Mona Gleason, Educational Studies, UBC: “Navigating the Pedagogy of Failure: Medicine and Education Encounters The Disabled Child in English Canada, 1900-1945”
Youth Research Symposium
April 2, 2008
9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. | St. John’s College Social Lounge
Organized by the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education and sponsored by the University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract
At the turn of the twentieth century, medical and educational professionals in numerous national contexts solidified their relationship as partners against the challenges posed by disabled children. In the United States, as was the case in much of Western Europe, eugenic thinking suggested that biological solutions provided answers to social problems posed by ‘abnormal’ bodies. While American and British contributions to the fate of children labeled disabled over the twentieth century have garnered scholarly attention, the English Canadian experience suggests additional, yet often overlooked, affinities. Physical and mental ‘defectives’ or ‘cripples,’ as they were described in the context of the time, were judged largely ill-suited to the demands of public schooling, particularly as it was conceived and configured before World War II in English Canada. Yet, even by the 1920s, manual training was held out as a possible solution to the ‘management’ of the young ‘mentally defective,’ as numerous medical and educational professionals suggested. While children with physical impairments caused other kinds of social anxieties, English Canadian professionals engaged in similar patterns of hand wringing over their fate as well. Far more than just a problem of ‘management,’ however, children labeled disabled brought to the surface transnational anxieties about the stability of the present and the future, particularly on the part of professional elites who feared threats to the social order. Professional pronouncements about disabled children shifted over the century often leaving children themselves caught at the crossroads between scorn and sympathy, invisibility and admiration. Early in the new century, experts characterized physical and mental disability as the irrevocable corruption of body and moral fiber. In the context of English Canada, medical and educational experts who sought to identify, classify, and segregate ‘normal’ bodies from ‘abnormal’ bodies bolstered support for compulsory public schooling. By the early 1940s, however, disabled children were more likely to be cast as innocent victims, worthy of public sympathy, support, and motivation. By this juncture, professionals were advocating increased support for disabled children from the welfare state. Regardless of these significant changes, I argue that shifting versions of a ‘pedagogy of failure’ endured in the professional writing about disabled children. It conveyed powerful lessons about disability as tragedy, deficiency, and, ultimately, failure to mimic more desirable markers of ‘normal.’ In addition to professional writing on the part of adult experts, I consider the oral histories of five adults who were disabled in childhood and who grew up in various regions around the country in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. While I think it critical to contribute to our understanding of the transnational character of professionals’ construction of disabled children over the century, I attempt to consider also how individual children and their families in English Canada responded to the “pathologizing” of experts often thought above close scrutiny.