Canadian Special Education Compared To The 1950's

Of course, today, Canada is a country that is known to be very liberal, progressive, and accepting of all types of people, disabled people included. Although, Canada was not always as nurturing as Canadian society is today, especially when focusing on the history of Canadian special education. Canadian special education began with the exclusion of “special needs” students from education and is currently focusing on the inclusion of “special needs” students into regular classrooms, rather than segregation. This research essay will focus on the mid-to-late 1900s but is not limited to that singular era; the 1800s era will be touched upon in order to give a history and brief understanding. The sources that will be mainly used to build upon this

Although, when compared to the 1950s weak way of educating and catering to the “special needs” students, we see how poorly organized the special education system was in the older days. Thus, education institutions and the Government of Canada only allowed disabled students to join schools in the 1950s in a poorly organized segregated way due to the outrage caused by parents that wanted to have their kids to be educated too. It was only in the 1980s that schools across Canada began to create the inclusive education system that we see today, which humanized disabled people across the country. Therefore, demonstrating that segregating “special needs” students from able students was just a weak and quick solution by Canadian governments in the

The document does describe the disabled Canadian students with words such as “retarded”, which is considered a “dated” and “offensive” word when describing an individual in contemporary society, according to Oxford Dictionary. To be more specific, in Chapter Fifteen and section thirty, the document states that “The more the child is retarded mentally, the more he requires to be taught specifically and concretely, and the less capable he is of thinking imaginatively or abstractly.” With this quote, it is easy to see that the government only thought of the “special needs” students as less human than the able children; the government was under the influence that disabled kids could not critically think like other students. In the document, chapter fifteen is completely based on students with exceptionalities and is even titled “Exceptional Children.” A casual reader could easily mistake this chapter as a honest attempt made by the Ontario and Canadian government, but, as mentioned before, treating the students like unimaginative, inanimate objects will only worsen the situation for them, and the government was simply not trying in the 1950s. More concrete evidence includes