Learning Disability and Inclusion Phobia: Past, Present, Future

Description

The social position of learning disabled people has shifted rapidly over the last 20 years, from long-stay institutions, first into community homes and day centres, and now to a currently emerging goal of "ordinary lives" for individuals using person-centred support and personal budgets. These approaches promise to replace a century and a half of "scientific" pathological models based on expert assessment, and of the accompanying segregated social administration which determined how and where people led their lives, and who they were. This innovative volume explains how concepts of learning disability, intellectual disability and autism first came about, describes their more recent evolution in the formal disciplines of psychology, and shows the direct relevance of this historical knowledge to present and future policy, practice and research. Goodey argues that learning disability is not a historically stable category and different people are considered "learning disabled" as it changes over time. Using psychological and anthropological theory, he identifies the deeper lying pathology as "inclusion phobia", in which the tendency of human societies to establish an in-group and to assign out-groups reaches an extreme point. Thus the disability we call "intellectual" is a concept essential only to an era in which to be human is essentially to be deemed intelligent, autonomous and capable of rational choice. Interweaving the author's historical scholarship with his practice-based experience in the field, Learning Disability and Inclusion Phobia challenges myths about the past as well as about present-day concepts, exposing both the historical continuities and the radical discontinuities in thinking about learning disability. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents A note on terminology Acknowledgement 1. Introduction Notes 2. Exclusion Outgroups and their boundaries Inclusion phobia in action Historical change and ‘radical evil’ Beware of ethics Inclusion phobia, contamination disgust and fear of pollution Inclusion phobia as false consciousness Inclusion phobia and the great incarceration Inclusion phobia and the scapegoat mechanism Inclusion phobia and experimental verification Inclusion phobia: the effectiveness of existing approaches Notes 3. Intelligence Intelligence and dogmatism Intelligence and scepticism Intelligence and religious delusion Intelligence and empire Intelligence and bureaucracy Abstraction and logical reasoning: historical contingencies Intelligence and the consecration of status Notes 4. Difference Ability and disability: chicken or egg? Social construction and the social model The social model and the disability movement The need for a workable historical method Comparative psychology and the ladder of nature The ladder of nature: modern rearrangements Outgroups before modern psychology From categories to cages Learning disability in the concrete historical totality Notes 5. Causes Eugenics and psychological phenotypes Magic and natural causes The Devil as the cause of learning disability The child you have had or the child you haven’t had? Parental guilt Notes 6. Development Developmental disability and the nature of childhood Ages means stages: modern developmentalism The development of ‘development’ Development and social history Notes 7. Assessment Morbid rationalism and cognitive ability testing Morbid rationalism in action Morbid rationalism and rebellion Assessment in history: the beginnings Assessment in education Assessment as sanctification Assessment as the new science of segregation Assessment by speed Notes 8. Autism and its creation The biological status of autism Brain imaging A very recent history Concept and practice Autism and its critics Notes 9. Autism in context Autism and totalitarianism Private thinking Social interaction Kindness, sympathy, empathy Autism and reciprocity Autism and gender Learning disability versus autism Notes 10. Conclusion Notes References Index