It is certainly true that placing handicapped children in regular classrooms allows them and their non-disabled peers to learn how to live together. It is true that parents of a handicapped child find real relief—in the crushing weight they bear—knowing their son or daughter can attend school with other children: a regular school, not the special school of an earlier era. It is true that integration into society begins with this first step, mandated by law in recent years (we are writing in 1983), whether it is welcomed or criticized, accepted or poorly digested. All of this is true, and in principle we agree.
Does "socializing" teach? Does sitting in a classroom with normal children amount to learning? Learning what?
But how many doubts have accumulated over these years of "trial." How many phone calls. How many second thoughts from parents and teachers alike, each worried about the difficulties, obstacles, and disappointments they have encountered.Does "socializing" teach? Does sitting in a classroom with normal children amount to learning? Learning what? And what happens when a child is too restless, too disturbed, or too withdrawn? What can a teacher do when the task assigned to her far exceeds her specialized training, her abilities, and her goodwill—and that of her generous classmates?
What is a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old doing in a middle school classroom when he cannot yet read or write?
How do we help a child who so desperately needs to become independent—eating alone, dressing and undressing alone, using the bathroom alone—in a classroom where the goal is to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic?
And worst of all, after reaching that longed-for milestone of eighth grade, what comes next? Where does he go? What does he do?
At fifteen, with a hollow diploma but still unable to read or write, it is not easy to find work in a field you never learned. The mothers who call me ask for solutions I don't know where to find. My heart aches. I want so badly to help them. I cannot look them in the eye and say: "I'm sorry, but there is nothing for them." I cannot send them from place to place to file requests that will only meet with no.
So what now?
We cannot go backward, of course. That would be wrong. But neither can a fifteen-year-old go home to do nothing.
What matters is not to burden the weakest among us yet again with an educational policy that fails to account sufficiently for the "good" and "dignity" of the handicapped person and their right to be educated in a way that honors their difference.
What matters is not to burden the weakest among us yet again with an educational policy that fails to account sufficiently for the "good" and "dignity" of the handicapped person and their right to be educated in a way that honors their difference. We ask our readers to send us your thoughts on this. Tell us what has worked in your experience with integration, and why, and where. Together, let us examine what is truly working and what has gone wrong in school integration as it has been carried out. We can uncover the facets of a truth that may be hard to speak, but harder still to live.
The two articles on education we offer in this issue (here and here) are examples of the many solutions that can be found and that must be urgently pursued: different solutions, tailored solutions, integrated or not. What matters is not to burden the weakest among us yet again with an educational policy that fails to account sufficiently for the "good" and "dignity" of the handicapped person and their right to be educated in a way that honors their difference.
- Mariangela Bertolini, 1984