I hate to say it but I am not surprised at the development of such legislation and the fact that it is being applied only to children who get born into families who qualify for public aid. When I was a kid, I was diagnosed with several different things including but not limited to Learning Disabilities. Of all the things I've gotten diagnosed with, I consider Learning Disabilities the most damaging and damning in terms of long-term consequences for my life. Even my mother thinks they come with a side order of stupid even though she's seen IQ tests and evaluation results which have said otherwise. At best, Special Ed classes for LD involve efforts at active remediation of obvious difficulties but few opportunities for supplemental activities. At worst the educational experience for kids in Spec. Ed is warehousing and not even trying to teach them and develop what capabilities they have. The school system often doesn't give a damn and it is just pure chance whether your scholastic problems get helped if you are a kid who gets put into special ed. I know I've been there. Spec. ed students in my school system didn't get to learn an instrument for music and there was an amazing lack of essay contests, field trips, etc. At the secondary level it was even worse: while there was less stigmatization (e.g. the general ed kids calling you a retard) there was a caste system when it came to distributing new textbooks and instructional materials and guess who got the short end of the stick. I ended up convinced that LD is not something that someone _has_ as an individual but a socially-created condition which justifies measures such as the system of educational apartheid I just described to keep an arbitrarily-designated group of people from getting anywhere near the higher levels of society and providing a ready-made "excuse" if they turn out to be failures in adult life. While I have been diagnosed LD from psych evals before, I have actually had the following happen a couple of times: teachers and bureaucrats would diagnose me as having a Learning Disability just from looking at me, NOT from giving me placement tests, the inkblots, etc.! I never saw a rich kid in Special Ed. I wasn't surprised to later find out that the Nazis used similar terminology to describe the social groups they wished to exterminate.
Commenting by HaloScan
