Individuals Who Contributed to Special

Individuals Who Contributed to Special Ed

Contributions to Special Education

Special education addresses the special needs of children with disabilities. Children that often benefit from the additional attention are those with learning and communication challenges, social or behavioral disorders, physical disabilities and developmental disorders (Special Education, 2011). Special education adapts traditional teaching approaches and individualizes them to the particular needs of a child to optimize the educational benefits. Accounts of educating the deaf and blind can be traced back to the Renaissance, when scientists first began to develop methods of educating disabled people. A number of individuals in particular have made significant contributions to the field of special education both in laying the foundations and later in institutionalizing the teaching approach.

According to historical accounts, the first physical impairment to receive special attention was deafness. Abbe Charles-Michel de l'Epee is an 18th Century French educator widely considered the father of the deaf (Martin et al., 1981). Epee believed that deaf people were capable of communicating through language and dedicated himself to developing a method to instruct them. In 1760, Epee founded the world's first free school for the deaf. An especially remarkable aspect of the school was that it was open to the public as Epee encouraged other educators to learn from his system. He developed a sign language known as "Methodical Signs" that built on an older system by incorporated signs for all verb endings, articles, prepositions and auxiliary verbs of the French language (Mirzoeff, 1992). His work had an immense impact on legal status of the deaf in society. In 1791, the deaf were first recognized under the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. The school for the deaf that he founded, the Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets a Paris, began to receive government funding in 1791. His educational approach and system of sign language were exported and implemented in other European countries. Laurent Clerc, a student of the school later founded the first school for the deaf in America and introduced the sign language that forms the basis of the modern American Sign Language (Martin et al. 1981).

Developments in the special education of the blind followed soon thereafter. In 1784, Valentin Hauy founded the Royal Institution for the Young Blind in Paris, the first school for the blind (Sakula, 1998). Hauy developed the first system of raised letters, which he began to use with students to help them compose sentences. Louis Braille entered the school in 1819 and perfected Hauy's system of raised letters into the Braille system of reading and writing for the blind. It was Hauy's efforts that first introduced the system and gave the blind the educational opportunity to prosper.

Later in the same century, Edouard Seguin opened the first private school in Paris for the education of the mentally handicapped. Seguin was a physician and educator who stressed the importance of fostering independence and self-reliance in the mentally disabled through a combination of physical and intellectual tasks (Copeland, 1995). He was the student of Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, whose work with a mentally retarded child many consider the beginning of modern special education (Lanska, 2010). Seguin moved to the United States in 1848 and established a number of schools in various cities for the education of mentally handicapped children. His publication, "The Treatment, Hygiene and Education of Idiots and Other Backward Children," is a landmark textbook dealing with the special needs of children with mental disabilities. Maria Montessori, an Italian pediatrician built on Seguin's work in the early 1900's and her work on the education of the mentally disabled became integrated into many schools around the world (Hallahan & Mercer, 2001).

Special education in the United States remained marginalized until the early to mid-1900's. Samuel Orton, Marion Monroe and Samuel Kirk were especially instrumental in the development of special education during this time (Hallahan & Mercer, 2001). Orton worked extensively to develop ways of teaching reading to children with reading disabilities. He developed the Orton-Gillingham method for reading education, which consistently proved to increase the IQ scores of his students. Monroe developed diagnostic tests that effectively identified students with reading disabilities and created individual teaching programs based on the outcomes. Samuel Kirk advanced this assessment approach for identifying specific learning disabilities in children by developing the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA) (Hallahan & Mercer, 2001).

Kirk is credited with the terming of the diagnostic label "learning disabilities." He went on to define special education by eight specific features that became the foundation of a political movement to implement structured special education programs: special class organization, special materials, special diagnosis, special clinical teaching procedures, intensive use of learning principles, systematic instruction, individualized instruction, and parent education (Cook & Schirmer, 2003). These efforts led to the establishment of the Association for Children with Learning Disabilities, which campaigned heavily for special education funding. In 1970, a law passed (Public Law 91-230) that consolidated the Education of the Handicapped Act and gave authority to the U.S. Office of Education to award grants to support teacher education and research in special education (Richardson & Parker, 1993).