Posted on 05/22/2012 9:07:52 AM PDT by shove_it
A Texas high school has recalled its yearbooks after special needs students were described as "mentally retarded" within its pages, angering teachers, students and their parents.
Mesquite High School's yearbooks were initially distributed on Friday, but were recalled by school officials within hours.
"They told the entire class that they have a slight mistake that needs to be fixed," a senior at the school told Fox's KDFW affiliate.
An introduction to the "Special Education" section read, "Some of the disabilities the students in the Special Education Program have are being blind, deaf or non-verbal" and described two students as "both blind and deaf, as well as mentally retarded."
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(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I attended a conference of the affairs of the Physically Disabled in Toronto in 1975. Resolutions were put forward. One was to stop using the description 'Crippled Children'. Later this was put to a very middle-class lady at a meeting. She was a person in the charitable field.
She rolled her eyes in mock horror. We would lose half our donations without the words `Crippled Children` she said. What a put down. The fund continues to this day. I will have to check on what percentage of the dollar goes to the kids.
“I would assume it was for them to learn. Helen Keller was deaf and blind, and graduated from Radcliffe.”
But she wasn’t also retarded. Throw that in the mix and there is no reason to waste tax money putting them in school.
“Wouldn’t Negro be more correct?
Few are truly ‘black’”
“Negro” means black, so I don’t see your point.
I see that the dignity of human life means very little to you. Such a shocking statement that I am speechless at its cruelity.
No. But fortunately, if they were your kids, the state would have found you unfit and taken them away long before they reached school age.
From the article: “The yearbooks will be redistributed this week, school officials said, without the offending pages.”
So the treatment of this self inflicted wound by the school administration is to confiscate all the yearbooks and rip out the “offending pages” thereby leaving the “special needs students” out of the yearbooks completely. Sounds about right for public education.
“...confiscate all the yearbooks and rip out the “offending pages””
And this situation was made worse and more insulting.
How truly awful.
Mental Retardation was recently cured - didn’t you know this? With a single stroke of his mighty pen, Obozo eliminated Mental Retardation (through an executive order, no less). Now we are to refer to the status of the mentally retarded as Intellectually Disabled.
Liberal???
Fallen out of favor??? Obozo signed an executive order which eliminates from use the term mental retardation within the medical and education fields. We (in the education field) are now required to refer to mental retardation as "Intellectual Disability". The state of California is presently drafting legislation to do the same thing on a state level.
Liberal???
That would get my vote.
WHY would there even be a special section for the “Special Education” students?????
This is nuts.
Even mentally retarded children can still learn. The upper limit of their abilities may be much lower, but their parents also pay taxes and these kids have the right to an education just like the other kids.
Proper education can prepare many of these kids to live a fairly independent life, which will be a blessing to them, expecially in their older adult years when their parents aren’t around to take care of them any more...
She went for her interview with four years of teaching college and two years at elementary school - they grabbed her quickly. Finally she got the job she had dreamed about. Special Education. The classes were Senior, Junior and Primary. Ages were from two or three years old up to thirteen years. She is very charitable to those who have never really had the experiences of these children. I had diplomatically mentioned that there were some "misunderstandings" here.
Some things she did for the apparently severely disabled were dabbled their fingers in jello and other tactile things. Putting their feet in a puddle and see them chuckle and laugh. I would gather from what she has said it is the stimulation of the senses that gives them some measure of well being. Somebody cares and they know this.
On the more able cases, they were tutored at every possible academic level. Some went on to earn a living and compete in this life's journey. Things have changed though and now the mentally challenged, who are considered more able, are integrated into regular classes. Mixed feelings about this, the kids can sometimes be unkind. Certainly not always though.
It’s made worse by the non-PC term, but this isn’t completely about being politically correct...
The point is why label the kids at all? Why not just a picture of the kids and their name? This approach was just silly, unless the yearbook staff wanted to be fair and label everyone with their associated problems. I bet half the kids could be labelled in some way: ADHD, learning disability, dyslexic, eating disorder, depression, crippled, stutterer, etc.
In my class all kids got the same opportunity. What they did with it was what got them a grade, not their labels. However, their labels defined how I presented their opportunities.
BTW you can bet all parents wanted the labels "gifted", "advanced" or "accelerated".
I picked up a school book at a library sale in Mississippi named “Building Citizenship.” Copyrighted from 1933 to 1939. Originally from the Pittsburg schools. The author is R.O. Hughes who says:
The feeble-minded are of three classes. The moron may have as much intelligence as a twelve year old and is sometimes hard to distinguish from an ordinary “slow-minded” person.
The imbecile never gets any further mentally than an eight year old child.
The idiot is always an infant mentally, not passing the mental age of two or three years.
He adds, “The feeble-minded are not particularly dangerous, but are often a nuisance to normal people.” - He cautions that they should not be allowed to marry because their children tend to be feeble-minded also.
“Whatever you call the mentally retareded will inevitably be pejorative, since it’ll never be a good thing to be retarded.”
It has to do with intent. If the intent is to hurt and insult, then yes - it’s pejorative (as would be the case with any other insult given to someone), but if the intent is to describe a condition (a chronic slow mental development/late development), the term is not pejorative. I was speaking of a time when the latter usage was still openly accepted and not viewed as inherently “insulting”. Otherwise, I agree with the rest of your post.
Agreed on that. PC nonsense is a hot button issue for me and I got sidetracked. I agree there seems to be no reason whatsoever to slap a label on these children - in a yearbook no less. What would be the purpose? Bizarre - and unkind regardless of the label used.
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