Education certainly has changed here in America. Trust me on this. I attended grades K-12 from the mid 70s to the late 80s. Today, I'm in the midst of a mid life career change. I've completed work for my masters in education, have passed the Praxis II test and currently have applications out all over the place for a job as an English teacher here in Connecticut.
I've learned a lot in preparation for my teacher's certificate...and a lot of what I've learned has stunned me. For one thing, students with learning disabilities and various other problems are given the attention they need today. Naturally there are those out there who sneer about the “special treatment” these kids are getting, and, in truth, they have a right to be wary. We live in a society where everyone, for whatever reason, seems to be treated with kid gloves these day. That's not always a good thing.
Yet evening the playing field for our young people IS a good thing because it helps all of us in the long run. An educated child is a benefit to society, plain and simple. It doesn't matter HOW the child gets to be educated. What matters is that the child LEARNS. Who really cares if it takes a bit more time and effort for a particular student to succeed? If operating outside the box brings about the desired results, then let the student operate outside the box.
I'm passionate about this issue because I myself was a “problem” student. As a young person, I suffered from ADD, OCD, and Tourette's Syndrome, much as I do now. I don't reveal this information in order to play the martyr, though (we have too many pseudo martyrs in our society), I do it to illustrate a point. In some (if not many) of the schools I attended, I was looked upon by certain educators as if I were garbage. “Lazy,” “undisciplined” and “disruptive” were words I heard a lot while I was young.
And while it's true I could be all of those things (I've gotta be honest here, after all), I had some pretty distinct walls standing between me and what I was supposed to be learning. And some educators had no patience for those walls. They either thought the walls were imaginary or thought they were far smaller than they actually were. Either way they didn't care. The name they gave for those walls was “excuses.”
Clearly, those educators would not hold up well in today's classrooms. Nor should they. Although it's true that special treatment runs the risk of morphing into preferential treatment, a proactive approach to teaching students with particular issues is clearly the way to go in this day and age. So long as the disadvantaged don't end up having an unfair advantage, there's simply no downside to the coin.
