Teachers working with disabled children in schools, without specialized theoretical or practical training, face problems that seem nearly impossible to solve. Thomas J. Weihs' book The Difficult Child offers real help.
Weihs is a physician and director in Scotland of the Camphill Movement schools. The Camphill centers are integrated communities of life and work that emerged after 1940 in Scotland, England, and several other countries. They include village communities, protected homes, schools, and residential schools.
Dr. Weihs works throughout Britain and internationally as a writer and lecturer, changing "the way we interpret and understand the abnormal" and developing "new social forms that allow the application of the therapeutic impulse that guides and animates (...) the Camphill communities" (from the preface by Dr. Leonardo Fulgosi).
The book grows from "thirty years of life lived intimately with handicapped children"—a truth evident from the opening pages.
Weihs begins with the question we always ask when a "different" child is placed in our care: "What is he like? Why is he this way? Can he be cured? Educated? Helped? Healed?" The author argues that traditional classifications of physical handicaps, mental disabilities, and maladjustment are no longer sufficient as a foundation for future work. He calls them "abstractions," useful for administrative purposes but not applicable to the individual child, in whom these categories overlap and interfere. Physical and organic impairment always brings emotional problems; a mentally retarded child may have suffered brain inflammation despite appearing physically normal. Weihs finds the concept of "mental age" equally inadequate—it may be a "significant element," but it cannot be the sole measure of a child's "level of maturity" or "mental development."
As an alternative framework, Dr. Weihs proposes "the idea of development"—studying failed development as the basis for evaluating handicapped children.
After illustrating how a child normally transforms physically and psychologically in early life, the author examines different forms of developmental handicap, or "developmental failures." These should never be viewed as "isolated conditions" but rather as "phenomena that can combine with others in countless ways"—just as normal development is only a "harmonious balance among the many possible deviations and failures to which development is subject."
To support this thesis, Weihs sketches the physical appearance, behavior, suffering, and difficulties in reality contact of macrocephalic, aphasic, blind, mongoloid, and autistic children, always showing their symptoms as deviations, arrests, or delays in natural physiological development.
The tone is never merely scientific or impersonal, nor sentimental. Instead, it reveals deep, humane concern, long familiarity with the handicaps he describes—qualities that allow him subtle and sure insight into attitudes and tendencies. And in these pages, Weihs seems to demonstrate precisely what he claimed from the start about relating to a handicapped child:
"...one must look at his behavior, his displays, his abilities and disabilities, in relation to what is always perfect in him: the experience of his personality, his own self."
Some descriptions may surprise the uninformed reader. But if you have even brief direct contact with disabled children, you will agree with the author—and you will feel as though something you once grasped only confusedly is now expressed clearly.
Take his account of the "princely manner of macrocephalic children," their hypersensitivity and irritability, but also the precociousness of their speech and their tendency to be helpful. Or his description of the "almost repressed but always present desire for normalcy that forces the autistic child to seek refuge in a multitude of taboos and rituals, attempting to achieve a form of communication that neither denies nor overwhelms him."
Of the Down syndrome child, he writes: "...he should simply be allowed to benefit, like any other child, from everything made available to the others, and should be permitted not only to be useful to himself but also to others." Contrast this with so many complicated and sometimes unnecessary discussions about integrating children with this kind of handicap.
Reading this book yields several rewards: a simple but essential understanding of different handicaps, their possible origins and evolution. Most importantly, it calls us to reflect on respecting the child's personality, on the insistence that we never separate physical handicaps from mental process and the child's spiritual integration. Only then, Weihs argues, will we learn to see certain developmental handicaps "...as exaggerations of what we consider normal variation in human traits. Only then will we find within ourselves the same fragilities and problems as the handicapped child. Only then will we love him—not with emotion or sentimentality, but our affection will become the means through which we offer help..."
by Tea Mazzarotto
(Learning support teacher, secondary school)