No charges were brought against me for doing that. The orderlies that dragged me away heard what I said. Even though that doctor did torture me a little more after that, he was removed as my doctor. I hope he didn’t treat any other people with his insanity. Ya that story still sickens me too. Why must there only be one answer to a problem? Why must the answer always be to reject or harm. That is more insane than anything else. Lets make fish hooks..

I agree that teaching ethical behaviour and the
value of inclusion should be done not only in achools, but also at home and in the wider community. But there may be cases where teaching at school is necessary, such as for children of racist parents.

I also agree that such teaching should not be reduced to trite sayings which children memorize to please their teachers, nor as an artificial abstraction.

Religious bodies, such as churches or synagogues, have traditionally played an important part in teaching ethical behaviour and inclusive values. That is when they are true to their highest ideals.

I work as a volunteer in a small library which is mostly used by teachers. It stocks books on what in the UK is called citizenship, as a subject taught in schools. Basically this is about teaching children who are different in various ways – such as in terms of ethnicity, disability, sexuality – to have positive views and behaviour towards one another.

On the one hand, some people would condemn the teaching of citizenship or similar subjects in schools as “indoctrinating our school children with politically correct opinions”. On the other hand, there is the danger that it becomes another school subject which pupils learn to get good grades and pass exams. But if it is done imaginatively and sensitively it can change attitudes and behaviour.

And it was largely during those times when we were seeing ethical behavior modeled for us in ways beyond the purely artificial. It’s much harder to show a kid ethical behavior when you’re in a category of people (teachers) which is separated in so many ways categorically from students, and students are looking to each other as examples of how to behave, rather than looking to the teacher.

If people are going to learn this stuff it’s really going to have to happen more than just in the classroom, and when it does happen in the classroom it can’t be some kind of artificial abstraction.

About teaching “non-exlusion” in schools, this article – http://www.teachingexpertise.com/articles/including-disabled-children-1063 is about Playback. This is a Scottish organisation which provides education resources which are “designed to challenge existing mind-sets by encouraging personal reflections through examining experiences and understandings of disability.”

A report and evaluation of their resources and activities found that “participating pupils were able to clarify more fully the meaning of disability, reject the ‘not normal’ tag and recognise that everyone is unique”

“children began to see disability in a very real way and that their attitudes shifted from sympathy to empathy”.

Pupils had greater awareness of social barriers and began to see disability in terms of social issues, and to “recognise the negative impact of being excluded, physically and psychologically, and the feelings associated with exclusion.”

If I were the recipient of the “reach out to the weird person because it is the right thing to do” policy in that college I would find it boring as hell and nauseating. But I expect the people who formulated that policy thought they were putting into practice the best features of inclusive education. It is because such people are well-meaning that it is difficult for them to change that policy, and even more so if it has become highly regarded by the education trend-setters.

Of course, this is undercut by the general ineffectiveness (often incompetence) of most therapists — for somebody like VATech’s Chu, talk therapy by itself won’t cut the mustard, and a lot of therapists (especially the incompetent ones) can’t tell when the situation is out of their league.

Yeah– we’ve seen something sort of like that too, unfortunately. What we saw was people who were told to “get counseling,” and when they did, they ended up just talking to the therapist for an hour about whatever *they* wanted to talk about or deemed to be a problem, which in most cases was not the fact that they were abusing others. The fact that they were abusing others was rarely even touched on at all. But somehow they were still seen as “working on the problem” just by virtue of the fact that they could sit in a therapist’s office for a hour a week, while they continued to be abusive.

And most of the time, at least online, when we see someone saying “this person needs help” or “this person needs a good psychiatrist,” it definitely is a “polite” (except not really) way of expressing social disapproval of someone’s behavior and beliefs. And, yeah, unqualified faith in the system.

On how psychiatry makes ethical problems into medical ones– we have a really long rant in us, somewhere, that needs to be organized and fleshed out, about how the concept of mental illness is used to obscure the existence of actual moral wrongs. I mean, how many times do you see, in the wake of news articles about autistic children murdered by parents or guardians, comments like “that person clearly must have been mentally ill,” or “I hope they get the help they need”? (Well, along with all the crap about “if you don’t understand why they did it you have clearly never raised a child like this,” but a lot of people seem to try to absolve the killer of responsibility by saying “they must have been mentally ill” too in some places, we’ve noticed.)

It comes out in stories about school shootings, too– we had to stop reading all the editorials and news articles about the Virginia Tech shootings because we were getting so angry over all the talk about how this clearly demonstrated the need for mandatory mental health screenings in schools and how if this person had been caught and identified and “treated” he would never have killed anyone and etc, etc, that we couldn’t even see straight. It’s like a cheap, cut-rate solution to the problem of evil. People do bad things because they have chemical imbalances in their brains. Therefore, if we just get everyone on the right drugs to fix their brains, there will be no more evil in the world. (Having grown up with family members who *could* have been seen as “doing bad things because they were mentally ill,” we think it’s a *lot* more complex than that.)

…oh, also, we had an email we wanted to send you, but it can wait. It’s nothing urgent, and we’re just worried that if we send it now it might get lost in a flood of spam or something.

Responding to someone or another awhile back:

Regarding the thing about teaching “non-exclusion” in school, is that school is far from the only place kids are. A society that actually cared about this to a high degree would be teaching about it — by example — all the time, not in trite little sayings to memorize (as if that teaches kids anything) but by real and genuine actions.

We had a program when I was in kindergarten called the “green circle”, where we all got pins to wear and a guy came in and kept saying stuff like “if you’re inside the green circle it’s good, but if you put someone outside the green circle it’s bad”. I think that this made very little sense even to the children without receptive language impairments, and is really a silly way to go about teaching anything like that.

Responsibility isn’t generally something you learn in school — you can, but it’s mostly taught by people around you, by consequences if you don’t behave responsibly, and by how other people are acting, and maybe what they talk to you about. Teachers should do their part but they shouldn’t and can’t be doing the whole job and they shouldn’t do it in all those useless and/or patronnizing ways.

In college I was once the recipient of the “reach out to the weird person because it’s the right thing to do” crap and I found it boring as hell and patronizing. That’s not real inclusion, that’s just lip service sort of stuff. The people who did that meant well but they truly weren’t that interested in me and I wasn’t that interested in them.

A lot of the stuff you talk about sounds similar to what’s discussed in Hell-Bent on Helping: Benevolence, Friendship , and the Politics of Help, which you might want to read. The stuff they describe in there is pseudo-inclusive stuff and so is sitting people down and telling them to smile at whoever sits next to them.

But choosing that you want to go out with this or that friend isn’t the same thing as systematically bullying and shutting someone out for all the wrong reasons. And I really don’t see how it’s relevant to the experiences people are talking about here — which aren’t about just someone not liking someone. (And even if you don’t like someone, there are right and wrong ways to go about dealing with that.)

As far as generalizations about non-autistic people go, I don’t agree with them either, and normally am around to say something about it, but I haven’t been as active online lately as I could be. (Which is why I still have thousands of unread emails.) So thanks for saying something about it.

At the same time, while I’m not into the autistic supremacist or NT-bashing crap and tend to call people on it when I notice it, I’d like to invite you to read my post titled What happens when you ignore power relationships.

Because a lot of your comment (not just that part) seems to not take those into account, but I can’t fully explain how, so I thought I’d show that example. (I don’t think what you’re saying is anywhere near as bad as that example, but it’s something to think about.) Also, from another site, “But I’m not like that!” deals with some similar stuff in a different way.

It goes to show that one can place very little faith in the education system in place for our children.

Thanks,
Angela

Well put. I was going to point out something similar. Having a psychological or emotional problem and doing morally wrong things are not the same. To equate them is insulting to people who really do “need help,” and also kind of promotes the wrong idea about what “help” is. It’s not the job of therapists to take over for people’s moral sensibilities.

Thus for example, in the later Greek myths such as the Iliad, we see that abusing travelers has become an offense against the gods (but it still occasionally happened anyhow). Compare to, say, the (very old) Oedipus tale, where Oedipus has no problem with attacking and slaughtering a group of travelers on the road — but the part he gets punished for, is that (unbenownst to him) the victims included his father.