The history of special education has been a tumultuous one. Only within the last 40 years have significant gains been made. In the years before 1975, students with disabilities were not entitled to receive a free public education as everyone was. Progress to get equal rights for people with exceptionalities slowly crept along in the 19th and 20th centuries. Previous to this, the only movement was backwards. In 1691, a New York act grouped mentally challenged persons in with the “vagabonds and idle persons” it wished to discourage from residence. In years to come, this lack of empathy would only increase. In 1773, New York passed another law that actually permitted the denial of mentally ill or mentally challenged people to reside there. The law encouraged their families to “see to their care”.
It was during these times that the first psychiatric institutions were being founded. The same year that New York passed its law denying the mentally ill residence, the first institution in America was founded in Williamsburg. Eastern State Hospital was the passion of Royal Governor of the Colony of Virginia, Francis Fauquier, who showed a great compassion for those in need. In 1766, he stated, “Every civilized Country has an Hospital for these People, where they are confined, maintained and attended by able Physicians, to endeavor to restore them to their lost reason”. Of course, by today’s standards the word “confine” would never be used, but by the standards of his day Governor Fauquier would have been seen as showing unparalleled kindness toward a group most wanted to ignore. Unfortunately, Governor Fauquier died before the completion of the Eastern State Hospital and didn’t get to see his vision come to life.
Meaningful education for people with disabilities didn’t start to emerge until the 19th century. In 1817, Thomas Gallaudet founded the first private school for the Deaf in America called the “American Asylum for Deaf-Mutes”, now the American School for the Deaf. Gallaudet started his career in working with the deaf when he met his neighbors’ nine-year old deaf daughter, Alice Cogswell. He began teaching her and subsequently traveled Europe studying ways to teach deaf students. While in Paris, Gallaudet learned how to communicate using sign language as well as teaching methods. After returning to America, he opened America’s first school for the Deaf and young Alice was one of his first students.
Soon after Gallaudet opened his school, Dr. John Dix Fisher opened a private school for the blind. After visiting Paris, Dr. Fisher brought back new ideas for teaching the blind in America and in 1829 a group of top men got together in the Boston Exchange Coffee House and signed papers to make the New England Asylum for the Blind a reality. In 1831, Fisher brought in Samuel Gridley Howe to head the school. A year later Howe would open his own school in his fathers’ house. The institution grew so much that soon the school had to relocate to a mansion, owned by trustee Thomas Perkins. Eventually the school would be renamed Perkins Institute for the Blind (now Perkins School for the Blind). Howe developed many techniques for teaching the blind, including special embossing (similar to Braille). Of special note is Howe’s success with a seven-year-old student, Laura Bridgman. Laura was left both deaf and blind after a bout with scarlet fever and was considered uneducable. Howe used tactile stimulation to reach into Laura’s world and pull her out. She soon showed her thirst for knowledge and was quickly reading raised-text books, finger spelling and eventually writing. Howe’s success was so widely known that Dickens wrote about it in his Notes on America, which led Helen Keller’s mother to contact the Perkins Institute. The Institute sent one of their recent graduates, Annie Sullivan, to work with Helen and the rest, as they say, is history.
Despite the fact that in 1864 the first higher education school for the Deaf was federally funded, cognitive disabilities still carried a heavy stigma. While the people of the day found the deaf and blind relatable, they still lacked the empathy to relate to children who were cognitively or behaviorally impaired. In 1852, a New York school began a class for “unruly boys” which served to segregate and control rather than educate. In 1856, Edward Sequin wrote Origin of the Treatment and Training of Idiots in which he claimed, “The idiot wishes for nothing, he wishes only to remain in his vacuity”. The rights movement for the disabled was set back again in 1893 when a ruling from the Massachusetts Supreme Court found that a student who was “weak in mind” could not benefit from education.
Dorothea Dix came on to the scene in 1841, after she began teaching Sunday school to women at a Cambridge jail. While there she saw that many of the inmates had disabilities and suffered from severe neglect and abuse. During the 1840’s and 50’s, Dorothea began advocating for people with disabilities. She felt the best was to accomplish an improved life for this group was to gain support from the legislature to expand and create new asylums. In 1843, Dorothea presented a petition to her state legislature to expand the State Hospital for the Insane in Worcester. She wrote, “I proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of insane persons confined within this Commonwealth, in cases, closets, cellars, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience…” Because of Dorothea’s promotion of asylums, the Massachusetts legislature granted a large increase in funding. She ultimately played a role in the establishment of 32 new institutions.
Of course, public education for cognitively and behaviorally impaired students was nearly non-existent at this point. But that began to change at the beginning on the 20th century. In 1915, Minnesota became the first state to put into place special education teacher requirements. The state legislature also granted a set amount of state aid for the education of “defectives”. It seemed as though proper treatment of those with disabilities was on its way in… but then came the eugenics movement.
Harry Laughlin was the forerunner of the eugenics in America during the 1920’s and 30’s. He felt “[the government] should seek to, so far as possible, to reduce to the minimum the production of the feebleminded” (Spring, p.315). In 1926, Harry Laughlin wrote “The Eugenical Sterilization of the Feebleminded”. He believed that “only those persons best endowed with superior mental, physical, and temperamental hereditary qualities should be permitted to reproduce…” (p.315).
Those who were institutionalized, he reasoned, do not have the need for sterilization, as those institutions would keep them from breeding. But once those “feebleminded” individuals were released they needed to be sterilized as not to risk reproduction. In 1909, California (who was at the forefront of the eugenics movement) began sterilizing every “mentally ill or mentally impaired” person released from an institution. Thankfully, the eugenics movement lost its momentum in the 1930’s and 40’s when people began to be appalled by what the Nazi’s were doing. Their quest to “create a superior race” made people realize to horror of forced sterilization.
With the famous case of Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in 1954, it paved the way for advocates to bring attention to the federal court the injustices special needs students were suffering. Schools continued to segregate, discriminate and flat out deny education to those with disabilities. Even as late as 1958, the Supreme Court of Illinois held that compulsory education legislation didn’t require the state to provide free public education to the “feeble-minded” or “mentally deficient” (Department of Public Welfare v. Hass).
In the 1960’s, during the heart of the civil rights movement, American’s began to look at people with special needs differently. The 1950’s saw the advent of organizations like the Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children, but it wasn’t until the 60’s that the judicial system was prepared to take on the issue of special education. Despite lobbying efforts from associations like PARC and the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC), local and state governments were not prepared to change how they addressed handicapped students in public schools. With no luck in the legislature, PARC took their case to the courts. In the groundbreaking case PARC vs. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1971, the courts found that the segregation of disabled children was unreasonable. This case made it so every disabled child was entitled to free public education within the state. This set the groundwork for Public Law 94-142, which the CEC lobbied extensively for.
The fact that this movement took place during the Civil Rights movement is of no coincidence. During the 60’s American society began to develop empathy as a whole. Injustices started to be seen for what they were and Americans began viewing the potential of each person. In 1970, only one in five children with a disability was educated in American schools. Without the Civil Rights movement, special education would not be what it is today. Once segregation of races was seen as wrong, the floodgates opened and revealed many issues. Of course, the American education system of today is not a perfect system, but it is certainly leaps and bounds above 50 years ago in regards to equality. Even the most severely impaired students receive free and appropriate education, just like everyone else.
Public Law 94-142 established the laws of special education in America. It held that every child with a disability was entitled to a free and appropriate public education no matter how severely they were impaired because all children can benefit from education. It also gave a broad definition of disability categories (11 exist today in the current version of this law). It laid out the guidelines for the IEP (Individualized Educational Program). P.L. 94-142 also put in the guidelines for what is called the “least restrictive environment” which states that children with disabilities should be around non-disabled peers as much as possible while still being educationally appropriate.
Eventually, P.L. 94-142 became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or IDEA. In 1986, it expanded to include early intervention for infants and toddlers, a critically important aspect of special education. It 2000, it was estimated that $4.9 billion was spent on the education of disabled children in America, a far cry from just 100 years ago. In 2004, IDEA was reauthorized and aligned with the No Child Left Behind legislation. Today, IDEA is responsible for providing services to more than 6.5 million children and 200,000 infants and toddlers. Students with disabilities now have the same rights as everyone else… just as it should be.
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