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As the father of a Down's Syndrome son Michael, aged 24, myself, my heart goes out to Brendan O'Connor and other parents of children with disabilities of various kinds. We have been happy for Michael to stay in the Special Education sector, allowing him to develop at his own pace. We did start him at a school for 'moderate' learning difficulties, only to see him arrive home aged six with perplexing pages of 'sums'. He would have made more sense of Sanskrit. Eighteen years later he still possesses only a tangential relationship with number. In other respects he amazes and delights us. Moving him to a Special school obviated the need for him, as Brendan puts it, to be 'dragged along' by his more neuro-typical peers. Alas, in my many decades in 'normal' schools, I've seen too many examples of DS children, put in 'normal' classes with the best will in the world, being made to feel very alienated due to being permanently out of their depth, inadequately supported, and in many cases patronised.
Where I would like to see savings being made is in the 'labelling' industry itself. We have teams of so-called 'experts' making these absurd calls about which ill-fitting category a child should be consigned to, based on pseudo-scientific, semi-medicalised guesstimations, masquerading as 'science' - most of which turn out eventually to be unverifiable. (I have a degree in Social Science from UCD myself, so I know something of what I'm talking about.) We are suckers for 'experts' - a new high-priesthood? They should be ashamed of themselves and find something honourable to do with their trainings - even better, train for something proper in the first place, like being a teacher.
Because of my literacy work, my particular bete noire is those who perpetuate the 'dyslexia' industry. Most of what passes for 'diagnosis' of this nebulous condition, and others, (there's a longish list), is just more quasi-medicalised waffle. There is nothing medically wrong with a child who has difficulties deciphering language. In the vast, vast majority of cases, the problem lies with hit-and-miss, (hit-and-run?) teaching methods, and a labelling industry that needs reining-in.
Here are savings for you, Enda. Keep up the good work Brendan.
Paddy McEvoy (February 19th, 2015)
I was reading some academic papers recently from Blue Labour and came across the following: 'Its opposite involves either the predetermination of what that good might consist of via some theoretical construction; the refusal of the possibility of such a shared good within the individualistic interest- based politics of liberalism and neo-liberalism; or the refusal of a common world of meaning and action in the identity process of multiculturalism'.
And: 'Society, through the development of institutions built around the preservation and nurturing of status, solidarity and subsidiarity, of reciprocity and responsibility, could mediate the logic of both state and market which was to subordinate all self-organised societal organisations to their mutual sovereignty'.
People who write such gobbledegook should be asked what they mean. I certainly don't know, but as a student I endured years of ploughing through turgid undergrowths of verbiage in search of meaning -where there wasn't any... One of the reasons I gave up teaching 'Sociology' and found an honest way to earn a crust, in a Primary school. (March 6th, 2015)
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