George and Sam by Charlotte Moore

Author:Charlotte Moore [Moore, Charlotte]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141923376
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-01-25T16:00:00+00:00

13. Education, Education, Education

When George was diagnosed by Dr Gilly Baird, she told us that the right education was the only effective ‘treatment’. Chapter 7, on interventions, makes it clear that I consider several other treatments worthwhile, but in essence I agree with Dr Baird. No diet or vitamin supplement is going to magic away true autism. You use diet, or supplements, or AIT, or whatever, to get your child as well as you can, and that will help them to learn as well as they can – but that may still be not very much.

What is the ‘right’ education, though? That’s a subject of much debate. At the time of writing, national and local government favour a policy of inclusion; special-needs children should be included in mainstream schools if at all possible. I believe this policy to be wrong; wrong as in misguided, and in some cases wrong as in immoral. I also believe that current practice is storing up enormous problems for the future.

All case histories are different. But I feel able to speak with some authority, because I’ve tried both mainstream and special education for my boys. George, as outlined in Chapter 6, started in a mainstream nursery school, aged three. At that time, prediagnosis, we were hoping that the routine of school and the contact with other children would iron out some of his peculiarities and antisocial behaviours. Of course it did nothing of the kind. It was a lively, well-run nursery, one I’d have warmly recommended for any normal child. And George was not so ‘lost’ that he couldn’t get something out of it. He enjoyed some of the activities, shied away from others. He learned to write his name, very large, on two sheets of A4 Sellotaped together. After the trauma of the first few weeks he seemed quite happy; he learned new songs and rhymes and reproduced these at home with pleasure. He memorized the register, and seemed to relish the fact of the children’s names. He even seemed to single out a couple of children as ‘friends’, though these friendships didn’t extend as far as inviting anyone home for tea. On sports day, when George’s autistic lack of competitiveness and team spirit were clearly apparent, he cheerfully allowed himself to be towed up and down by one of those kind-but-bossy little girls who in later life will run the PTA with aplomb.

I don’t think that George’s mainstream nursery experience harmed him, except that by keeping him there we deprived him of special help, of the kind of intensely structured, individually tailored learning that would have targeted his deficits and smoothed out some of the bumps in his intellectual and social development. But such specialized nursery teaching is not easy to come by, and besides, by the time George was diagnosed he had less than two terms left before he reached the age for ‘proper’ school. If we’d been very, very clued up, we’d have either found him a special-needs nursery or started

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.