A definition in the 1970s of the educationally handicapped as “persons with difficulties and disadvantages derived primarily from physical causes,” as distinguished from “the mentally, emotionally, socially, and economically handicapped,” is no longer accurate, as the scope of what is recognized as an educational disability underwent a significant expansion in the next thirty years, along with a broadening of the concept of how these disabilities should be addressed.
There are two distinct periods in the education of the disabled in America: from colonial times until approximately 1970, and from the early 1970s forward, during which time much of what is currently perceived to form the substance and procedure of special education rapidly developed. One representative indication of this explosion in the education of the disabled is the change in terminology from “handicapped” to “disabled,” a result of amendments to the federal legislation that has come to define much of special education. This change reflects the belief that “handicapped” has historically been a demeaning term and that “disabled” more precisely identifies the population in question.
The earliest approaches to the education of the disabled in America—during colonial times and for some time thereafter—had little to do with education and more to do with management. Overtly physically or developmentally disabled children were either cared for by individual families or excluded from local society. For example, a 1691 New York act included the mentally challenged among the “Vagabonds and Idle persons” it sought to “discourage.” In 1773, New York passed a law permitting the denial of settlement to the mentally ill or retarded or, if they were already residents, compelling their families to see to their care. By the early nineteenth century, institutions for the “feeble-minded” were established, once again more as a segregating social management tool than as a means to educate independent citizens.
From the early nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, a number of movements arose that offered more educational approaches for specific disability groups, although often in isolated settings. Meaningful deaf education began in 1817, with the founding of Thomas Gallaudet’s private school in Hartford, Connecticut, and was extended by the founding of the first state school for the deaf in Kentucky in 1823, and the eventual proliferation of schools throughout the East and Midwest. In 1864 the first higher education institution for the deaf, the National Deaf-Mute College, now Gallaudet, was federally funded. Additional educational services for the hearing-impaired were developed through the much-publicized efforts of Samuel Gridley Howe and Alexander Graham Bell.
Similarly, educational opportunities for the blind and vision-impaired were established throughout the nineteenth century. Howe founded a private school for the blind in Boston in 1832, soon to be followed by others, all residential. Public day programs for the blind were instituted in Chicago in 1900 and New York in 1909. With the services of the American Printing House for the Blind, Congress and the states began funding local facilities for the blind, often library services, as early as 1868.
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