We have good evidence that most children can become literate alongside their peers. Not just a majority of children, but virtually all. In 1975, with the enactment of the American Disabilities and Handicapped Children Act, all children were given the right to be educated in the least restrictive environment. Today, children with disabilities are entering the regular classrooms, where teachers are looking for ways to teach them.
Researchers, already in disagreement about such basic issues as how to teach reading, have proposed strategies for teaching children who learndifferently. When educational theories leave the universities and arrive in the larger community, they often are interpreted as facts. Textbooks are developed, kits are designed, tests are written, and programs are bought forever classroom. When this happens, “children’s learning is lost in the clean copy of aphonics workbook page or in a test of learning styles or in some other reductionist trick”. Simple solutions are prescribed for complex problems.
Now we add children who have a diagnosis of mental retardation to the mix. Historically, children with mental retardation were institutionalized or kept out of sight at home. Not until the 1960s were children with mental retardation allowed to enter public school systems. Education of these children focused on functional needs, and literacy was not an issue. The diagnostic-prescriptive model no longer seems logical way to approach the literacy needs of the handicapped child.
The highly sophisticated tests that are now used to identify strengths and weaknesses for behavioral objectives are of little or no use to the regular classroom teacher, for what is produced under artificial means in clinical situations is seldom the same behavior seen in the classroom. The sensitive period of language focuses on the acquisition of language.
Children acquire language by absorbing sounds, words, and grammar from the environment. The pace of language acquisition is considered to be irregular with “explosions” until around the age of 21/2. After that age, children absorb the richness of language around them, and by the age of 6, they are able to speak and understand the rules of grammar that are present in their environment.
Maturation plays an important role throughout mental growth, for unless children are at the stage of maturity where they can understand what it is that one wishes to teach them, they will merely learn empty procedures. Mental growth and physical growth are inseparable. True intellectual competence was thought by Piaget to be a manifestation of children’s largely unassisted activities, where they acquire experiences while performing actions upon object. The history of special education reveals a constant struggle for children with mental retardation or severe handicaps. Since the 16th century these children have looked to the normal population for help, yet have been excluded and often ignored.
