Disability In The Classroom

Disability has always existed throughout history; it has never changed. What has changed are the names people used to describe and label it. Dr. F. M. Powell is the superintendent for the Iowa Institution for Feeble-Minded Children. “Backward and Mentally Deficient Children” was written for educators who have “mentally deficient” children in their classroom. In this piece, he focuses primarily on what should be done for the “backward and mentally deficient children” (or what people in modern times would call autistic children) and provides some insight on how the children who were deemed mentally deficient was treated.
Historically, impairment is seen as something devastating if it happened, especially to a child. “…feel the blighting touch of accident or disease…burdening them with the life-long grief of a visitation worse than and more dreaded than even death itself” (Powell, 1896, p. 16-17). Although it is not as extreme, this viewpoint is the basis for the medical model of disability and cure culture. Because disability is seen as a “failing that tragically ‘handicaps’ those ‘afflicted’” …show more content…
For example, the moral imbecile is seen as someone who is born with “an inverted perversion of the sense of right and wrong” (Powell, 1896, p. 21). Powell believes that some people are inherently born with impaired morals instead of these morals being taught by the child’s families and teachers. This is a change from his original opinion in which the child is born as a blank slate with their environment influencing them which means that the moral imbecile is born abnormal. Another category of children who was put into the feeble-minded category were the epileptic. Along with the moral imbecile, Powell thought that the best way to care for these children were to isolate them from society and detain them in a special institution (moral imbeciles) or in a special colony (epileptic) (Powell,