There is a most unfortunate tiny minority of children who are so severely disabled that they cannot be formally educated. Then there are kids whose disabilities are so profound that they must receive their entire educations in specialized settings, which, although we don’t do it nearly as well as we should, the nation has long provided.
But then there are most of the kids with disabilities, who can learn pretty much what others their age can learn, but need a little bit of help. It is a portion of this category of youngsters whom the Ministry of Education, at the behest of the First Lady, seeks to serve in some 65 special classrooms in public schools around the nation, which are to be equipped to educate children with visual or hearing problems along with peers who don’t have these problems.
Because of this mainstreaming project, one provincial teachers’ union, hardly any of whose members would be working in the special classrooms, has threatened to go on strike.
These teachers need to be sent back to school to learn some manners, a sense of common human decency, and maybe a few skills in adjusting to other people’s special needs.
Ah, but maybe their concept of school is something else --- a place where the bigger and stronger kids bully the smaller and weaker ones, of competition designed to define, marginalize and eliminate “losers” and bestow honors and privileges on “winners,” in imitation of and as preparation for this country’s obscenely polarized social structure.
Set aside for a moment considerations of social justice and common human decency, because bullies, those who believe that their illustrious surnames make them a superior species and apparently this benighted group of teachers do not understand or respond to such values. Yes, we can reject those sorts of attitudes by reference to such ancient traditions as the biblical injunctions against mocking the deaf and putting stumbling blocks in front of the blind. Better yet, let’s look at it from the bottom line of modern Panama’s economic needs.
We are a relatively small and poor country that’s trying to improve our national standard of living. When we consign someone who loses a leg or his or her eyesight to hanging around on the street with a cup, that’s a double economic loss and a setback to the nation’s progress. The person who is marginalized in that way becomes a drain on society’s resources, and we lose his or her capacity to contribute to national progress on many fronts. As a matter of hard-nosed economics, it’s a loss that Panama can’t afford.
Almost all people with disabilities have valuable abilities, and the norm is that they compensate for what they can’t do by enhancing their skills at what they can do. Homer couldn’t see, so he made up for that with a facility with language and a powerful memory that allowed him to compose epic poems that have have endured over millennia while the works of his sighted peers have long been forgotten. Beethoven never heard his Ninth Symphony because his hearing loss had progressed to total deafness by the time he wrote it, but his works are still more often performed and enjoyed than those of Chuck Berry. Both kickers in the recent Super Bowl were coached by a man in a wheelchair who is not himself able to kick a football. The best armies benefit from the services of colorblind observers, who are less easily fooled by camouflage. Einstein believed that his childhood difficulties with spatial perception allowed him to consider the phenomena of time and space mathematically, without the preconceived notions of those whose normality give them both a common sense and a susceptibility to illusions, and thus led to his theories of relativity. Lincoln got past his depression, saved his nation and freed the slaves. Julius Caesar overcame his epilepsy to lead an empire.
So is it too much to ask the afflicted among our public school teachers to set aside their debilitating prejudices for the good of the nation?
Yes, the teachers who threaten to walk out over mainstreaming would be able to mobilize support from some parents and students, who can be expected to argue that students who share a classroom with kids who have disabilities inherently have their educations slowed down and held back.
If done inappropriately, mainstreaming can divert so much of the teachers’ efforts toward the kids with special needs that the rest of the students get less time. The pilot project now about to begin will not mean that we can now close the schools for the blind or the deaf, or the special education facilities for those with serious learning disabilities. But those are not the things that the Ministry of Education proposes to do.
What is contemplated, however, is an ordinary range of public education experiences for kids who can benefit from it with just a little specialized help. It’s actually a very cautious program.
The kids without special disabilities actually benefit in many ways from their close exposure to those who would be brought into the educational mainstream. There are, of course, lessons about decency, tolerance and social justice to be learned, lessons that are crucial for our national economic development. Some perfectly able kids will suffer accidents or illnesses in their lives, and the examples of their former classmates with disabilities will serve to remind them that their new handicaps can be overcome. Because we all have disabilities --- if you don’t believe this, think about your powers to hit Mariano Rivera’s cutter out of the park, your ability to properly pronounce a foreign language that’s new to you, how conversant you are in quantum mechanics or how literate you would be if you picked up a Sumerian cuneiform tablet --- exposure to both those with special talents and those with special needs helps a youngster understand his or her own situation in a much more realistic light and thus make better decisions about what to do in life.
The modest mainstreaming program that the First Lady is promoting and the Ministry of Education is implementing is good for the kids who will gain access to regular schools, good for their classmates without special handicaps and above all, good for Panama. Let it be the start of a sorely needed modernization of one particularly retrograde aspect of Panamanian culture.
Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.
