Abstract
This chapter relates to understanding disability and the construction of ‘learning difficulties’. It begins with the emerging notion of ‘educability’ and debates between hereditarians and environmentalists. The chapter highlights how disabled people described as having ‘learning difficulties’ are treated as objects, measured in accordance with the normalising standards of society, and subjected to a clear intent to divide, practices of segregation, processes of distancing and dehumanisation. Throughout there is an important critique of the rhetoric of the medical/individual model (biophysical) of disability, which seeks to impose its complex interpretive dominance. Whilst it is recognised that there is an increasing number of interpretative, explanatory and competing understandings of disability (Hales 1995; Llewellyn and Hogan 2000; Turnbull and Stowe 2001; Brett 2002; Reindal 2008), it is not the intention of this chapter to rehearse and labour a detailed outline; such debate can be found elsewhere (Oliver 1990, 1996; Shakespeare 2006; Swain and French 2000, 2008). Rather, what this chapter seeks to do is to add to the existing understanding of how constructions of ‘learning difficulty’ have been produced and reproduced.
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- 1.
Read Hampson (1968) for an understanding of how the Enlightenment emerged from European thought, the interconnections of the creation of the arts, and the discoveries (construction) of science, religion and philosophy, which created a set of attitudes rather than ‘facts’ and in turn influenced modes of thinking and behaving.
- 2.
Read Weber (1967) for an understanding of how rationalism emerged and replaced mysticism, from and through the idea of a ‘calling’ to labour, self-interest and the pursuit of profit.
- 3.
Read Bartlett and Wright (1999), a collection of historical insights into institutional responses to individuals and familial care, in which individuals were at times incarcerated, controlled, regulated, and boarded out to strangers. Given this displacement, one interpretation of institutionalisation was that there were concerns of ill-treatment if such individuals returned home.
- 4.
Read Williams (1966) for a critique of how tragedy, specifically modern tragedy, has been derived (through its historical development) from a particular form of art and that the word is often ‘viciously’ misused. Arguably, then, when disability is interpreted as tragedy, in cultural terms, there emerges a dualistic moral position in that the ‘bad’ will suffer and the so-called good will prosper and be happy—a kind of ‘poetic justice’. This social drama, a moral tragedy, is a shallow demonstration of good and evil, which also demonstrates the loss of human connection, marking the emergence of modern tragic ideas.
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Kikabhai, N. (2018). Producing and Reproducing ‘Learning Difficulties’. In: The Rhetoric of Widening Participation in Higher Education and its Impact. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75966-1_3
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