I remember a night when dad left my room at university and I cried. I had always feared being away from home – always! Hebden green, the school where I was educated, has a residential department, where kids can stay for up to four nights a week, to give parents respite. I remember bawling my eyes out each and every time I had to stay there – it wasn’t as if resi was bad, just that I missed my home. Home was where I was most comfortable, safe and sound. However, in retrospect I realise I was being totally selfish – looking after me would not have been easy for my parents, at a time when dad was busy with European quality awards and my brothers needed their fair share of attention. I knew that my parents needed one or two nights free of having to spoon feed me, wipe my butt and so on, but I couldn’t give them it. Moreover, there were children half my age at residential, coping quite happily; in short, I was immature.
This fear returned that first night, when my father prepared to leave me at university. Then, the tears returned, so much so that dad later said he nearly took me home. But we both knew that this was not an option – I knew that I was going to have to leave home sometime, so I stayed. I stayed in my room all evening, as, until then I did not know I could go outside alone, without permission from anyone. What if I fell? What if there were bandits?
Permission, if it was needed at all, came via web conference the next evening. Dad said it should be fine for me to walk around campus alone: ‘why not, Matt?’ and so I did,. That day was a Wednesday, and I walked into brandies, found the disco in full swing, and never missed home again.
This year I have flourished at university, not in the sense that my brothers have, but then they did not have my fear of going anywhere alone. I thought I needed a PA to go anywhere, as there were too many ‘what if’s, and so I didn’t go anywhere, but stayed in doors, on my computer. Yet this year has changed that fundamentally. My horizons have been thrust wide open, and it seems as though I can do anything, from watching busa football matches to going to the Opera. I have learned more than ever, but I have also lived more than ever.
What strikes me is the contrast between then and now. I am no longer timid and shy, but feel like I am free. It is as though there was something restraining me, to use an over-used metaphor, but this has been lifted. And so we finally get to my point..
This restraint was, I think, imposed by school. Over a decade of going o that safe, insular place will do such things. Towards the end of my education there, school installed high fences around perimeter in the light of the dunblane tragedy, but this had all the appearance of a fence around an enclosure in a zoo, rather than a defence against attack. In other words, school resembled a prison, or an institution, and the fence’s purpose was to keep students in. the fence can be seen as symbolic – school was repressive, it’s walls deceptively bright. Children there were, and are, educated in name only, and the thirst for knowledge was not fostered. Kids who could not read, aged sixteen, were simply fobbed off as having learning difficulties, and my parents had t push to get me decent GCSEs. As an aside, it was my parent’s pushiness that got me on the path to university, their insistence that a D was not good.
However, without my parents’ help and bloody minded insistence that I did A-Levels, I would have languished. My classmates did. I am not sure how well they could read, but each time one of them read aloud – baring Michelle – it was rather slow. If memory serves, maths only extended up to, say, Pythagoras. Mind you, I always found maths difficult and dull, so I did not try. It was only when I failed maths, (i.e., got a D), and my parents got me a tutor, that mats got to be interesting. To put this in context, while, at school, we were studying frogspawn, offer the dinner table, mark, two years my senior, was explaining to us that time sped up and slowed down. Thus, without my parents insistence that I should be properly educated, as befits the son of a middle class family, I would not be at university, but,, in all probability, in some sheltered accommodation.
Indeed, not many former special school students who complete their ‘education’ in such places end up in university. Of course, a great many disabled people do end up in higher education, but most attended inclusive schools. A notable example of this is Disability now’s Kate Caryer, whom I have had the fortune to meet. Moreover, the statistics bear this out: in the 95/96 term,, just 16% of year 11 pupils achieved A* to G grades at GCSE in special schools, compared with 93% in mainstream (Thomas, 1997). No doubt the residual 84% were fobbed off as having learning difficulties, and I have little doubt that, had it not been for my parent’s bloody mindedness, I might have been among them.
Not only do I blame school for my educational stiltedness, but my social stiltedness. Admittedly, my parents had their hand in this, as did my general wimpy disposition, but school had a major hand. Post-16 students were not allowed off school grounds during school hours, and there had to be a teacher on duty to go into the playground. Thus, I was never out of shouting range from people I had known from infancy. This was not, of course, as repressive as some schools or institutions – some of which see o treat kids like cattle – but I was repressive enough. In short, it was intended tom mould students into good, quiet, sheltered accommodation inmates.
This must end. I want more students to feel that which I felt the moment I set foot in brandies, or the moment Alan Faire took the podium on my first ever lecture. According to Speechless (Crosley, 1997) many people described as ‘severely retarded’ [sic] simply have communication problems, and I would maintain that my school friends could not read, not because they had learning difficulties, but because they were not motivated enough. Take, for example, Tom, apparently illiterate until it came to his first love of football, whereupon he could read the football scores as well as anyone.
The next obvious question is ‘What tells us he would do any better in mainstream?’ the answer is that he might not, but mainstream is far more engaging than any special school, where one mused sometimes which of your friends would die next. Just as I came alive when I first entered university, if schools would just find ways to accommodate all children, all children – able bodied included – would benefit. As Kikabhai (2002) wrote, ‘A wider implication and consequence of segregated education, as pointed out by Vlachou (1997:15-16), stated that, ‘segregated education is a major cause of society’s widespread prejudice against disabled people.’
‘Just’ being the operative word. Major adaptations will need to be installed, but this can, and indeed must, be done, for all of the above reasons. One could, of course argue that it would be simpler to improve educational standards in special schools, but I would counter by saying that the problem is innate. If one has a class of, say, eight disabled pupils, each requiring intensive academic help with only two members of staff to help them, the overall educational gain is less than that of a class of twenty with one disabled person with his own dedicated learning support assistant. Only when I entered a mainstream classroom, with Heather sat by me taking my notes, did I really start to learn. Thus, until we implement similar systems for all disabled students, as befits their needs, very few will experience that which I have this last year.
The Ill-Informed Ramblings of a Cripple 