#educational stigma

[autumnhobbit]

Hey I saw the aggressive responses you got to your tradesman Jason post and I just wanted to say I support you. I'm a working class person who got enough scholarships to study anything, but I could never in good conscience choose anything other than an useful, money making degree. However, middle class people can't seem to grasp it's not simply a matter of having or not having the money.

Yeahhhh I have no idea what that was about. XD Honestly I don’t care what other people do? I myself don’t like the concept of college either for myself or as an inherent moral bastion, for perfectly logical reasons like its monopoly and overpricing and the social stigma and hyped-up emotionalism that surrounds it……which I think that reaction you’re referring to kind of summed it up nicely and proved my point for me. XD

But yeah, I really don’t care what other people choose to do for college, but I feel like any decision you make you should be responsible enough to accept the consequences of. Like, if I wind up skipping college—or at least not getting a degree—I’m not going to constantly complain that I don’t have one because I chose not to get one. Whereas I could fill a book on this site alone, let alone in real life, with people who chose free and clear to go to college and take out loans, who are OUTRAGED that they have to pay them back and the jobs they thought they’d get don’t exist. What really gets me is the fact that they sometimes twist it in their own heads so that their lack of a job is on everyone else for failing to realize how “”“valuable”“” college is, rather than on….I don’t know, supply and demand? Which is basic economics??? (((Which apparently they didn’t teach in college???)))

And yeah the fact that I was accused of “classism” for it is hilarious because 1. I’m middle class (and my family’s unemployed and not so well off right now, despite higher-education.) 2. Implying that Ivy Leagues are inherently better than normal colleges is actually kind of classist because most normal people cannot and will not ever get the chance to go to an Ivy League and the statistical majority of the country did not attend an Ivy League, so you’re classifying a huge amount of flyover country as stupid and irrelevant. Plus, Ivy Leagues ARE inherently more expensive: a year at community college is roughly $3,000, a year at a state university in the state you live in is roughly $5,000, and a state university in another state goes up to $21,000 a year. Ivy Leagues are even more than that, for an education you could get the equivalent of somewhere cheaper, and a degree that (unless you choose really wisely and measure up) will never make enough money to justify the cost.

And I never said people can’t go to Ivy Leagues, just that as a general rule a person of normal means will not get in or would not go because of a lack of resources. Aside from that, education is not a competition or race-to-the-top, and maybe it’s just because I’m a non-competitive person, but I don’t see why anyone should have to get into an Ivy League to “prove” that they’re smart. Smart is as smart does. Your brains are your own business, what you choose to do with your brains is your business, and what other people choose to do with theirs is not your business. Who the frick goes around declaring themselves the arbiter of intelligence based off of college or job? That’s a stupid, simplistic, and frankly utilitarian way to look at the world and I won’t stand for it. So. If that gets me callout posts, boo frickin hoo. XD

anyway rant mostly over (for now)

[realsocialskills]

If you’re feeling bad about your kid after an IEP meeting

Content note: This is directed at parents, and it’s about mitigating damage that can be done by the stigmatizing language in the IEP process. It expresses sympathy towards parents who are feeling things that can be harmful to disabled kids (as well as a call for parents handle those feelings constructively). This post may be triggering to people with disabilities who have been harmed by these kinds of attitudes. 

The IEP process can be really hard on kids, parents, and families. In order to get your kid the services they need, you’ve probably had to describe them using some awful language. It likely violated every one of your instincts about how parents ought to describe their kids. You may have had to do it anyway, in order to get your kid access to education.

It’s pretty normal to feel awful about either yourself or your child after describing them in such negative terms or allowing others to do so. It’s wrong, and it feels wrong, and you often can’t do anything about it — and it often comes along with pressure to believe that this is being caused by your child’s disability. If you’re finding that you feel that way, it’s important to do something about it. Kids are generally very aware of how adults in their lives feel about them. Feeling that way about your kid on an ongoing basis is really damaging to them and to your relationship with them. Don’t beat yourself up; do find ways to mitigate it.

It can help a lot to remind yourself that nothing about your child’s disability causes this kind of language. No child should ever be described this way, including yours. They’re not being described this way because of the things they can’t do — they’re being described this way because the system is ableist and often unwilling to respond to disability constructively. It’s not their fault, and it’s not your fault — it’s an awful fact about our culture’s attitudes towards disability.

You wouldn’t say that a baby is failing because they’re not talking — it’s just part of being a baby. If someone said that a typically-developing eight year old was failing because they can’t write 10 page papers, most people would be outraged. Your child’s development isn’t failure either, and they deserve appropriate education without stigma or panic. They are allowed to have a body and a brain, and they deserve to be respected as a human being. Language that treats them as a collection of deficits is cruel, and doesn’t reflect reality.

Your child’s differences aren’t a failure. Their development is what it is, and that’s ok. It’s ok to be different. It’s ok to have a disability. It’s ok to need appropriate education. Their need for appropriate education is not failure, it’s just that you sometimes have to cooperate with a system that wrongly describes it that way.

One way you can show yourself that it shouldn’t be this way is to write a better description of your kid after the fact. Rewrite what your child is learning, and what you’d like them to learn. Write about what the barriers are, and what kind of help they need. Write about their rights, and where you see that they might be violated. Write about them as the child who you know and love, not a collection of scary deficits. (It can also help to write down ten of your favorite things about your kid.) Their disability does not call for freaking out. It’s just part of who they are, and that’s ok.

Tl;dr IEPs describe kids using cruel stigmatizing language that doesn’t reflect reality. Having to cooperate with them anyway can do serious damage to parent-child relationships. Rewriting a new and better description of your child can help to mitigate this damage.