JOHN DEWEY’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO AN EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY OF INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY
Abstract
Abstract Leading researchers describe the field of special education as sharply divided between two different theories of disability. In this article Scot Danforth takes as his project addressing that division from the perspective of a Deweyan philosophy of the education of students with intellectual disabilities. In 1922, John Dewey authored two articles in New Republic that criticized the use of intelligence tests as both undemocratic and impractical in meeting the needs of teachers. Drawing from these two articles and a variety of Dewey’s other works, Danforth puts forward a Deweyan educational theory of intellectual disability. This theory is perhaps encapsulated in Dewey’s observation that “The democratic faith in human equality is belief that every human being, independent of the quantity or range of his personal endowment, has the right to equal opportunity with every other person for development of whatever gifts he has.”1
Introduction
A prestigious foundation recently asked a group of fifteen leading American special education researchers to make an authoritative pronouncement on the current state of educational research and practice for students with disabilities. After many decades of intensive research on numerous types of disabilities and school-based interventions, the group was charged with making a summative statement about scientific and practical achievements and the challenges that lie ahead. The group could not reach sufficient clarity and consensus to issue such a report. Instead, the document produced by the leading researchers articulated the problem of a “special education divide,” a sharp split between two distinct views “on the notion of disability and its implication” and “the purpose of special education.”2 The division was described as a significant obstacle to the future of the field.
Contemporary debates on a wide array of theoretical and practical issues — research epistemology and methodology, inclusive education versus pull-out programs, the purpose and effectiveness of special education services — hinge on a deep philosophical conflict between two different theories of disability. One perspective espouses an individual or medical concept of disability that has been the mainstay of American special education research.3 An opposing stance, often called the social model of disability, proffers a social constructionist orientation that construes disabilities as social identities developed within cultural processes, ideological applications, and structural constraints.4
The medical model of disability has generally employed medical and psychological discourses to frame educational disabilities as conditions of individual deficit or defect. This theory maintains a commitment to the existence of what noted special education researcher Samuel Kirk aptly termed the “abnormal within the child,” a biophysical or psychological disorder that inheres to the individual.5 Disability, in this light, is synonymous with a bodily or mental anomaly demonstrated by significantly subnormal functioning in domains such as physical mobility and performance, sensory operations such as hearing or vision, general intelligence, psychological or linguistic processes of learning, and social or adaptive behaviors. The diagnosis of disability is held to be an objective professional activity involving a mixture of clinical judgment and scientifically validated psychometric measures. Employing this theory, American special education researchers have worked for decades to develop and test professional interventions that attempt to cure or ameliorate deficits in specific areas of human functioning. This approach has often called for students with disabilities to be educated in separate classrooms or schools where specialized treatments are applied.
In sharp contrast, the social model approach to disability theory has sprung from the work of disability rights activists, disability studies scholars, and inclusive educators who describe disabilities as social phenomena that take shape and gain meaning within social processes and political structures. Disability is understood not to be a bodily or mental anomaly or a deficit in functioning. It consists of the variety of social interpretations of human difference that construct disability by assigning to it particular linguistic, interpersonal, and political meanings, often limiting the access, status, and participation of disabled persons. This social retheorizing of disability does not deny the presence of individual bodily or mental differences across the population. But it effectively shifts theoretical and practical attention away from diagnostic and remediation goals — what Ellen Brantlinger critically terms “fixing other people’s children”6— and toward ways of organizing schools and classrooms as democratic communities, interactive spaces where a diverse range of individualities are respected and valued.7
In this essay, I propose that educational philosophy offers intellectual and practical resources that can help disability researchers trapped in the theoretical divide move toward a deeper and more useful understanding of the issues at hand. More specifically, I contend that the educational philosophy of John Dewey affords a timely and insightful reassessment of the divisive, thorny issues arising in what might be described as the “social turn” in disability theory.
In the sections that follow, I coalesce fragments of Dewey’s social thought into a philosophy of the education of one specific group of students with disabilities, those described as having intellectual disabilities (often called “mental retardation” or “developmental disabilities”). The keystone of a Deweyan philosophy of intellectual disability is a pair of articles published in the New Republic in December of 1922. These two essays directly interrogate the social utility and ethical consequences of intelligence testing while also animating themes such as individuality, equality, and democracy that Dewey examined and reexamined throughout his life. After mining these essays, I explore the philosopher’s writings on adjacent and allied themes, painting a broad portrait of Dewey’s thinking on the education of persons with intellectual disabilities in a democratic society. I then return to the current contentious debate between two theories of disability — the medical model and the social model — to offer a constructive reappraisal based on the contributions of Dewey’s philosophy. This reassessment might be viewed as more of a first word than a final word, an initiation of a conversation about Dewey’s philosophy and the education of students with intellectual disabilities.
Dewey’s new republic essays
In October and November 1922, New Republic published a series of six scathing critiques of mental testing by Walter Lippmann, a prominent social theorist and a good friend of Dewey.8 Lippmann’s series criticized the intelligence tests developed by Lewis M. Terman at Stanford, the Army intelligence tests built by Robert Yerkes and his colleagues during World War I, and the utilization of intelligence testing by the public schools to classify and sort students.
Dewey’s two essays were published just one week after Lippmann’s sixth article. In contrast to Lippmann’s harsh and sometimes mocking tone, Dewey’s approach to intelligence and intelligence testing evidenced a more moderate consideration. Though his critique is less toxic than Lippmann’s, it is ultimately more thorough and compelling.
In the first of the two essays, entitled “Mediocrity and Individuality,” Dewey provided commentary on a speech made by Colgate University President George B. Cutten.9 In his inaugural address, Cutten stated that intelligence tests had revealed that “only fifteen percent of the people have sufficient intelligence to get through college” (MI, 290), a fact that bodes poorly for the state of the American democracy. In Cutten’s view, the average American was not smart enough to bear the conceptual and practical weight of a democratic system. Dewey uses Cutten as an example of a class elitism that too often emphasizes “thinking in standardized averages” (MI, 291) rather than appreciating the particularities of individuals of all economic statuses and stations of life.
The concept of intelligence as a fixed facet of an individual’s native constitution struck Dewey as harkening back to the aristocratic politics of historical eras that preceded the birth of the American democracy: “The old notion that intelligence is a ready-made possession of individuals” enacts an outdated tradition of explaining an individual’s social status, wealth, or achievement in terms of inherent individual character.10 This aristocratic tradition tends to “rationalize the inequities of our social order by appealing to innate and unalterable psychological strata in the population” (MI, 289). Drawn from the social thought of Jeremy Bentham and Herbert Spencer, the aristocratic ethos extrapolates from “the natural inequalities of individuals in psychological and moral make-up, asserting that the inequality of fortune and economic status is the ‘natural’ and justifiable consequence of the free play of these inherent differences.”11
Rather than conducting an evaluation based on the actual activities that an individual undertakes in daily life, intelligence tests simply classify a person based on a series of contextually disconnected activities, thereby providing no insight into the current or potential talents of an individual:
To say that Johnnie Jones who was born in 1913 has in 1922 the mental age of eight or ten years only means that he belongs, on the basis of his performance of certain exercises, to a class of persons at least over a million in number, who were born in 1912 or 1914 respectively. Why is it so frequently supposed that the individual mentality of John Jones has been definitely determined? To say that one belongs in a class which is a million or so large, with respect to which one is accelerated or retarded by a year in comparison with another class of a million, does not, after all, throw much light on the intrinsic capacities of a given individual. (MI, 291)
Intelligence testing enacts the “habit of ignoring specific individualities” while “thinking in terms of fixed classes, intellectual and social” (MI, 290). Intelligence tests facilitate the classification of the individual by comparing that individual’s actions within very limited activities to the similarly constrained actions of others.
The goal of intellectual testing, according to Dewey, should be “a method of discrimination, of analysis of human beings” (MI, 292), a way of interpreting the fullness and richness of individuality. Here is where Dewey leaves the door open for whatever potential mental testing might have. What educators need are practical ways of “studying and treating individuals in their distinctive and unique qualities” (MI, 294), idiographic insights that illuminate qualities of the individual.
Dewey’s second essay —“Individuality, Equality, and Superiority”— is a concise treatise on the ethical dispositions that create and sustain egalitarian democracy.12 He begins by critiquing the assumption that intelligence testing is based on a universal external point of reference that fairly grasps the intellectual skills of a wide variety of individuals seeking diverse purposes across multiple situations:
Professors have one measure of superior ability; captains of industry another. One class esteems aptitude for learning academic subjects; the other class appraises in terms of power of execution. Suppose that investigators and artists were so socially dominant that they were effectively articulate. Should we not employ quite other standards of measurement? (IES, 295)
Given that different purposes or outcomes would require different standards of evaluation, it struck Dewey as illogical that one test could conduct a universal scale of value that somehow applied to all life’s contexts and goals. Additionally, he noted that, given the different social positions and cultures of various ethnic and racial groups, a test that demonstrates the superiority of one over another is merely failing to evaluate the actual life activities engaged in by the supposedly inferior groups.
Building from this critique of the error of classifying minds, he launched an analysis of the terms “superiority” and “inferiority.” He quickly declared that one cannot be superior or inferior in any sense that lacks the specificity of context and goal. That is, one cannot be superior or inferior except in relation to a certain activity:
There are as many modes of superiority and inferiority as there are consequences to be attained and works to be accomplished. And until society becomes static new modes of activity are continually developing, each of which permits and exacts its own specific inferiorities and superiorities. There is doubtless some degree of correlation between traits which promote superiority in more than one direction. But the idea of abstract, universal superiority and inferiority is an absurdity. (IES, 296)
Dewey’s purpose is larger than the deflating of nomothetic concepts of superior or inferior. His target is the old undemocratic habit of scaling persons on a value axis from top to bottom, worthy to unworthy, more than equal to less than equal.
In pursuit of this goal, Dewey revisited a comparison of aristocracy and democracy that he had first articulated over three decades earlier in “The Ethics of Democracy.” In that 1888 paper, Dewey contrasted the “aristocratic ideal” with the “democratic ideal” as a way of comparing the social ethos of the new American experiment with that of the older European countries. He posited that a democratic ideal is an aristocracy for everyman whereby “in every person there lives an infinite and universal possibility, that of being a king and a priest.”13 In 1922, Dewey again captured this ethical concept of democracy as a mode of associated living marked by mutual support for the furtherance of all individualities, enacting the proposition that “every human being as an individual may be the best for some particular purpose and hence be the most fitted to rule, to lead, in that specific respect” (IES, 297).
For Dewey, the purpose of education in relation to the fulfillment of that democratic ethic is to provide the social conditions that support persons in having a range of experiences necessary to develop whatever capacities, interests, and desires each individual might have. Especially given the rapidly changing nature of society, schools must support the widest diversity of intellectual and practical development for all students so that they might prepare themselves for the many possible life activities. Intelligence testing, sadly, classifies an individual at an early age so that his future may be predicted, tracked, and constrained, thereby squelching the growth of both individual capacities and the dynamic development of the free society. Dewey’s words on this point chafe with bitterness:
It was once supposed, at least by some, that the purpose of education, along with equipping students with some indispensable tools, was to discover and release individualized capacities so that they might make their own way with whatever of social change is involved in their operation. But now we welcome a procedure which under the title of science sinks the individual in a numerical class; judges him with reference to capacity to fit into a limited number of vocations ranked according to present business standards; assigns him to a predestined niche and thereby does whatever education can do to perpetuate the present order. (IES, 297)
As a highly vocal supporter of the possibilities of educational psychology to help schools improve pedagogy, Dewey was rankled by the prominent use of this science to undercut the goals and practices of education for democracy. The purpose of an educational science is to figure out how to better release and propel individual talents through instructional arrangements, not to identify intellectual superiors and inferiors at the start so that childhood paths of growth might be foreordained according to the predicted trajectories of each classification.
To the casual reader of those two essays, it appears that Dewey’s main objection to intelligence testing is its role as a method of intellectual classification. Within a society cultivating a deep commitment to equality and an appreciation for the unique individuality of each citizen, a so-called universal test that creates hierarchical classes of citizens is as useful as a porous soup bowl. That interpretation of the two New Republic essays holds true enough, but our understanding of Dewey’s thinking about subnormal intelligence, education, and democratic living will run far deeper if we fortify the emphases of these two essays with a broader reading of Dewey’s philosophical work. In the remaining sections of this investigation, I undertake that intellectual expansion in order to provide a stronger understanding of Dewey’s philosophy of the education of the “feebleminded.”
Intelligence and human nature
Much of Dewey’s discomfort with intelligence testing arises out of his orientation toward individual intelligence as a construct. His critical view of the notion that intelligence is an enduring feature of an individual is a specific extension of his understanding of human nature itself. Questions of human nature, he argued, involve a basic disagreement between “those who assert the essential fixity of human nature and those who believe in a great modifiability” through experiences of interaction with social and physical environments.14 Dewey criticized the former concept on factual and political grounds, and he championed the latter as an invitation to the possibilities of individuality and democracy.
Dewey’s critical approach to the individual intelligence construct lies in three interdependent propositions. First, he held that the traditional philosophical and scientific bifurcation of the natural and the social as conceptual and ontological categories is misleading and counterproductive to scientific inquiry. The habit in philosophy and many social sciences of interpreting some aspects of human experience as natural and therefore ontologically preeminent or transcendent in relation to phenomena construed as social creates an empirically and practically unjustifiable division between types of social living. Second, Dewey critiqued the tendency to view biology as frozen essence instead of constant growth and change. Human activity apprehended at a given time within the continuous biological motion of development is suspended backward from that concrete instance to create an original entity claiming situational and temporal transcendence. Third, he framed both individuality and social association within the historical shift from a European aristocratic tradition that submerged the value of individuality beneath social classes based on wealth and power to a more recent American democratic experiment that construes individuality and community life within an ethic of moral equality. Each of these three propositions requires further explication.
The unity of the natural and the social
[W]hat passes for social science is built upon the notion of a gap between natural and social phenomena…[T]hat science is truncated, arbitrary and insecure…In psychology the persisting tradition of a purely individualistic and private subject-matter is to be attributed directly to neglect of the social conditions of mental phenomena…15
Throughout his life, Dewey reconstructed commonplace binary oppositions — theory versus practice, ideal versus real, transcendental versus material — whenever such dichotomies created practical dead ends for philosophy, education, and society. Frequently Dewey’s tactic was to choose neither side, preferring instead to examine the false assumptions that yielded the either/or choice in the first place and then proposing a creative, new concept that denies the existence of the binary altogether.
In both philosophy and the emerging sciences of the early 1900s, it was standard practice to assume that the natural and social worlds were distinct ontological and analytical categories (this practice continues today, in many cases, despite Dewey’s work). The natural was often viewed as primary, material, and objective; and the social was taken to be derivative, nonmaterial, and subjective. Intelligence testing was founded on the idea that a unitary organic property — a natural trait, not an excrescence of social interaction — resided as an enduring source of efficacious individual action. This natural trait was assumed by the intelligence test developers (and many others) to be inherited and material, part of one’s physical constitution. Dewey’s critique of the underlying assumption that “social and natural are oppositional conceptions” shoots to the faulty heart of the individual intelligence concept.16
Dewey’s analysis of the split between the natural and social consisted of two specific arguments. First, the social/natural bifurcation harms both the social and the natural sciences. For example, in behavioral science, the social is rendered as material, thereby requiring that mental activity be ignored as nonmaterial. Other social sciences oscillate back and forth between the two categories as if they were magnetic north and south poles, thereby failing to successfully incorporate both material substance and human association into single analytic frameworks. Meanwhile, Dewey warned, the natural sciences generally forget that their activities “are outgrowths of some phase of social culture, from which they derive their instruments, physical and intellectual, and by which their problems and aims are set.”17 Natural scientists often believe that their work is somehow isolated from the supposed subjectivity of the social realm, a stance that fails to realize how cultural resources contribute to science as a human activity.
Perhaps more persuasively, in his second critique, Dewey assailed the assertion that physical matter and social activity exist in a discontinuous manner. As an empirical observation, what we describe as physical and what we view as interactive human activity do not exist in different realms:
It gives a ludicrous result to think of social phenomena merely as lying on top of physical phenomena; such a notion is negated by the most casual observation of the facts. What would social phenomena be without the physical factor of land, including all the natural resources (and obstacles), and forms of energy for which the word “land” stands? What would social phenomena be without the tools and machines by which physical energies are utilized? Or what would they be without physical appliances and apparatus, from clothes and houses to railways, temples and printing-presses? No, it is not the social which is a superficial category. The view is superficial of those who fail to see that in the social the physical is taken up into a wider and more complex and delicate system of interactions so that it takes on new properties by release of potentialities previously confined because of absence of full interaction.18
The physical and the social coexist and interact within the complex and developing scope of human experience. Put simply, given our human apprehension of a single physical-social whole within our actual lives, the physical is best viewed as included within a more comprehensive, inclusive view called the social.
The continuity of biological growth
In a strand of thought that can be viewed as an expansion of his critique of the social/natural opposition, Dewey described the individual intelligence construct as an illogical attempt to consolidate and freeze the widest variety of human activity across time and context into a single entity lacking time or context. He claimed that the common notion that some essential aspect of human nature stands prior to child development and continues as a static or regular force within the course of individual growth fails on factual grounds:
The supposition that there is such a thing as a purely native original constitution of man which can be distinguished from everything acquired and learned…is a view which holds good only when a static cross section is taken; when, that is to say, growth is ignored.19
Rather than viewing biology as fixed factuality that sets an enduring series of limitations and potentials on human activity, Dewey observed biology as motion and change itself, as continuous unfolding such that “it is fruitless to try to distinguish between the native and the acquired, the original and the derived.”20
In true pragmatist spirit, Dewey rendered the nature/nurture dichotomy useless by demonstrating that the “conception of a fixed and enumerable equipment of tendencies which constitutes human nature” is little more than an “intellectual device” that freezes a momentary image from one perinatal point in development and promotes that as a lingering and powerful inherent at later moments in the process of growth.21 At any point in the development of an individual, one can speak of what was original by explaining some feature of the current moment as a distillation of a prior essence. Yet this proposal is always an artifice that denies both the constancy of change in living organisms and the modifying influence of the continuous interactions of the individual with his or her surroundings. What is natural, by Dewey’s analysis, is not a fixed nature but the constant process of change that we call growth, learning, and development. That growth, moreover, can best occur under democratic social conditions involving a lived commitment to an ethics of moral equality.
Moral equality in a democracy
[E]quality is moral, a matter of social justice secured, not of physical or psychological endowment. (IES, 299)
Dewey’s thoughts on individual intelligence and intelligence testing never wander far from his thinking about democratic living in America. Central to his understanding of American democracy was a concept of moral equality, a notion that begins with an understanding of the practical and political basis for making comparisons between individuals.
The individual intelligence construct that stands as the conceptual core of intelligence testing is founded on the assumption that something constant and consistent at the center of the mental activity of one person is directly comparable to a similar element in the intellectual activity of his neighbor. The individual intelligence construct is built on the proposition that this comparison produces definitive knowledge about the intellectual constitution of each of those compared.
Dewey did not deny that such a comparison might be informative for some limited purposes.22 What he did oppose was the belief that this mode of comparative analysis yields important knowledge that contributes to the furthering of democratic community and individual development. Dewey’s understanding of democracy rested on a belief in the moral equality of all citizens, an understanding of equality that ran directly counter to the mental testing procedures of comparison and ranking:
Moral equality means incommensurability, the inapplicability of common and quantitative standards. It means intrinsic qualities which require unique opportunities and differential manifestation: superiority in finding a specific work to do, not in power for attaining ends common to a class of competitors, which is bound to result in putting a premium on mastery over others. (IES, 299)
Moral equality means that individuals are uniquely diversified in capacities, interests, and tastes such that comparisons between individuals on external standards of evaluation are not feasible. Individuals — at least as construed within a democratic community — are not qualitative equivalents. In relation to this concept of incommensurability, individuals are more like interpersonal relations and less like sums of legal tender. Financial sums are directly comparable on an ordinal hierarchy. One dollar is equivalent to and interchangeable with another. There is a legitimate ordinal hierarchy of value for the comparison of financial sums. On the contrary, interpersonal contacts and relations, like individual persons, are not exchangeable on any metric. With reference to relations, Dewey explains, “No contact of this human sort is replaceable; with reference to it all are equal because all are incommensurable, infinite” (IES, 300). One interaction, one human connection is necessarily unlike another. Each is unique, to be appraised of its own light, and can only be misunderstood through application of a graded scale of comparison.
The intimate link between incommensurability and social equality as a moral value deserves further attention. Dewey held that equality within an understanding of the common good “does not mean sameness”23 or “mathematical or physical equivalence in virtue of which any one element may be substituted for another.”24 Rather, equality is the convivial fruit of participation in a shared social enterprise, a community of interaction and association in which each both contributes and receives in unique and distinct ways: “Each contributes something distinctive from his own store of knowledge, ability, taste, while receiving at the same time elements of value contributed by others.”25 There is no formula or mechanism for the active exchange of contribution and benefit, of giving and receiving, only a social process involving development and diversification of capacities and interests without comparative measure.
Moral equality, in this context, is a social achievement within and by the community, a process and result involving the acceptance of many diverse individual contributions and simultaneous support of greatly varied capacities and tastes. Equality occurs in the social balance of opportunity for individual learning and growth that is extended to all members: “One person is morally equal to others when he has the same opportunities for developing his capacities and playing his part that others have, although his capacities are quite unlike theirs.”26 Moral equality involves a shared, active ethic that acknowledges differences between individuals without constructing those as differences within schemes of hierarchical gradation. In the democratic community, frameworks that track differences along axes of value, a grammar running from superior to inferior, lack social utility and meaning for they fail to appreciate the individual’s talents, capacities, and contributions.
Incommensurability, or a noncomparative orientation to the reception of and appraisal of others, is vital to the achievement of moral equality. Judgments of superiority and inferiority fail to register or carry social weight given the associated disinterest in habits of comparison and classification:
The equality is one of values, not of materials and quantities, and equality of value has on this account to be measured in terms of the intrinsic life and growth of each individual, not by mechanical comparisons. Each individual is incommensurable as an individual with every other, so that it is impossible to find an external measure of quality. Concretely, one person is superior in one particular respect and inferior in some other to many others… To employ a somewhat mechanical analogy, a violet and an oak tree are equal when one has the same opportunity to develop to the full as a violet which the other has as an oak.27
The simple pastoral metaphor of violets and oaks brings clarity to the vital notion that a democratic community where moral equality is valued and lived actively develops the social conditions that support and nurture the distinct individuality of each member.
A deweyan reassessment of intellectual disability
The goal at this juncture is to initiate a constructive reappraisal of the current rift between the medical model and social model of disability through applying a Deweyan philosophy of the education of students with intellectual disabilities. Such a reassessment must move to the heart of the disagreement between the social and medical models of disability: the assumed bifurcation of the natural and the social. It must unify the natural and the social in a pragmatic formulation that comprehends the need to nourish the trajectories of growth experienced by individual children within schools pursuing social relations of moral equality. In order to portray an initial Deweyan reformulation of intellectual disability theory, I will organize this discussion around the age-old, oft-debated question, what causes intellectual disabilities? This question raises significant issues that any theory of intellectual disability must address. It also serves as a substantive fulcrum of the theoretical divide, creating ample space to clarify the two theories of intellectual disability and allow for the introduction of a new theory.
For many decades, medical and psychological researchers debated the causes of intellectual disability, pitting nature against nurture, heredity against environment. By the 1940s, Henry Goddard’s eugenics-based argument for strict hereditarianism had withered under assault from numerous studies,28 including work by the highly influential Harold Skeels,29 that demonstrated the influence of familial environment on measures of intelligence. By the 1960s, many researchers had arrived at the current balanced reconciliation of nature and nurture as cooperating influences on individual intelligence.30 This combined influence notion (with substantial updating of Mendelian heredity theory in accordance with today’s genetic science) remains prominent to this day in special education textbooks.
At the bottom of the heredity-environment debate is the question of whether an intellectual disability is a biological or a psychological phenomenon. The hereditarian argument posits a biological understanding of how intelligence as a relatively fixed trait is transmitted from one generation to the next. The environmental stance employs a psychological concept of social influence, an idea about how the adults who regularly interact with a growing child have a tremendous effect on that child’s intellectual development. This ultimately results in a theory of intelligence as malleable, especially during the early childhood years. Although the environmental stance views the social world surrounding the child as highly influential, it primarily accepts the hereditarian notion of intelligence as individual endowment, as a universal faculty contained in the mind that is demonstrated in one’s performance across countless contexts, tasks, and events. The two sides of this prolonged battle among intellectual disability researchers diverge on the practical mechanisms of formative influence, one holding to biology and the other to psychology, but they do not differ in their orientation toward understanding intelligence as an individual attribute or intellectual disability as an individual condition of subnormal intelligence.
On the other hand, the social model interprets intellectual disability as a cultural and historical artifact, offering a social constructionism that discounts biological or psychological explanations in favor of political accounts of intellectual disability as a devalued identity.31 Steven Taylor describes the history of this tradition of intellectual disability research as an outgrowth of the 1960s labeling theory of deviance developed by Kai Erikson and Howard Becker, as well as Erving Goffman’s research on stigmatization as the product of social interactions and interpretations.32 Forms of deviant identities, in this interpretation, are not dictated so much by the inherent biophysical or psychological features of the diagnosed individuals as by the social production of meanings that construe certain individuals as outside cultural-historical norms. “Persons have no names and belong to no class until we put them in one,” Jane Mercer declared in her landmark sociological study of labeling and intellectual disability.33 The professional activities of testing and diagnosis enforce a normative cultural grammar through political systems of classification, achieving a scaling of minds that diminishes and marginalizes labeled individuals.
A Deweyan theory of intellectual disability response to the causation question begins by avoiding the extremes of a naturalistic essentialism that frames the biophysical or psychological constitution of the individual as a deterministic factor in human activity, on the one hand, and a radical social constructionism that overlooks individual growth, learning, and agency amid notions of overwhelming cultural constraint, on the other.
Steering clear of these two extreme positions, a Deweyan approach then unpacks the causation question into a sequence of three subquestions. First, what are the causes of the human variation in performance in specific activities (goals, contexts)? Second, how is the inevitability of human variations of effective performance translated into an individual diagnosis called an intellectual disability? And, finally, how do we theorize a democratic education for students with intellectual disabilities?
What are the causes of the human variation in performance in specific activities (goals, contexts)?
This question attends to the fact that, with reference to particular human activities under specific conditions consisting of the physical environment, social context, and the results or ends sought, actual performance varies considerably from one person to another. From a Deweyan standpoint, especially in regard to the important goals of pedagogy, the bundle of issues often congealed under the “intellectual disabilities” umbrella are more practically framed as questions about why individuals engage in effective or ineffective activity in specific social and material circumstances and how pedagogy can be devised to increase and expand the range of effective, goal-satisfying activity for each student.
This stance sets forth an understanding of human learning and development through a nuanced, ongoing dialectic of physicality and social context, the dynamic interplay of the organic body and numerous instances of social association, resulting in the advancement of the child’s intellectual and practical capacities. Human learning and performance is adequately explained neither by views that treat the individual as a biological or psychological entity nor by those that see the social cartography of human association as deterministic. What is required is a focus on the “the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself”34— in other words, the thoughtful provision of experiences to support the gradual unfolding of the changing biology of the developing child in relation to the specific tasks attempted, goals sought, and meanings undertaken. As a child comes into contact with different materials, settings, and social groupings, and as the child attempts to achieve satisfactory results by way of intellectual and practical action within a variety of circumstances, the child experiences gradual and numerous forms of expansion. Capacities broaden, abilities develop, and skills refine through the appropriation of the material and conceptual instruments of the broader culture. This is the path of gradual growth that Dewey theorized for all children.
This orientation to human development is certainly challenged by the case of a student with an intellectual disability whose experiences of growth occur at a rate far slower than peers or whose intellectual and practical expansions seem quite humble in comparison to those of other children. It can even appear, in the case of some children with intellectual disabilities, that specific forms of growth and learning are virtually frozen. What may appear most noteworthy to educators is the lack of apparent growth and change over time.
A Deweyan response to this challenge readily admits to the wide variation in rates or paths of growth among the general population of children. However, educators should pause before considering any child to have, in a total sense, halted at a given point of growth because the child is not advancing on common educational tasks and measures. The “power of growth” is present wherever life exists.35 It is misleading to accumulate instances of failed learning into an overall portrait of incompetence that denies the reality of human growth.36 For example, recent research suggests that teachers who believe that students with intellectual disabilities lack a general capacity to learn often fail to notice the academic skills that these students do develop. This underestimation of the growth of students with intellectual disabilities often results in failure to provide instruction in areas of active but unacknowledged growth.37
How is the inevitability of human variations of effective performance translated into an individual diagnosis called an intellectual disability?
On this point, a Deweyan philosophy primarily coincides with the social model concerning the ways that social processes and structural factors within organizations such as schools, and across society more broadly, operate to create hierarchical categories of human difference. The “problem” in the instance of the student with an intellectual disability is poorly theorized in the concept of a person with a restricted rate of or capacity for growth. A given trajectory and speed of development, occurring across a range of different activities that a child may attempt in an educational program, is only rendered problematic when framed in reference to a series of cultural expectations that confer unsatisfactory judgment. An individual’s rate of development and growth only becomes understood as a “problem” through social processes that index that growth pattern according to comparative performance criteria. Through such a comparative appraisal, a child’s pattern of growth and development is recast as inferior and therefore problematic. In a sense, the child is defined as failing to be the person he or she “should” be.
The lines of demarcation that frame the boundaries of normality and abnormality, in this analysis, are cultural and historical rather than rational and transcendent. The intellectual disability diagnosis is a mode of social symbolization that plays an influential cultural part in distributing a series of stigmatized meanings about labeled individuals while claiming scientific neutrality. Through procedures of mathematical comparison such as intelligence testing, social classifications conferring inferiority and superiority gain a scientific authority and subvert democratic goals of moral equality.
While a Deweyan perspective adheres closely to the social model critique, it takes a realistic step further by investigating melioristic possibilities within the realm of the existing system of American special education. It does so by evaluating the pragmatic value of the intellectual disability designation for educational purposes, how it is or might realistically be utilized within the public schools.38 In the current categorical scheme of special education employed in the United States, an intellectual disability (or “mental retardation” as termed in the federal law) label is a daily reality for almost six hundred thousand public school students.39 The diagnosis opens important doors within the educational system, compelling the allocation of significant financial and personnel resources toward the needs of the individual student. It also activates a legal apparatus that protects the individual’s right to instruction that is specifically designed to address the assessed academic and social abilities of the student. Whatever critique one might apply with the support of Dewey’s philosophy, these current affordances and achievements that occur through a classificatory system must not be abrogated.
A pragmatic evaluation of the consequences of intellectual disability diagnoses in the public schools must also attend to a series of troubling developments, most notably the issues of social segregation and racial disproportionality. Students with intellectual disabilities receive an inclusive education — learning side-by-side with their nondisabled peers — much less often than other students with disabilities. According to federal data, 10.95 percent of students with intellectual disabilities receive an education that is considered highly inclusive (80 percent or more time spent in general education). By comparison, over 48 percent of all students with disabilities (of any category or type) receive a highly inclusive education.40
Recent scholarship clearly demonstrates the overrepresentation of African Americans among students with intellectual disability designations.41 This issue is inseparable from the tendency for racial or ethnic minority students with disabilities to be placed in segregated settings such as separate classes or schools. Thomas Parrish found that African American students are almost three times more likely to be diagnosed with an intellectual disability than are white children.42 Edward Fierros and James Conroy found that “Black and Hispanic students are much less likely to be educated in an inclusive setting and more likely to be substantially separate from their white counterparts.”43 Beth Ferri and David Connor contend that, after public schools underwent racial desegregation based on the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, in recent decades special education has greatly served as an organizational mechanism of racial resegregation through placements of racial minority students in separate classrooms and schools.44
This brief pragmatic evaluation points to both achievements and problems occurring within the current classificatory system of special education. A student who receives an intellectual disability label receives the benefits of two individualized forms of interpretation, a medical model of instruction promising an educational plan tailored to a student’s needs and a legal bulwark supporting an individual’s right to a public education. However, by framing individual needs and rights primarily in opposition to the interests and values of the community, these two forms of benefit carry substantial baggage that runs counter to the democratic goals of education. What is required is a formulation that unifies the realms of individual and social interest within a coherent democratic framework.
How do we theorize a democratic education for students with intellectual disabilities?
Reassessing intellectual disability in the public schools requires applying Dewey’s notion of democracy —“the idea of community itself” (PIP, 238) — within a dialectic, constructive relation between the individual and the social organization called the school. The individual student contributes his or her efforts and energies to the school as a social group in which there are “material, intellectual, aesthetic interests in which all participate.”45 Dewey was very specific in saying that the contribution of each individual occurs “according to capacity” (PIP, 238), in sensitive calibration with the talents and abilities that an individual can offer. In a mutual manner, democracy requires that the school be organized to facilitate the individual’s participation “according to need” (PIP, 238) in the social values that the organization builds and sustains. The goal of the school in dynamic interaction with each individual is the “liberation of the potentialities of members of a group” (PIP, 238) in accord with the group’s developing interests and values. Each child, “independent of the quantity or range of his personal endowment,” is supported and nurtured in the “development of whatever gifts he has.”46
Of course, this interactive mutuality of contributions of individual students and the achievements of the social group called the school does not necessarily result in the formation of a democratic community. Dewey was aware that such a relation may occur within a social organization seeking unethical ends (such as a band of robbers). An additional requirement must be met to steer an organization toward democratic ends. In a school that is actively moving toward a democratic ideal, individuals must experience satisfaction and filial aspiration concerning the achievements and values shared by the group:
Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realization of the good is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just because it is a good shared by all, there is in so far a community. (PIP, 238)
Individual students enjoy satisfaction as a result of their own roles within the larger project and also experience affections and constructive energies of social affiliation and devotion. The school, class, and group of peers become collective developments that are valuable because they facilitate the participation and growth of each individual student while fostering individual contributions to the mutual support of other students. Moreover, in a school that pursues an ethos of democratic community, “the progress of one member has worth for the experience of other members.”47 The growth and learning of each student, regardless of ability, is understood within a collaborative or shared experience of value and achievement among the group.
While it is beyond the scope of this article to offer a comprehensive vision of democratic education and inclusive education, it must be noted that it is difficult to imagine employing Dewey’s philosophy of education in the cause of segregated schooling of students with intellectual disabilities. In relation to race, social class, and religious groups, Dewey worked consistently to reduce social hierarchies and divisions that he viewed as running contrary to the ethos of American democracy. Although the current disability rights agenda was not part of the social horizon during Dewey’s lifetime, his social thought certainly extrapolates toward educational arrangements that provide students with and without disabilities ample opportunities to interact, develop relations, and learn together. The democratic space of face-to-face interactions offers students with and without disabilities, under the guidance and support of teachers who actively support the moral equality and valued participation of all community members, opportunities to build relations based on mutual appreciation and respect.48
What has been achieved in this distillation of Dewey’s philosophy of the education of students with intellectual disabilities provides only an initial reappraisal of disability theory. Numerous intersections of Dewey’s educational and social thought and the wide range of issues concerning students with intellectual disabilities in the public schools remain. At the top of the list undoubtedly are the related goals of improving instructional provision while also cultivating a social climate of moral equality and human connection. Philosophical analysis in pursuit of these conjoint goals is best framed within educational provision that arranges for substantial interaction and mutual support between students with and without disabilities. Future theoretical and practical work in this area must attend simultaneously to individual needs and social unity within a communal framework of moral equality, a combination best pursued with guidance from John Dewey.
