Active Intervention

Abstract

The chapter begins with three heart-wrenching accounts describing children and their parents caught amid special education’s self-defeating categorical, pathological system. Advantages for a non-categorical, non-pathological perspective are offered. The chapter presents the scenarios’ children as adaptive rather than maladaptive. It claims the children’s purposeful behaviors were communicating needs that educational and medical professionals, invested in the medical model, chose not to consider. It demonstrates the perils of focusing on a child’s deficiencies to the exclusion of determining what a child can do successfully. It states that today’s calendar-driven curriculum, which rarely considers a child as an individual, promotes behaviors wrongly interpreted as signs of disabilities. It recommends that we spend less energy comparing children, and focus instead on applying the strategies we possess toward helping all our uniquely capable youngsters progress along the developmental ladder that advances each one from where he or she is to where educationally he or she needs to be.