Preparing to Learn

Transformation of the American Public's Understanding of Disability

Before discussing the American public’s  transformation in attitudes, perceptions, and understanding of disability over time, complete the assessment below to check what you already know, what you need to unlearn, and what you might be interested in exploring further.

People with disabilities always have been part of the population, but they have not always been acknowledged, treated fairly, or given the right to go to school. As people started expressing interest in educational reform to support those with disabilities, the public’s understanding of disability shifted, and so too did the terminology. Because of the change in terminology, the history of special education includes once-commonplace words now deemed inappropriate or offensive. This chapter focuses on the shifts of understanding that occurred over time throughout the United States, starting with the 1800s and ending with the 1920s. The next chapter addresses the changes in United States laws that relate to disabilities and special education from the 1920s to the present day.

Early Advocacy: 1800s

The Roots of Special Education

In the 1800s, a time of curiosity, people eagerly wanted to understand what they did not understand. During this period, very little was known about people with disabilities and their ability to learn. Jean Marc Gaspard Itard (1774-1838) worked to change this. In 1800, Itard was appointed chief physician at the Institute for Deaf Mutes in Paris. While there, he began working with a feral child named Victor.

Found wandering in the wilds of France, Victor was estimated to be 12 years old. Experts speculated that Victor had spent most of those years alone. Victor had no communication or social skills. Because Itard believed Victor was capable of learning, he worked extensively with him for several years, after which time Victor had learned very few words. Victor’s difficulty acquiring language caused Itard to highlight the essential importance of language attainment during a child’s earliest years of life.

Professionals now consider the goals that Itard set for educating Victor as the first Individual Education Program (IEP). Although Victor did not make the progress Itard wanted, he did prove that people with mental disabilities could learn. Many consider Itard the founder of special education (Chalat, 1982) because of his work with Victor. Given the circumstances of Victor’s upbringing, scholars today still speculate whether Victor had a disability or delayed development.

Poorhouses, Training Schools, and Asylums

At this time, in the 1800s, it was not uncommon for people who were poor or disabled to be placed into what were called “poorhouses.” Publicly funded housing units, or institutions, poorhouses at the time allowed outcasts to be separated from the rest of society. This separation continued into the late 1900s, as the 1910 census found that “more than 110,000 [children] were living in asylums across the country. They were labeled ‘dependent, neglected, and/or delinquent’ ” (Katz, 1996). This misunderstanding may have occurred as a result of separating those with disabilities from the rest of society.

To gain a deeper understanding of those with disabilities, terminologies to classify people with disabilities and their differences began emerging. French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol (1772-1840) identified two categories: imbeciles and idiots. He described Imbeciles as being almost as efficient as those without disabilities but impacted by limited functionality, and idiots as having no intellect and as being unable to think or learn. However, by the mid-19th century, the understanding of people with disabilities began to shift (Parallels in Time: A history of developmental disabilities, 2022) as people became more aware of the living conditions that people with disabilities experienced.

Dorothea Dix (1802-1887), a social reformer and teacher who advocated for people with disabilities, helped increase awareness. While in England, she was exposed to the living conditions of those living in prisons and poorhouses, and when she returned to the United States in 1840, she began visiting prisons and poorhouses in the United States. To get an understanding of Dix’s impact, “[b]y 1845, she had . . . [visited] 19 state prisons, 300 county jails, and 500 poor houses . . . From 1845 to 1848, Dix lobbied various state legislatures to improve the living conditions of the mentally ill” (Markel, 2020).  However, in 1848, women could not address Congress, so Dix asked Samuel Gridley Howe (1901-1876), an American physician and advocate for the education of the blind, to present a speech on her behalf. Soon after the positively received speech, a change in the education of people with disabilities would soon begin.

Within that same year, 1848, Gridley Howe helped start the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth (Perkins School for the Blind), which served as a boarding school for students with intellectual disabilities. He, along with Édouard Séguin, a French physician and educationist who studied medicine under Itard and psychiatry under Esquirol, wanted to include family and community in the education of people with disabilities. Together, they advocated for the preparation of people with disabilities to live in society instead of a lifetime locked away in institutions (Parallels in Time: A history of developmental disabilities, 2022). Audio of a letter to Howe on behalf of a patient has been preserved through the project “A History of Developmental Disabilities.”

By the late 1800s, as a result of people’s advocacy and curiosity, numerous training schools to support the education of people with disabilities opened their doors. These training schools used Séguin’s physiological teaching methods to help students to the desired educational outcomes. Founded on the belief that through education, compassion, and the teaching of social skills, the teachers could “make the deviant undeviant” (Parallels in Time: A history of developmental disabilities, 2022), the schools sought to help people with disabilities live within society. They succeeded, but this positive change soon took a turn for the worse.

As a result of the economic despair that occurred following the Civil War, training school graduates couldn’t find employment in their communities. Many of these people ended up in poorhouses or jails (Parallels in Time: A history of developmental disabilities, 2022). Because enrollment in the training schools continued to increase, more schools were opened. Schools, though, no longer focused on training and transitioning to society and instead shifted to asylums. Physical spaces shifted, and so too did the treatment and consideration of people with disabilities. They attended training schools as students, and they lived in asylums as residents who received institutionalized custodial care. As a result (Kode, 2017), research studies during the Reconstruction Era (1865-1877) connected people with disabilities to crime and poverty.

In 1896, the first special education class began in Rhode Island. As more students entered public education, teachers noticed  an influx of students with learning disabilities. At this time in history, they were labeled as either feeble-minded or backward. Although compulsory education laws were enforced across the United States by 1918, most public schools still excluded children with disabilities. Families could either keep their children with disabilities at home or institutionalize them (Pardini, 2017). Schools relied on the institutions to train teachers to work with students categorized as feeble-minded (Parallels in Time: A history of developmental disabilities, 2022).

1893 marked another milestone. That year, Lillian Wald (1867-1940) founded the Henry Street Settlement in New York City. She and Mary Brewster, both nurses, often interacted with the immigrant community. They sought to improve their living conditions, with education and access to healthcare as their main concerns. After establishing the Henry Street Settlement, Wald recruited teacher Elizabeth Farrell (1870-1932) to help work with immigrant children. At this time, students with disabilities received education only as a means of preparation for institutionalization thereafter (Kode, 2017).

The Transformation of the Treatment of People with Disabilities in America

A Scientific Approach to Understanding Disability: 1900s-1920s

The Binet Intelligence Test and Feeble Mindedness

During this period, people with intellectual disabilities were referred to as “feeble-minded.” Unlike the terminology that we  use and know today, this language described any person experiencing intellectual disabilities, with no differentiation between the types of intellectual disabilities. This broad understanding, or lack thereof, not only made it challenging to diagnose but also challenging to support and treat. Additionally, the term “feeble-minded” tends to be connected to eugenics, a concept that relates to controlling human genetics.

To determine feeble mindedness, French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857-1911) developed the first intelligence quotient (IQ) test to serve as an assessment tool in 1905. People would take the IQ test and, from there, were classified as feeble-minded if their scores did not align with what was considered to be normal. While we tend to associate IQ tests with measuring intelligence, the tool’s original intent was to identify feeble-mindedness.

The Eugenics Movement

A science that society now morally frowns upon because of its ethical implications, in the 1900s, eugenics sought to manipulate human genetics to produce desirable characteristics in the general population. American scientist and eugenicist Henry Herbert Goddard (1866-1957) believed that intellectual and cognitive disabilities were inevitably passed on from one generation to the next. Based on this belief, Goddard influenced people at the time to also believe that if people with disabilities reproduced, disease, crime, and evil would spread (Kode, 2017), resulting in the sterilization of many people.

Goddard translated the Binet Intelligence Test from French to English to determine feeble-mindedness in people who lived in the United States. He used this test not only to label children as feeble-minded but also to reduce their potential as they were then deemed unable to learn. He recommended that segregation in asylums for children classified as feeble-minded, as well as surgically sterilization so they could not reproduce. Feeble-mindedness was heavily concentrated in poor, uneducated, and minority populations.

Immigrants often suffered from feeble-minded misclassification. With immigration on the rise as people left their home countries because of poor living conditions, they found themselves living in similar conditions once they relocated to New York City. Misclassification as feeble-minded and idiots contributed to their poor living conditions because it resulted in segregation from other populations (Cherry, 2022). The Binet Intelligence Test has received criticism for measuring assimilation rather than knowledge acquisition. In recent years, psychologists have been rethinking how intelligence is measured. 

In 1911, the Research Committee of the Eugenics Section of the American Breeder’s Association echoed Goddard’s conclusions by recommending lifelong segregation of people with disabilities and forced sterilization. By 1931, 20 years after the committee’s recommendation, 30 states had enacted sterilization laws. Fifty years after the recommendation, almost 50,000 people were sterilized (Kode, 2017).

These laws were so effective that during World War II German Nazis turned to California, which enacted extensive sterilization practices, to learn more about sterilization. When criticized for his own practices relating to sterilization, Hitler made a point to say that he followed American laws preventing reproduction of the unfit (Black, 2003). Following the horrors of World War II, the eugenics movement was discredited.

Conclusion

While not uncommon for people with disabilities to be institutionalized, segregated from the public, reproductively sterilized, and abandoned by their families, these actions came from a fear of misunderstood behaviors, misconceived notions of genetics, misinformation, and just plain ignorance. We should not dilute or ignore the history of how people with disabilities were treated because it allows us to learn from the past and forge a better, more inclusive, future.

Transformation of the American Public's Understanding of Disability

References

Black, E. “The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics.” History News Network. N.p., Sept. 2003.

Chalat, N. I. (1982). History of Medicine Jean Marc Gaspard Itard – 1774-1838. The Laryngoscope, 9(6). https://doi.org/10.1002/lary.1982.92.6.627

Cherry, K. (2022). Alfred Binet and the History of IQ Testing. Verywellmind.

Katz, M. (1996). In the shadow of the poorhouse: A social history of welfare in America. NY: Basic Books.

Kode, K. (2017). Elizabeth Farrell and the History of Special Education (2nd Ed.) Council of Exceptional Children.

Markel, H. (2020). Dorothea Dix’s tireless fight to end inhumane treatment for mental health patients. PBS.

Pardini, P. (2017). The History of Special Education. Weebly. https://impactofspecialneeds.weebly.com/special-education-history.htm

Perkins School for the Blind. Samuel Gridley Howe. https://www.perkins.org/samuel-gridley-howe/

The Minnesota Governor’s Council on Developmental Disabilities (2022). Parallels in Time: A history of developmental disabilities. https://mn.gov/mnddc/parallels/index.html