Where did ideas about learning disabilities come from?
Patrick McDonagh is the author of Idiocy: A Cultural History, which explores representations of ‘idiocy’ and how people’s ideas of what might constitute ‘idiocy’ – and later, learning disability – were shaped through literary and other works from the 16th to the start of the 20th centuries.
When I was growing up in Vancouver, Canada, I attended primary school in a cluster of portable trailers placed on an grassy lot. Our playground had a large metal fence, and on the other side of the fence other children played. One day I was playing with a group of kids near the fence, while a girl played on the other side, when one of the boys from my class yelled at her, “Hey, are you retarded?” She gave him a look of disdain – I can still see it – and said “No.” Then she moved further away.
This exchange – the taunting question and the affronted rebuttal – stand out for me because it was the first time I heard the word “retarded.” I recall not knowing what this term signified, although clearly it was not good and seemed as it must be somehow connected to why a fence separated these two playgrounds: those children were different. I discovered many years later that the Oakridge School for children with special needs lay on the other side of the fence.
Strange impressions
I now recall this incident as the first of several that led me to become a historian of learning disabilities. In the early 1980s, while an undergraduate, I worked in a program with autistic youth and, a few years later, while pursuing my masters degree in English literature, I co-founded with a couple of friends the Spectrum Society for Community Living, which still operates in Vancouver. We were supporting people who were moving into the community from a massive long-stay institution which was shutting down and I became intrigued by how some people in the community seemed to hold the strangest impressions of what people with learning disabilities were like. Where did these ideas come from, I wondered?
And that question has changed my life. It turned me into a historian. And as a historian, my focus has been directed primarily at earlier ideas that I call ‘precursor notions’ to learning disability: ideas like ‘idiocy’, whose meaning has shifted dramatically from its first medieval appearance in English to its 19th century meaning. A term like ‘idiocy’ is not simply an earlier term for what we now consider to be learning or intellectual disability. But it – along with many other notions – forms part of the historical lineage that leads to our current ideas.
Shaping ideas
My interest has been in how these ideas – whether they be ‘idiocy’ or ‘mongolism’ ‘learning disability’ or ‘autism’ – have been shaped. This involves looking at plays, poetry, and novels that deal with these ideas, as well as legal documents, 19th century medical and scientific writings, and a vast range of other historical evidence.
The ultimate goal is to point to the factors that go into creating a particular group of people, establishing the boundaries that contain that group, and then reinforcing those boundaries. In understanding how this process occurs, we can also imagine the opposite process: what might dissolve those boundaries and reshape our ideas of disability and difference. In this way, I hope my historical work can help transform ideas about disability, intelligence and authority, and open spaces to imagine better futures for people who currently bear the labels that set them apart.
