Professor Bailyn, Meet Professor Baynton: The “New Disability History” of Education

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.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.” [...]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].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. 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. 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.23 Disability to these nineteenth-century Americans and Canadians was not a personal biological deficit; it was a spiritual one.