Exploring the Evolution of Special Education Practices: a Systems Approach: A Systems Approach

By Joseph Ifeanyi Monye

Exploring the history of disability and special education practices from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century indicates similar ideas and similar human approaches that have developed independently over time. People who survived the eugenics movement were placed in asylums and segregated special schools. In Europe and America, the general systems theory has been applied as a logico-mathematical discipline to include students of all special needs categories in their placements and education.
The systems approach to special education practices has evolved from a historical model of diagnoses and cures to the biological and ecological models, integrating technology as the driving force in implementing curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483600680

Joseph Ifeanyi Monye

o Born in April 14, 1958, I was raised in a rural country side of Agbor, Nigeria o Attended Gbenoba Grammar School and later worked with the defunct Bendel Broadcasting Corporation in Warri, Nigeria o .Moved to the United States and attended Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas, before transferring to Laney College in Oakland, California. (associate degree, 1984) o Briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the United States Army Reserve Corps from 19831989 o Graduated from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (bachelors degree, 1995) o Graduated from the City College of the City University of New York (masters degree, 2005) o Held several teaching and consulting positions in Virginia, New York, and Maryland o Is currently a tutor-volunteer and educational consultant with New York Citys the Equity Project

Book preview

Chapter 1

Educational Inequity, Competition, and Scarce Resources: Setting the Stage

Nineteenth-century Charles Darwin reasoned that there will always be competition for societies’ scarce resources, such as space, food, water, as well as educational resources (human capital) within our species’ environment. If all the offspring in a given population produces in their image and likeness, there is bound to be competition for scarce resources. In this way therefore, it is unlikely that all will survive viability.

Those individuals that survive can only logically be the ones that reproduce and pass down their most desirable traits, such as an adaptive capacity to generate wealth, physical appearance, and yes, educational possibilities. The ability to reproduce one’s genetic information and to socially reproduce one’s acquired traits, such as wealth to one’s offspring, is in itself a very powerful evolutionary trait indeed.

Darwin was not silent on the issue of natural selection, in which he stipulated that there must have existed variations within populations. Some variations are favorable and can survive, while others are unfavorable and can die or stagnate. Darwin was thus the first to advance and develop a comprehensive theory of evolution based entirely on competition, variation, and survival in the natural environment.

When transposed into the natural world of American education, the biological concepts of natural selection is reproduced in its social manifestations in the educational arena of survival of the fittest. In this regard, wealth, social class, unequal funding in school districts, ability groupings within schools, tracking of whole school systems into students in general education and students in special education, are all thus affected by the structure of modern-day schooling, be it positive or negative.

Functionally, these conditions produce the two-tier system of education—one, for those with favorable adaptive capacity; and the other, for those with less favorable adaptive capacity.

It should be noted that race did not so much appear as a relevant factor until much later. In this way, it can be argued that favorable adaptation traits—not race—tended to support the survival of the fittest mentality, which appears to favor segregation; thus, exclusion in its worst kind had to emerge. One America, two parallel education system: general and special education—one is superior while the other is inferior, with both groups painfully aware of the other’s educational attainment potential, yet without remedy or equity.

Inequality in education and savage inequity

According to Joel Spring (2002:48), residential segregation into rich and poor school districts in America seriously compromises Horace Mann’s dream of mixing the children of the rich and poor in the same schoolhouse to receive an equal education. This is particularly true as income becomes more dependent on educational achievement. Those with already high incomes will be able to buy houses in school districts within promising environments for attaining education geared toward high income jobs. In this manner, a family can pass on its educational advantages to its children. For the have-nots, the opposite scenarios can be true—where attainment, educational and economic advantages, as well as other non-favorable traits are equally transmitted from one generation to the next with a particular social context.

Survival of the fittest:

Understanding our educational evolution

The Origin of Species (Darwin 1859) was much more than a scientific treatise. Marvin Harris (1988:117) stated that it was a great book, precisely because of the diverse cultural themes it consolidated and expressed. It dramatized and legitimated what many people felt to be true without themselves being able to put it into words.

Darwin’s book had a rather focused philosophical message, namely, the reaffirmation of the laws of nature, the inevitability of progress, and the justice inherent in the system of struggle, without which, progress would be an illusion. Darwin, no doubt, stood on the shoulders of others to render meaningful his sociological theory of development. In his ideology of progress through struggle, Darwin—like his contemporaries—was surprisingly incapable of differentiating changes due to a group’s learned or acquired behaviors from possible changes due to hereditary modifications.

For example, in today’s American educational environments, the idea that inner-city youths could be intelligent and academically gifted is simply inconceivable by many teachers and school administrators and is thus a non-issue. To stipulate that the black inner-city youth, with a multitude of learning disabilities, have long been written off by the system is an understatement. Nothing has changed since Darwin.

No educators, not even the multicultural proponent of curricular changes, have yet to come up with adequate answers, let alone write a book that succinctly and pedagogically addresses the myriad of needs of students with learning disabilities who live within city limits. The individualized education plans (IEP) as a guideline for service delivery protocol are simply not enough. Without resorting to Spencer’s Social Darwinism, as convincingly espoused in his Principles of Sociology (1896), this researcher is aware of the important role of variation in the operations of social laws. According to Darwin, social laws made human deliberative action possible in the rational facilitation of progress in society. Thus, in addition, Peet and Hartwick (1999: 67) suggested that the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest applied to human societies legitimated laissez-faire market systems, private ownership of productive resources, and social inequalities.

Although this researcher agrees with the basic tenets of Spencer’s work, Spencer, however, places his sociology in jeopardy. This is because his idea that human nature is a product of two diametrically opposed aspects of human behavior—namely, on the one hand, biologically inherited capacities influenced by the struggle for existence, and on the other, socially transmitted capacities—influenced by fitness for survival has not yet been proven with certainty.

The poorhouse effect in special education practices

During the eighteenth-century enlightenment up to and including Darwin’s era, only the privileged class in society had the opportunity for formal education. The poor in America, who couldn’t afford education of any kind, were simply lumped together either as lunatics, defective children, imbeciles, dunces, and/or were consequently classified as insane—fit only for the asylums of the mentally retarded in New York State, Massachusetts, Virginia, Maryland, and elsewhere across the original thirteen colonies.

Roberta Ramsey (2003: 2-3) documented that in America, the colonists treated people with severe mental disorders as criminals, while some who were harmless were left to beg or were treated as paupers. At some time, it was common practice to sell them to the person who would provide for them at the least cost to the public, thus making the mentally ill the cartels of slavery. Gradually, this practice was eliminated as it were. When this practice was stopped, persons with mental retardation were put or quarantined into poorhouses or squalor boarding homes. In most instances, minimal learning in the life skills curriculum did occur.

Thus, Darwin’s theory of natural selection and Spencer’s articulation of its application in the survival of the fittest became the historical equivalent of What happened, brought forth to the contemporary explanation of What’s now happening, in the arena of American special education environment. A condition for good education in general is the acquisition of cultural capital in particular. The acquisition of life skills was essential. Decades later, life skills acquisition became the bedrock on which American special education practices was founded.

These conditions will be analyzed by contemplating the essence of the No Child Left Behind Act on students with learning disabilities. Specifically, how does a theory on natural selection impact the development of education in general, but specifically, on special education? For these and other issues, we now turn to Karl Marx’s Capital and a critique of political economy by analyzing our educational environment of curriculum, instruction, and assessment. This analysis will be based on the works of Jurgen Habermas (1979), Herbert Marcuse (1968), David Held (1980), and will be consistent with their introduction to critical theory. But first, let’s set the stage and consider Hegel’s disagreements with Marx as they relate to issues of cultural capital.

Chapter 2

Karl Marx’s Disagreement with Hegel

Karl Marx’s concepts and theories significantly differed from those of Hegel (1770-1831), whose intellectual influence on him was immeasurable. Marx rebelled against the philosophical movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, especially that which was attributed to Hegel. As for Hegel’s Dialectic and Idealism, Karl Marx disapproved. The dialectic is both a way of thinking and an image of the real world, which stresses the importance of processes, relations, conflicts, dynamics, and contradictions… . Hegel tended to apply the dialectic only to ideas… whereas Marx felt that they applied similarly to the economy, and therefore, to our educational establishment (Ritzer 1992:20).

On Hegel’s philosophy of idealism, the emphasis is on the mind and other mental/psychological constructs, rather than the material aspects of life which Marx held dear. Indeed, that idealism denies concrete reality was to form the focal point of Marx’s departure from Hegel. In the dialectic, Marx contends that people are real; in which they had to work to survive, and they socialize in the process. Marx believes that Hegel’s essences or spirits of society are basically values, which—again—are the mental constructs of the human mind.

Thus, a social construct such as schooling is a socially agreed-upon phenomenon on which society thrives—for example, formal education in America together with its concomitant ramifications. It should be noted that the modern positioning of this single index classificatory scheme (Values) is not even close to being realistic. For example, what are the deeply held values by students with learning disabilities regarding today’s American educational system?

Neither Marx nor Hegel has an acceptable answer in this regard. Materialism, according to Karl Marx, formulates a theory on the conception of history in the formation and development of social structures upon which both economic and political institution emerge.

In this view, economic relations constitute the base of society wherein the noneconomic institutional superstructure lies (such as, for example, the educational system). In American industrial society, formal education establishment is seen as a delegate agency, which is charged with the means of upward mobility of its citizens and as a method of credential acquisition, which is structured for preparation into a variety of entry-level job positions/allocations (Ogbu 2003). In this way, students are expected to benefit from the American Dream and have a share of society’s scarce resources, such as adequate and affordable housing, education, good nutrition, as well as healthcare.

Materialism viewed as economic determinism

Critics contend that if class formation was an essential aspect of Marx’s analysis, it would soon become the relations of goods and services, which invariably constituted the basis for both social structure and social change. In a way, this conception closely anticipates Marx’s ideas about religion. Again, Marx had defined religion as the opium of the people, even though his concept of religion did not differ much from Feuerbach’s theory on Alienation (1844). Herein, humans tended to attribute their own culturally created norms and values to divine forces. In doing so, purposeful attention is diverted from the injustices and inequalities of planet earth with the hopes of a promise in the