I love Thomas Sowell. LOOOOOOVE.
And this piece is excellent.
I actually agree with him about the misguided theory that all children with mental or physical or learning handicaps should be mainstreamed into regular classrooms. Many parents of kids with disabilities disagree with me.
On this point, there has to be a reasonable and frank discussion about the child's ability and disabilities and about who benefits.
If a child is, for example, physically handicapped but mentally all there, or high functioning, then they can and certainly should be mainstreamed with assistance. A child with severe behaviour problems (injures others, self-injurious) should not.
Children with cognitive issues also should be integrated only when they themselves will benefit, and not as some kind of social justice program for the school or school board. My son is not a school project. Contained classrooms or special education classrooms are not 'apartheid'. Sometimes they are the very best thing for the child.
Often, the battle that a parent has with a school is a projection of the battle that they are having with themselves-in acknowledging their child's limitations. It is very, very hard to come to terms with a child's disability-I know this from first hand experience of course. That's why I don't care how my son is characterized-as long as he gets what he needs to thrive.
Anyway, this paragraph encapsulated exactly what is going on now in our public systems-education, higher education, media, arts, government-everything. It's brilliant.
"Whether
in housing, education, or innumerable other aspects of life, the key to
busybody politics, and its endlessly imposed “solutions,” is that third
parties pay no price for being wrong. This not only presents
opportunities for the busybodies to engage in moral preening but also to
flatter themselves that they know better what is good for other people
than these other people know for themselves."
