Every historian of education eventually encounters Bernard Bailyn's 1960 book, Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study, and his challenge to the field to define education much more broadly than the generation of house historians previously had. Historians of education, Bailyn writes, should consider “education not only as formal pedagogy but as the entire process by which a culture transmits itself across the generations.”Footnote 1 We wager, however, that few historians of education have come across Douglas Baynton's similar call in 2001 to consider disability as a bigger part of history.Footnote 2 “Disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it,” Baynton writes, “but conspicuously absent in the histories we write.”Footnote 3 It is time for Professor Bailyn to meet Professor Baynton. In the five essays in this special issue, they do.
It is not totally accurate to say that disability in history has been neglected. Like educational history when Bailyn composed his essay over sixty years ago, a lot has been written about disability in the past. Bailyn observed that professional educators, not historians, wrote many of the first histories of education. Unfortunately, they lacked the historian's skill of linking up education to the rest of American history. So, too, did educational history develop “in almost total isolation from . . . twentieth century historiography,” Bailyn writes.Footnote 4 Disability history is similar. With historians absent, special educators, along with others in professional areas such as rehabilitation, wrote most of the disability history. Historians of education Marvin Lazerson and Barry M. Franklin actually noticed this as a problem some time ago.Footnote 5 Missing the professional historian's skill of situating disability history within mainstream historiography, writers who were not historians stranded disability history, as Catherine Kudlick says, in the “unglamorous backwaters” of history that interested only a few readers in “applied professional fields.”Footnote 6
More recently, professional historians have begun to chart a fresh course they call the “new disability history.” At the center of this are important distinctions these historians make between the “medical” and “social” approaches to disability. A medical approach takes for granted that disability is always a personal deficit to overcome. A social approach, which the new disability history adopts, encourages historians to think more imaginatively about disability, to treat it as a historically constructed social category, like other categories historians have become accustomed to exploring, such as gender, race, or class.Footnote 7 Applying a social approach reveals whole new worlds of disabled experiences in history that appear quite different than the medical. Looked at this way, disability comes into view not just as personal, physical, and tragic, but as potentially public and political, cultural and social, and manifestly diverse—a category ready for historical analysis.Footnote 8 The new disability history, with its social approach, as Kudlick says, puts disability “squarely at the center of historical inquiry, both as a subject worth studying in its own right and as one that will provide scholars with a new analytic tool for examining power itself.”Footnote 9
The new disability history does more than just recognize people with disabilities as historical actors, although it does that also.Footnote 10 (So do a few historians of education that the new disability history has inspired, Richard J. Altenbaugh notably.Footnote 11) Beyond the welcomed tendency to include more disabled people and their stories in their writing, the new disability historians, like Baynton, want historians to hunt for disability more thoroughly in the past. For a start, as Baynton writes, they can look for it as a “fundamental element in cultural signification” across time.Footnote 12 Kate Rousmaniere did this in her 2013 article in this journal, “Those Who Can't, Teach: The Disabling History of American Educators.”Footnote 13 Just about everyone knows the idiom “Those who can, do; those who can't, teach.” But how many people have thought about it as a disability metaphor? Starting from that place, Rousmaniere uses this everyday idiom and other examples like it to illustrate how disability has been a dominant cultural signifier in the historical development of schools and the teaching profession. She shows how “metaphors of disability are woven throughout common understandings of education: schools are criticized as being ‘broken’ or ‘crippled’; . . . educators are referred to as so incompetent that they are the ‘blind leading the blind,’” and so on.Footnote 14 At the same time that they are used to criticize schooling and educators, these expressions whisper over and over that a disabled teacher is a bad teacher, conflating the two.Footnote 15
Language sometimes is power. As Baynton argues, mentioning disability is one of the most common and powerful justifications for inequality in American history. “Opponents of political and social equality for women cited their supposed physical, intellectual and psychological flaws. . . . Arguments for racial inequality and immigration restrictions invoked supposed tendencies to feeble-mindedness, mental illness, deafness, blindness, and other disabilities in particular races and ethnic groups.”Footnote 16 Looking at disability in educational history in this way reveals, for example, how reformers have leveraged culturally powerful notions equating disability to incompetence to fire disabled teachers. It exposes how they have attributed disability to entire classes of teachers, such as lesbians and gays, African Americans, and ethnic minorities, in order to justify dismissing them or stopping their professional advancement.Footnote 17
Discriminatory claims that racialized groups are less intelligent have existed since reformers first introduced special education programs widely in the 1910s.Footnote 18 From the beginning, school authorities used these claims as justification for parking racialized and poor children in special education programs in vastly disproportionate numbers, a practice that has endured for generations.Footnote 19 This has been an equity problem where these programs have offered only a basic or inferior education, under the argument that special education pupils could not benefit from anything more than that. Although not all or always, many special education programs have followed this pattern.Footnote 20 Disability and the justification of inequality in this example can work the other way around, however. Baynton observes that
disability figured prominently not just in arguments for the inequality of women and minorities but also in arguments against those inequalities. Such arguments took the form of vigorous denials that the groups in question actually had these disabilities; they were not disabled, the argument went, and therefore were not proper subjects for discrimination [emphasis in original].Footnote 21
In 1971, as just one example, Boston parents sued their state's education and mental health departments because Boston school officials had been, for nearly a decade, intentionally misdiagnosing as mentally retarded large numbers of students, particularly African American ones and those from low-income families. They did this to tap into federal education money that was only available for special education programs. The parents’ lawsuit claimed that once the district misdiagnosed their children as mentally retarded, it then placed them in inappropriate and educationally meaningless special education programs. Their case did not question that these inferior special education programs were unsuitable for truly disabled children. Rather, the lawyers denied that the complainants’ children had disabilities, thereby implying that properly diagnosed children did deserve such treatment.Footnote 22
When Bailyn Meets Baynton
When Professor Bailyn meets Professor Baynton, interesting things happen. The four historical studies and one history-policy research study in this issue are proof of that. Each author adopts insights from the new disability history, relating that history to other educational, cultural, and political history. None of the studies takes for granted that a given individual's disability is a personal biological deficit. Instead, they show how historical currents have shaped and formed different meanings for disabilities in different periods. Further, following Bailyn's early recommendations, three of the five articles explore education and disability outside of public schools. They look at how other institutions transmitted and propagated ideas about disability and consider the influence of other intersecting categories, such as religious faith or gender.
In her article, “‘To give light where He made all dark’: Educating the Blind about the Natural World and God in Nineteenth-Century North America,” Joanna Pearce examines how nineteenth-century educators of the blind worried that blindness left young people deficient because they were unable to see and appreciate God's creation.Footnote 23 Disability to these nineteenth-century Americans and Canadians was not a personal biological deficit; it was a spiritual one. To attempt to make blind children more “normal” by making them more Christian, these educators introduced a parade of pedagogical inventions. Their creations—tactile models, taxidermied animals, tangible maps, and the like—had as their objective the instruction of blind students in science and nature study, so they too could learn and appreciate what God had created. These educators of the blind had a functional outcome in mind. Good citizens were good Christians, and by teaching the blind science and nature study, they believed they were forming these pupils as both. In this sense, they shared the same belief in the necessity of religious instruction as nineteenth-century educators of sighted children.
Like Pearce, Leanna Duncan's article, “‘Every One of Them Are Worth It’: Blanche Van Leuven Browne and the Education of the ‘Crippled Child,’” looks at an earlier way of conceptualizing disability differently. Browne was a woman with a disability who founded a Detroit private school for crippled children in the early twentieth century. She had a different educational philosophy than the progressives who came after her, and who in fact eventually took control of her school. Unlike them, Browne did not subscribe to a deficit and medical model of disability. She did not advocate for modified vocational education or surgical “cures” for her pupils. She did not believe that crippled children's physical differences were deficits that warranted an adapted education or medical correction. Instead, she encouraged her students to get “an academic education, focused on writing, citizenship, and individuality.”Footnote 24
In addition to operating her school, Browne was a capable and prolific author who used writing to make her living. She wanted her students to be able to do similarly. Like women and men who belonged to other social justice movements of her era, Duncan argues that Browne had a faith in education's transformative potential. She tried to prove to mainstream America that crippled children were capable of education and citizenship on the same terms as able-bodied ones.
Browne engaged in yet another of Baynton's “vigorous denials” of disability, where an individual or group attempts to circumvent discrimination by conceding that it should not apply to them because they are not disabled, while implying (or often stating outright) that the discrimination still properly applies to people who are.Footnote 25 In arguing that her crippled students belonged, she positioned them against another group of disabled youngsters, the feebleminded. Crippled children had intellectual capacity, Browne argued, and therefore society should not exclude them. Browne's denialism was dangerous in an era in which eugenics held considerable sway and many people feared and reviled the intellectually disabled, who they tried to institutionalize and sometimes sterilize. Ultimately, Browne lost control of her school to a board composed of characteristically progressive reformers. They repudiated her unique view of disability and replaced it with a more conventional medical approach that focused on a narrow vocational training for the school's pupils along with surgery and other interventions to correct their supposed physical deficits.
Educators are guardians of the highest ideals that societies pass on through public schools. Teachers have often been expected to embody those ideals as well. The education act of at least one major North American jurisdiction—to this day—still says that the teacher's duties include the responsibility to “inculcate by precept and example respect for religion and the principles of Judaeo-Christian morality and the highest regard for truth, justice, loyalty, love of country, humanity, benevolence, sobriety, industry, frugality, purity, temperance and all other virtues.”Footnote 26 In her article in this special issue, “‘The Important Consideration, After All, Is Disability’: Physical Standards for Teachers in Los Angeles, 1930–1970,” Kristen Chmielewski adds another item to a long list of “rules for schoolteachers.”Footnote 27 She shows how school officials insisted that Los Angeles teachers be specimens of ableness. In personnel decisions, school officials discriminated against teachers who could not meet their expectations of fitness. Chmielewski argues that officials feared that teachers who were unfit would reproduce unfitness in their pupils. This was both an example of how Los Angeles school officials identified fitness as an ideal and how they demanded that teachers fulfill ideals “by example.” Chmielewski also demonstrates how the Los Angeles public school system used disability to justify other discrimination, in this case by age. Superintendent Frank A. Bouelle adopted a policy in 1933 that targeted for dismissal “elderly and otherwise undesirable teachers,” in part to save money. Bouelle's policy equated age with unsuitability for teaching, and he then recommended that the school board use disability as a pretext to fire these teachers because “retirement law” allowed the system to forcibly retire disabled educators. The Affiliated Teacher Organizations of Los Angeles (ATOLA) defended teachers against Bouelle and the administration. Yet, like many other antidiscrimination activists, the ATOLA did not quarrel with dismissing teachers who were disabled. Instead, it used a disability denial, claiming that not every superannuated teacher was disabled and therefore public school officials should only dismiss teachers who had disabilities, not older teachers.
Laura Micheletti Puaca explores the interest in the rehabilitation of disabled homemakers in the two decades following the Second World War. Her article, “Home Economics, ‘Handicapped Homemakers,’ and Postwar America,” merges gender, class, race, and disability as categories of analysis. Puaca argues that “Home economists’ work with physically disabled homemakers simultaneously upheld and challenged white, middle-class, able-bodied gender roles.”Footnote 28 They upheld gender norms because home economics was identified as only for women, and disabled women homemakers were presumed to need rehabilitation to assume their expected feminine roles. Yet the work of home economists with women with disabilities challenged the assumption that women had to be able-bodied to fulfill socially prescribed gender roles properly. Disabled women, educators of handicapped homemakers said, could in fact live in the community, marry, and bear and raise children, but only if they received appropriate training to do so and lived a socially normative life with a bread-winning husband, a lifestyle to which middle-class and white women had much greater access. Puaca's intersectional gender analysis found that although the women who led handicapped homemaker study initiatives discovered a female professional niche, their efforts were fraught with the same biases Puaca identifies.
We are delighted that this special issue also includes a history-policy article by Christine Ashby, Julia M. White, Beth Ferri, Siqi Li, and Lauren Ashby. In their study, they use disability history to contribute to, and critique, contemporary educational policy. The policy under analysis is the formation of K-8 schools that create “enclaves of privilege” in an American school district today.Footnote 29 In their study of Syracuse, New York, the authors are concerned about the disproportional numbers of students of color labeled disabled, and the increased likelihood these youngsters’ schools will place them in separate, noninclusive settings. Most notable in the study is the intersection of this phenomenon over time with school reforms that replaced middle schools with K-8 elementary schools, and accompanying racial and class segregations. Drawing on a “DisCrit intersectional” and spatial analysis with geographic information system (GIS) software, the authors conclude that these reforms funneled white students into K-8 schools, which are more inclusive, while trapping students of color in middle schools that are more likely to separate labeled students into special education classrooms. Thus, the authors argue, the school restructuring reform exacerbated historical patterns of racial privilege for whites, while simultaneously reinforcing the racist and ableist disadvantages that students of color and disabled students face.
Geography matters a great deal to this privilege-disadvantage matrix, as reformers introduced K-8 schools to try to keep white, middle-class families in the city, placing their new K-8 schools in or on the boundary of white, higher-income neighborhoods. Thus the privilege of whiteness and class furthered a marginalization of students of color and students with disabilities. The authors use educational and disability history to show how events over time built up to their contemporary case study.
Disability, and people with disabilities, are conspicuously present in this special issue on the history of disability in education. Drawing on insights from new disability history, feminist studies, and intersectional analysis, the essays contribute to interdisciplinary scholarship in historical studies in education and provide excellent examples of putting disability “squarely at the center of historical inquiry,” as both a subject of study and as an analytic tool.Footnote 30 We hope that now that historians of education have met Professor Baynton, they will keep him in mind as they continue to hear Professor Bailyn's call to write broad and meaningful educational histories.
