completely. She lived the rest of her life in an institution, albeit a much nicer one than wards of the state experienced. JFK, however, did not forget about her; during his presidency he formed a White House panel to study the issues disabled people faced, which raised awareness and paved the way for later legislation. Even still, the practice of permanently institutionalizing disabled children didn’t begin to decline significantly until the 1970s.
Child recovering from polio, circa 1942. Library of Congress.
Sometimes physically disabled children also ended up in institutions, too, particularly if their disability was severe or embarrassing to the family. Children with dwarfism, cerebral palsy, congenitally missing limbs, paralysis, or other physical differences might be ‘put away’ to spare their families the stigma of having an ‘abnormal’ child. Children with milder physical issues that were not institutionalized still faced social and environmental barriers. School buildings –really, all buildings — had features like stairs, sinks, toilets, hallways, and doors that were impossible for some physically disabled students to use. Even children with very mild physical differences might have trouble navigating spaces that were not adapted to their needs. For an embarrassingly long time, both in schools and in the wider world, this was just not a concern. Even if they could attend school, children with physical differences were often segregated into special classrooms — sometimes classrooms for intellectually disabled children — so the rest of the students didn’t have to see or interact with them. Successive outbreaks of polio between 1916-1952 led to many children with permanent physical disabilities requiring crutches, leg braces, and wheelchairs but no real attempts to adapt learning environments to their needs.
Education for Students With Learning Disabilities
It’s hard to say for sure how children with learning disabilities were dealt with prior to the late 19th century. Education was largely rote memorization for most of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries so perhaps they were able to learn orally or perhaps they were just considered unfit for school. They were likely included under the general heading of ‘intellectual disability’. That began to change in 1877, when German doctor Adolph Kussmaul coined the term “word blindness” to describe otherwise intelligent people who couldn’t seem to learn to read. Around the turn of the century, “word blindness” was identified as a congenital condition, rather than a factor of effort or will. In 1935, American speech pathologist Lee Edward Travis identified multiple disabilities people might have that were “unexpected in reference to the individual’s intelligence.” Two he listed were word blindness, which we now call dyslexia, and ‘disorders of attention’, which we might call ADHD. He also noted a condition that sounds a lot like dysgraphia. In 1946, Dr. William Cruickshank, a professor of education and psychology at Syracuse University, developed the first program for students with learning disabilities, specifically addressing dyslexia. In 1963, Dr. Samuel A. Kirk coined the term ‘learning disabilities’ to describe “disorders in [the] development in language, speech, reading, and associated communication skills needed for social interaction.” He specifically differentiated learning disabilities from intellectual and developmental disabilities. As a result of his work, the first iteration of the Learning Disabilities Association of America was formed to advocate for these children. Today, children with a specific learning disability make up the majority of students with disabilities in public school (32%).
It took a long, long time to arrive at the idea that children with disabilities could be educated. By the late 1950s, there was a growing belief that such children should be educated, but how they should be educated was still very much at issue. There were still huge problems that needed to be addressed, like the highly discriminatory practices in the identification and exclusion of students with disabilities that prevented access to the same free education that non-disabled students had.
That’s what we’ll discuss in Part 2.
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*Nearly all the major educational shifts toward educating people with special needs were pioneered by the French.
**Children with cerebral palsy can be of normal intelligence but for many years, their problems with speech and uncontrolled movement led people to assume they were intellectually disabled.
***This is unquestionably offensive, I know. If you dive into the history of education for those with intellectual disabilities, prepare to be shocked at the dehumanizing terminology employed and the dismissive ways such people were regarded. Even people who genuinely wanted to improve the lives of disabled people used these terms freely. I will grant that some of the words were legitimate medical terms, though that makes them no less repugnant. It really was a different time.
****Students in these schools did lots of jobs like this; they were not paid for their labor.
^^Rosemary’s story is tragic and all of it — including the disabilities she had a birth — was because of incompetent doctors.