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From: pam@gows.net
Category: Category 1
Date: 9/6/00
Time: 5:04:28 PM
Remote Name: 152.10.91.145
After reading your books I was curious about the general view of schools towards children who are different. I was born in the fifties and attended school in the sixties and early seventies. The elementary school I attended had a ""special education"" class that was contained in a seperate building. Most of the children in this class were suffering from some form of retardation.Was this the norm in those days? (comletely seperating those children from the regular students, I mean) Also, from my own experiences and after reading your books, I get the impression that teachers at that time were not trained to recognize special needs children or to refer them to any kind of resource teacher, special classes etc. to get help for them. (until they became a classroom disruption) I have often wondered if anyone has compliled statistics on how many children may have fallen through the cracks and how much of the adult ""mentally ill"" poplulation of today are products of that educational system. I work for a state Victim Compensation Board, and am always appalled at how the number of claims filed for child abuse, domestic violence, and sexual assault cases far outweigh the number filed for murder and other violent crimes. How many of the perpetrators were themselves abused as children? Is the education system any better today at identifiying at risk children and getting help for them and their families? /Could child abuse be drastically reduced, if teachers were trained to indentify potential at risk children and refer them and their families to community resources to obtain help? When I read your books, I have painful memories of my own frustrations in the educational system. I was given all kinds of labels, ie., lazy, stupid, uncooperative, antisocial, to name a few. My parents took the labels that teachers gave to me to heart and punished me regularly for my failing grades. I wonder how many children out there today are going through the same experience because no one takes the time to really understand the problem. To this day, I still am unable to perform more than the most basic simple math calculations. Numbers just don't make sense to me. I have encountered co workers who have had a similar experience to mine. Was this the norm in the sixties? Or am I and others really just a bunch of dummies who learn to function enough survive in the real world?