as small as a world and as large as alone

3:50pm June 28, 2014

crystalfy:

It bothers me that the intelligence of animals is measured by how willing they are to obey the commands of a human.

same goes for students at schools

I just realized how fucked up that is wow. 

I used to volunteer in one of the autism classrooms at my special ed school.  I really was only “volunteering” so I could spend time with my friend who was in that class, but anyway.  So I spent a lot of time around everyone there and I thought I knew them, and their respective abilities, fairly well.

At one point I heard the teachers talking about this one boy.  They said he was “higher functioning” than the rest of them.  I could not work this out.   He did not have any particular abilities that anyone else didn’t have.  There was, in fact, nothing about him that stood out to me at all.

And then it slowly dawned on me that when they told him to do things, he was more likely to do them, than other students in the class.  So his obedience (and his ability to carry out that obedience) made him “higher functioning”.  That made me feel sick.

(Feeling sick was a normal part of witnessing anything in that classroom, though.  The teacher was truly a monster who should not have been around children, ever.  But she projected this earthy-hippie-image that made people think she was motherly and kind, when… I saw her throw people on the floor who couldn’t get up again, I saw her, without even asking, grab autistic people’s arms and yank them around – painfully – in order to bring them places, I saw her force a girl to eat her own vomit, this was not a nice woman.  But she fooled a lot of people, and people saw her as this amazingly dedicated, motherly woman who loved her students so much or something.)

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