The Meaning of Special
Here is journalist Mick Hume in the January 12th Times Online on the perceived overuse of the term “special needs” for children in England (1.5 million children in England—18 percent of the total—now have “special needs”):
Call me stupid, but how could that possibly be? It must reflect the fashion for medicalising childhood problems — see apparent epidemics of everything from autism to attention deficit disorder. It could also have something to do with special needs being a ticket for schools to obtain resources and parents to get their children school places.
And that’s not all. This week Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, announced plans for all schools to adopt “personalised learning and teaching”. Today’s official mantra is that every child is unique — that is, they all have special needs.
I do agree with Hume that the meaning of the word “special” seems to have been seriously eroded. Instead of meaning “distinct” as in “distinguished from the usual” or “extraordinary” special (in the US, at any rate) seems now to mean (if you are talking about education and schools) “special as in special ed.” “Special” now refers to education for students who have disabilities, whether physical or neurological; I have even heard “special” used in contexts to mean “disabled” or, pardon the expression, “slow.” “Special needs kids” are still “distinct,” but in a more pejorative sense: They are “special ed students” or “special kids” (or “students who are classified,” as school districts here in New Jersey often say)—they are students who, for various reasons, do not perform as well on academic subjects, or have behavior problems, speech delays, etc. etc..
I don’t know if Hume quite senses all of these meanings of “special,” though, if he takes it to be a de facto equivalent for “unique.” 18% may seem like a high percentage of children to be “special needs”—just as a prevalence rate of “1 in 166″ children being estimated to have autism is seen as grounds for an epidemic—-but what sort of education (if any) might have been given to children without such a “label” in the past?
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POSTED IN: Diagnosis, Education, Stereotypes
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