as small as a world and as large as alone

8:41pm December 30, 2013

allies-person:

youneedacat:

flutterflyinvasion:

cheapfilling:

college is catered towards the able bodied and able minded. school applauds people who can stay up all night, skip meals, and work endlessly. that kind of extreme contribution is expected. why are disabled people being squeezed out of academic institutions? why should I feel inferior because of some arbitrary and ridiculous standard?

FUCK.  YES.

I wish I’d thought this way my first time at college.  It could’ve spared me a suicide attempt.  Maybe.  

I really hate the use of the term “able-minded,” though.  I say everyone is able-minded, or no one is.

Plus, I don’t know, I sense kind of an implication that disabled people can never do well in college?  Maybe I’m just over-sensitive, having been inundated with the “disabled means you can’t be successful” message, but I feel like this statement posits a universal experience of disability which isn’t universal.  Some of us find academic environments easier to navigate than the so-called “real world,” where I often feel like I don’t have a single clue.

And part of me can’t help but feel like this energy would be better spent coming up with resources and practical plans and suggestions for how a wide range of disabled people can do well in college.  ASAN’s Navigating College is a good resource, and I’m sure there are other good resources as well.

I didn’t take it that way.

Like, if you say, college is geared towards this kind of person, and makes it hard for that other kind of person.  You’re not saying that that other kind of person never makes it through college.  You’re just saying that that other kind of person overwhelmingly faces barriers that make it impossible for many of that other kind of person to get through college, even if some manage it.

And that above paragraph applies to everyone college doesn’t cater to, not just disabled people.

And I agree that it would be great to make college accessible to a wide range of people.

But that doesn’t mean it’s worthless to say the sort of thing that was said above.

And that doesn’t mean that there will ever be a time when college won’t be inaccessible to a large number of disabled people.  (Not based on what disability grouping they’re part of, but based on what particular people are capable of doing right then versus what college requires.  Name anything, and there will be disabled people who can’t do it regardless of accessibility changes.)

I don’t think i could ever get a college degree, and I don’t think it would be good for that to be a goal of mine, even in a world where college were much-improved with regard to disability.  Even on things like Coursera, I can barely handle one or two classes at a time and I may not be able to handle it at all long-term.

And I think it would be great if some disabled people were able to realize sooner that college is not for us, and that this does not make us defective, and that this should notaffect our futures in a horrible way, and that we are not inferior, and that we don’t just have to try harder, and that we do not have to be like people who can do college.

And making that a reality is not a bad thing at all, and I don’t think it at all detracts from working to make a world where as many people as humanly possible (who still want to) can go to college.  Both can happen without one detracting from the other.

I honestly think that if I could somehow get to college, and it didn’t harm me physically to do so, and didn’t push me to the brink cognitively, it would still be a horrible idea for me and would do really bad damage, but I can’t articulate why.

I do think I get what you’re talking about, I just don’t see either side of this as an awful thing.

74,648 notes