“If things were different in the past,
they can be different in the future”
Chris Goodey is the author of A history of intelligence and ‘intellectual disability’, which challenges many of the assumptions made about learning disability today through an examination of its history. He explains why he wrote it.
I got involved in learning disability when our daughter was born. We were ordered by professionals to “grieve for the child we hadn’t had”, but our backgrounds prevented us.
Having been whisked from a working-class family (my Dad left school aged eleven and had trouble writing) via grammar school and an ancient university, I and my wife had both been in a position to see how the ruling class of the 1950s regarded whole swathes of the population virtually as an inferior biological species. Hence the idea of ‘ntellectual’ disability wasn’t so strange for us.
We got involved in the inclusive education campaign. I did action research with families and later on person-centred planning. The strongest booster you can give to someone fighting for inclusion is always: remember –you’re not mad, they are. Families are supposedly insane (‘unrealistic’) to expect their children to be in ordinary schools or workplaces but this is in fact a projection on to families of the segregated system’s own insanity and bullying.
Meanwhile, I got interested in history. Rather than focusing on actual people, I wanted to know about the ideas surrounding them and to go back as early as possible. We know about the Victorian long-stay hospitals – what about before that? The further back we go, the more the answer is: there were no ‘people with learning disabilities’. We find words like ‘fool’ and ‘idiot’ but they bore little resemblance to people who get labelled today. The whole society was different – you didn’t need an IQ of 40 to help with the harvest.
Across history, in-groups exhibit an “inclusion phobia” about out-groups. One symptom of this disorder is that you simply invent categories of people as your possible sources of contamination – they are only pretending to be human. Today’s favourite in-group quality is ‘intelligence’ (whatever that is); hence we now have ‘intellectually disabled’ people.
Inclusion phobia
The targeted out-groups a millennium ago were different. The permanent feature, the connecting link, is inclusion phobia. My historical researches have helped me understand what goes on inside the heads of those administrators, psychologists and head teachers and their mad anger when confronted with someone wanting to be included.
If things were different in the past, they can be different in the future. Introducing person-centred planning into social services and education signals the start of a massive historical change. By placing individuals’ aspirations at the centre of the process, it promises to end 150 years of their very identity being determined by administrators and experts.
On the other hand, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission recently pronounced (a) that it unequivocally endorses the inclusion provisions in the UN Charter on the Rights of Disabled Persons, but also (b) that it is “neither possible nor appropriate” for children with “very severe” learning difficulties to attend ordinary school. This blatant self-contradiction, on which it has refused to back down or even engage, suggests only one possible conclusion: that some children aren’t human.
There’s a long way to go yet.
A history of intelligence and ‘intellectual disability’: the shaping of psychology in early modern Europe by C. F. Goodey, Ashgate, 2011
For information on developments in this field of history from Chris Goodey and others see: http://www.history
oflearningdisability.com/
