על ידי דוד_רובנר* » 22 מרץ 2004, 16:51
The increasing homogenization of our schools is without doubt the chief underlying cause of their sky-rocketing costs. Here I would like to focus on the costliest, and most damaging, effect of standardization: the astronomical rise in the number of "special needs" students over the past decade.
Some perspective is needed in dealing with this ultra-sensitive subject. For the longest time, the regular schools did not handle children who had organic disabilities that severely impaired their physical and/or mental functioning. These children became pariahs; they were relegated mostly to horrible to institutions which kept them out of the public eye and left them unequipped to deal with life at virtually any level. It was a mark of great enlightenment for our culture when we collectively decided to include, rather than exclude, these children as part of our society. The citizens of this country chose willingly to go to the trouble and expense of providing a place for such children within the educational system, and made every effort to give them as productive a life as possible.
Simply put, that was how "special needs" education began, and few people begrudged the extra cost of caring for these unfortunate people who were our fellow brothers and sisters. The criteria for accepting children into these programs were fairly well defined in terms of measurable dysfunctions, based on observable physiological data - - neurological responses, neuromotor functions, neuropsychological reactions, kinesthetic behavior, etc. Most of the diagnoses could be related to biological disorders that were observable under the microscope.
Then, with astonishing rapidity, something terrible happened to this well-conceived, well-intentioned system of "special needs education": it became a tool in the hands of an educational system bent on standardization. Within a few years, teachers and counselors and school psychologists and, ultimately, anxious parents driven to distraction by the demands of the schools, all banded together to make "special ed" the repository for all children who did not fit neatly into the standard mold. Children who in early years would have been readily integrated into the classroom -- children who were more active than others, or less attentive, or more interested in other things rather than their current lessons, or who had unusual talents and leanings, or who learned different subjects at different rates -- all these were now driven out to the standard classroom, into special needs classes. In the relentless pursuit of sameness, the marvelous variety of the classroom of yesteryear was abolished, for the overriding purpose of achieving a classroom free of distractions, containing only "good" children who were obedient, calm, attentive, did their homework, and above all achieved good grades on battery after battery of standard tests, which increase in number and scope every year.
To achieve this homogenization of the classroom, all the non-standard kids had to be "diagnosed" as having some illness, that justified the expense of special ed. And so, in the past decade or two, a host of new so-called disorders has arisen -- attention deficit disorder (ADD), hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), reading disorders, cognitive disorders, and many others -- none of which have been, or can be, traced to any physiological dysfunction whatsoever. These pseudo-scientific diagnoses have caused a whole generation of non-standard children to be labelled as dysfunctional, even though they suffer from nothing more than the disease of responding differently in the classroom than the average manageable student. When this process of labelling and separation is applied to adults -- as it was for several generations in the Soviet Union -- there is a general hue and cry denouncing such action as a malicious suppression of freedom and individual variation. Alas, when the same process is being applied to more and more children in our own land of the free and home of the brave, hardly a voice is raised in protest, and those few who object are berated for attacking the schools!
The abolition of lock-step standardization in schools, from the earliest pre-school onward, could eliminate virtually overnight most of the crippling costs of special education, that threaten to entwine us in a never-ending upward spiral of demands for funds. All that would and should remain is "special ed" as originally conceived, providing diligently for children with real physiologically identifiable disabilities.
As I have said over and over, what we are seeing in our schools is the desperate behavior of educators who are seeking to keep an obsolete and irrelevant system running. The current schools are beset by failure and, as governments and bureaucracies always do, they react by falling back with ever more vigor on the old formulas that have failed. They become more restrictive, more cumbersome, more expensive, more prone to rhetoric and flag-waving. Meanwhile, life is passing them by, and they will either change on their own, or history will force them to change willy-nilly.
Who can doubt this? Most of the Communist world cast-off its rigid homogenization in a few months. Leading Japanese educators are grappling with abandoning their fearfully confining school system, which has produced so very little by way of original thought or independent behavior. How long will it be before the free world, cradle of liberty, defender of freedom, mother of creative endeavor, casts off the shackles of its rigidly standardized schools and opens its educational system at least to the creative influences of variety, difference, and change?
The increasing homogenization of our schools is without doubt the chief underlying cause of their sky-rocketing costs. Here I would like to focus on the costliest, and most damaging, effect of standardization: the astronomical rise in the number of "special needs" students over the past decade.
Some perspective is needed in dealing with this ultra-sensitive subject. For the longest time, the regular schools did not handle children who had organic disabilities that severely impaired their physical and/or mental functioning. These children became pariahs; they were relegated mostly to horrible to institutions which kept them out of the public eye and left them unequipped to deal with life at virtually any level. It was a mark of great enlightenment for our culture when we collectively decided to [b]include[/b], rather than exclude, these children as part of our society. The citizens of this country chose willingly to go to the trouble and expense of providing a place for such children within the educational system, and made every effort to give them as productive a life as possible.
Simply put, that was how "special needs" education began, and few people begrudged the extra cost of caring for these unfortunate people who were our fellow brothers and sisters. The criteria for accepting children into these programs were fairly well defined in terms of measurable dysfunctions, based on observable physiological data - - neurological responses, neuromotor functions, neuropsychological reactions, kinesthetic behavior, etc. Most of the diagnoses could be related to biological disorders that were observable under the microscope.
Then, with astonishing rapidity, something terrible happened to this well-conceived, well-intentioned system of "special needs education": [b]it became a tool in the hands of an educational system bent on standardization.[/b] Within a few years, teachers and counselors and school psychologists and, ultimately, anxious parents driven to distraction by the demands of the schools, all banded together to make "special ed" the repository for all children who did not fit neatly into the standard mold. Children who in early years would have been readily integrated into the classroom -- children who were more active than others, or less attentive, or more interested in other things rather than their current lessons, or who had unusual talents and leanings, or who learned different subjects at different rates -- all these were now driven out to the standard classroom, into special needs classes. In the relentless pursuit of sameness, the marvelous variety of the classroom of yesteryear was abolished, for the overriding purpose of achieving a classroom free of distractions, containing only "good" children who were obedient, calm, attentive, did their homework, and above all achieved good grades on battery after battery of standard tests, which increase in number and scope every year.
To achieve this homogenization of the classroom, all the non-standard kids had to be "diagnosed" as having some illness, that justified the expense of special ed. And so, in the past decade or two, a host of new so-called disorders has arisen -- attention deficit disorder (ADD), hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), reading disorders, cognitive disorders, and many others -- none of which have been, or can be, traced to any physiological dysfunction whatsoever. These pseudo-scientific diagnoses have caused a whole generation of non-standard children to be labelled as dysfunctional, even though they suffer from nothing more than the disease of responding differently in the classroom than the average manageable student. When this process of labelling and separation is applied to adults -- as it was for several generations in the Soviet Union -- there is a general hue and cry denouncing such action as a malicious suppression of freedom and individual variation. Alas, when the same process is being applied to more and more children in our own land of the free and home of the brave, hardly a voice is raised in protest, and those few who object are berated for attacking the schools!
The abolition of lock-step standardization in schools, from the earliest pre-school onward, could eliminate virtually overnight most of the crippling costs of special education, that threaten to entwine us in a never-ending upward spiral of demands for funds. All that would and should remain is "special ed" as originally conceived, providing diligently for children with real physiologically identifiable disabilities.
As I have said over and over, what we are seeing in our schools is the desperate behavior of educators who are seeking to keep an obsolete and irrelevant system running. The current schools are beset by failure and, as governments and bureaucracies always do, they react by falling back with ever more vigor on the old formulas that have failed. They become more restrictive, more cumbersome, more expensive, more prone to rhetoric and flag-waving. Meanwhile, life is passing them by, and they will either change on their own, or history will force them to change willy-nilly.
Who can doubt this? Most of the Communist world cast-off its rigid homogenization in a few months. Leading Japanese educators are grappling with abandoning their fearfully confining school system, which has produced so very little by way of original thought or independent behavior. How long will it be before the free world, cradle of liberty, defender of freedom, mother of creative endeavor, casts off the shackles of its rigidly standardized schools and opens its educational system at least to the creative influences of variety, difference, and change?