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warming up the cab of his camper, he reflected on how things had worked out, how hard it had been for him and his wife, Angie, to make a go of things, and how determined they had been to make sure their sons went through the experience of what a teacher had called the "melting pot." He remembered their own insistence on speaking English at home and never Spanish, the hassle over whether they had enough money to buy an encyclopedia, their attempts to conform to what they thought was the way good American parents should act, their sometimes painful experiences with PTA and Little League and the Boy Scouts.

John, their oldest boy, had seemed to be everything Joe had dreamed of when he was in school - a good student, accepted, popular, a better than average athlete. But then some questions had

arisen - as a matter of fact, when John became a tenth-grader. Joe remembered the day well when his son asked, "Dad, how come we don't speak Spanish, and how come we don't seem to have Mexican friends?" Joe recalled suddenly suspecting that maybe the melting pot wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Maybe John still felt "different," and though the boy seemed to be surviving the system, maybe school was just about as unhappy an experience for him as it had been for his old man.

And then later there had been the situation with the second boy, Paul - proud, aggressive, tough, always questioning. The family rebel. In fact, he insisted his name was "Pablo," not "Paul.” Ouch! That little switch had touched off what seemed like an endless series of negotiations with the youngster's teachers and ul

timately the principals, first in the grammar school and then the junior high. That boy, Joe mused. The aches he brought us, but in the end how much he made us think about who we really were and about our beautiful culture, and realize how rich we were. Paul was now at the university studying to be a lawyer, but there remained the vivid me memory of his militancy, his organizing the Mexican students, his leadership in demonstrations demanding that the school recognize the identity of "his" people.

The traffic near the school had died down now, and as Joe looked out the window, almost all of the students had disappeared from the lawn. He thought of their youngest boy, Frank, a kid who somehow was a mixture of John and Pablo, and of how he - Joe - and Angie had changed and how their lives had been changed by their boys. He thought of how the schools were changing, too. Who would have thought a few years back that they would even recognize el cinco de Mayo, a Mexican national holiday, let alone a week-long observance of it! Or who would have imagined that a whole section of the school would be involved in bilingual programs!

Things were not perfect. Too many Mexican kids still weren't really getting anything out of school, and too many were dropping out. Too many were still having trouble finding an identity, caught in the crossfire of two cultures. And yet, things were changing. Slowly, but they were changing. At the very least it was okay to speak Spanish. And the playground at Frank's school was as good as any in the State, and the buildings were modern and attractive. Maybe one day there wouldn't be all the fuss about being "different," and people would be accepted on their merits as individuals.

Suddenly the school bell clanged long and loud, bringing Joe upright in his seat. He looked in the rear-view mirror and pulled the camper away from the curb. Actually, it looked like it was going to be a pretty nice day after all.

-BILL RIVERA Special Assistant to the Superintendent, Los Angeles City Schools

New Era for Special

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n aspect of Indian culture that astonished the colonists, we are told, was the con

cept that the gods

had a special con

cern for the men

tally and physically

handicapped and that all creatures on earth were obliged to share it.

The more prevalent feeling, a legacy from the Middle Ages, was essentially one of rejection. It was thus perhaps inevitable that the initial moves to provide education for the handicapped entailed removing them from everyday affairs. Those offered any help at all were normally placed in an "asylum," a word which, along with "feeble-minded" and "deaf and dumb," quickly acquired pejorative connotations. The effort was nevertheless a major step forward, and it began in the New World with Americans who traveled to Europe to study the pioneering techniques beginning to emerge there.

One such was Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. Not only a teacher but a teacher of teachers, he became so interested in the communications problems confronting people who could not hear that he went to Paris to visit a school for the deaf that had been started by a young priest named the Abbé de l'Epeé. When Mr. Gallaudet returned to the United States he brought with him a deaf man who had been trained at the school, Laurent Clerc, and in 1817 they established the Nation's first formal educational institution for the handicapped - the American Asylum for the Deaf, located in West Hartford, Connecticut. Mr. Gallaudet was in time to gain an international reputation for his leadership in the education of deaf and other handicapped children, and he is memorialized today by Gallaudet College in Washington, D.C., the only liberal arts college for the deaf in the world.

Another importer of European techniques for educating the handicapped was John D. Fisher, who had gone to Paris to study medicine. There he became fascinated by the work being done in a residential school for the blind that

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had been started by Valentin Hauy. After his return to the United States in 1826, Dr. Fisher described that work so persuasively that three years later the Massachusetts State Legislature voted funds to establish in Boston the New England Asylum for the Blind (soon thereafter renamed the Perkins School for the Blind and subsequently relocated in its present site in Watertown). The initial director of the school was a physician named Samuel Greeley Howe, and his contributions and those of Dr. Fisher also were to be memorialized - in their cases by the accomplishments of two remarkable women who had been born both blind and deaf.

The first was Laura Bridgman, who began her instruction at Perkins in 1837 when she was seven years old. Her success not only in learning to read and write but as an extraordinarily effective teacher brought new hope to the parents of handicapped children around the world. One such parent was the mother of six-yearold Helen Keller, who read about Laura Bridgman's achievements and sought help from a graduate of Perkins Institute named Anne Sullivan. With Anne Sullivan's help and her own indomitable determination, Helen Keller became the author of several books, a much-soughtafter lecturer, and one of the most admired public figures the Nation has ever known.

Spurred by such examples of what could be done, other institutions for youngsters suffering various handicapping conditions began to come into existence. Most clung to the practice of separating the handicapped from society in special schools, but appearing here and there were arrangements which, while segregating handicapped youngsters from other children, at least made it possible for them to remain with their families. In 1871 a day school was established in Boston for deaf pupils, for example, a class in Providence in 1896 for the retarded, another in Chicago in 1899 for crippled children.

One of the most effective spokesman for this approach was Alexander Graham Bell, who proposed to the 1898 convention of the National Education Association that programs for the handicapped be established in the public schools. Such children, he said, would “form an annex to the public school system, receiving special instruction from special teachers who shall be able to give instruction to little children who are either deaf, blind, or mentally deficient, without sending them away from their homes or from the ordinary companions with whom they are

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associated." Dr. Bell was addressing the conference not as the celebrated inventor of the telephone but as a speech expert from a family of speech experts. He had among other things successfully undertaken the instruction of a deaf boy named George Sanders in Salem, Massachusetts, and it was in the Sanders home that he made his first telephone experiments. When it became clear that his invention would bring him wealth, Dr. Bell wrote to his mother, "Now we shall have money enough to teach speech to little deaf children."

D

r. Bell's comment was revealing not only of his character but of the shaky financial base of the various efforts to educate the handicapped. It is probably fair to say that in general, education of the handicapped ("special education," as it is now referred to by educators) was thought of by the public at large as essentially an exercise in charity. Not long after the turn of the century Elizabeth Farrell, a young teacher at Public School Number 1 in New York City, advocated and exemplified a new point of view. Considering handicapped children not as a caste of unfortunates, but instead viewing them as individuals, she dedicated herself "to the

end that each and every child should be given the opportunity to develop according to his capabilities." She worked first with a group of boys regarded as misfits because of their chronic truancy. On the theory that the school should adapt to them rather than demand that they adapt to the school, she organized an ungraded class in which the children learned with materials not usually associated with the classroom - picture puzzles, tools, paint and brushes, even tin cans. From there she went on to organize basic classes for younger children with intelligence quotients of less than 50 and trade courses for retarded older boys and girls. Along the way, in 1922, she organized and was first president of what is now The Council for Exceptional Children.

"Exceptional children" is an inclusive term covering not only the Helen Kellers and Laura Bridgmans and Miss Farrell's chronic truants, but also exceptionally gifted youngsters whose very brightness can produce problems for them; the physically, mentally, and emotionally handicapped; children whose socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds set them apart; students with motor, visual, auditory, communication, behavioral, cognitive, and specific academic learning dis

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