Separate Schools for Autistics

Ari Ne’eman has an article responding to the recent proposal by Gov. Chris Christie to fund an autism school in every county in New Jersey. In what might strike some people as being counter intuitive for an autism advocate, Ari opposes this proposal and for good reason, considering his own childhood experience. As Ari points out:

As an autistic adult who went through New Jersey's special education system as a child, I experience firsthand the low expectations that are all too common in segregated settings for students with disabilities.


For several years of my childhood, instead of walking to the neighborhood public school a few minutes away from my home, a van took me an hour and a half away to a school for students with disabilities. There, academics took a back seat to social skills classes. A culture of low expectations dominated the educational environment.

I cannot say that I support separate government schools for autistics mainly because I do not support government schools in the first place for anyone. That being said, I worry that by advocating integration we are missing an opportunity. Could not we, in the autistic community, take over such a school and give the children the sort of autistic education they can actually succeed with? If we believe that autism is a difference of mind not a disability then it follows that autistic children would benefit from a learning program designed specifically for them. To grow through the regular public school system, means starting out with special education, guaranteed, by definition, to treat us as inferiors, in the hope of eventually being able to integrate into a wider school, which might not really be a victory either.

The weakness of any integrationist policy is that it, by definition, enshrines the majority culture as the “superior” one to be integrated into. As long as we are trying to be like neurotypicals, we can shout at the top of our lungs that we are their equals, but we will not and they will have every reason to continue to treat us with contempt as their inferiors. This can be seen already in Ari’s own school experience. I am sure his teachers meant well and desired to give him the skills to eventually be able to integrate. That being said they were forcing him to spend time developing skills that he might not have had any particular aptitude with; time that could have been better spent developing those skills he could make best use of. At a more fundamental level the very valuing of neurotypical social skills holds up neurotypicals as the superior thing to which us autistics should try to emulate. If this was going on at an autistic school, how much worse would it be at a regular public school, a system designed around the valuation of socialization at the expense of the simple transfer of knowledge?

I am not saying that autistics have no need to be taught to socialize with neurotypicals, just that socializing, beyond being able to communicate a rational case as to why someone should do what you want, has no intrinsic value. That still leaves the attempt to play on the emotions of others to get them to conform to one’s desires. We generally call such activity manipulation and I have serious qualms about the morality of teaching such skills in school.

What might a real neurodiversity based autistic school look like? For starters we would have to take control away from people whose primary training is special education. As long as we are beholden to that model we will forever be trapped in the cycle of trying to catch up and by like neurotypicals. We need the school to be in the hands of people whose experience is not in treating autism, but in living it. The very concept of a classroom is based on a model of education as socialization and therefore needs to be scraped. In its place we offer a “school” as a building in which children are supervised and restrained from causing harm to others and to themselves; within such a framework children should be left to pursue their own interests. For teachers we should not be searching for education specialists at all, but experts in specific fields. Their purpose is to identify what specific fields of knowledge any given child possesses a predilection for and to work with that child to create specific assignments through which the child can pursue an area of interest. This could be something as simple as agreeing to read a book by a given date, write a report on it or be prepared to talk about it.

The success of the neurodiversity movement is going to depend on our ability to not just claim that we are different though still equal, but on our ability to put that into practice. We need to show that we can produce experts in specific fields of value. Do that and society will readily grant us the accommodations we need. To do this we are going to have to start with the education system and we are going to need to take control of it.

Reflections on the Autism Speaks Protest

So I spent Sunday morning protesting the Autism Speaks Walk. I took part in the protest as an associate of ASAN. I am not, though, an actual member of the group even if I did originally help found the Columbus chapter and even if I continue to view it as my family here. For this reason nothing that I say should be taken as representative of ASAN, a liberating position if at times I am critical of them. (Melanie, Noranne and Aspitude have already posted on the event so see them for an alternative perspective.)

We had a dozen or so people, Autism Speaks had about eighteen thousand so it gives an idea about what we are up against. Standing around waving signs is not an ideal way to win friends and influence people in the best of circumstances. In our case, the area we were given by the university to protest was away from the arena where the walk was being held, across a giant parking lot, across a busy street. People driving into the parking lot could see us and the end of the Walk was right by us, but other than that we were irrelevant. I know someone in the OSU band, who performed at the event, and she told me later that she was unaware that we were even there. Maybe it would have helped if we could have provoked some sort of reaction. In truth, though, besides for the occasional catcall of "you're stupid," "get a life" or "go home" we were pretty much ignored as we deserved. Why should anyone pay attention to some people waving signs? If anything the people of Autism Speaks were very nice to us. One of the organizers came out to offer us water if we needed it (we had brought plenty of our own). If we did not succeed on the ground we did succeed where it counts most in the twenty-first century, media. We were interviewed by the local ABC and NBC stations. The credit for those needs to go to our front office, particularly Ari Ne'eman, and to those in our group who made the phone calls. State representative Ted Celeste also stopped by. Representative Celeste is a good friend of the group, whom we have spoken to multiple times in the past. He apologized to us for having a puzzle pin on his lapel, knowing our strong opposition to its use. The fact that Celeste bothered to even talk to us in such an environment (we being outnumbered more than a thousand to one) says a lot about him.

I can only admire Autism Speaks for creating the sort of trans-generational, trans-community networks that they have. Central to their fundraising and what the Walk is meant to demonstrate is that autism is first off a family issue and second a community issue. For this reason you did not have just autistic children walking, but their entire families as well. And not just families, you had large groups of friends and neighbors as well so surrounding every autistic child is a large "team" of support. Now as someone from the group pointed out, this entire Walk was designed with neurotypicals in mind and not autistics. One can only imagine the hell some of these kids were being put through, taken off of their schedules to a place with lots of noise and people running around. A step in the right direction for Autism Speaks would be if it would openly fashion itself not as an organization for autistics, particularly as autistics are not represented in its leadership, but as a support group for the parents of autistics. However difficult it might be to go through life autistic, it cannot compare to the challenges of being the parent of an autistic child. These parents need and deserve the support of their families and communities.

This brings us to the trap that Autism Speaks has maneuvered us into, one that we have failed to solve and until we do we will not be able to stand up Autism Speaks in the public arena; Autism Speaks has pitted us, not against their front office, but against the parents of autistic children. Say what you want about the front office, their eugenics policies and their misuse of funds, but that is not going to help you deal with a parent grasping for solutions in the here and now. The toughest moment of the Walk for me was not the taunts (I am a brawler and cannot resist a fight); it was when that organizer, who offered us water, followed up by asking us who is going to speak for his son who is unable to speak. I admit that the person is not me. I have not spent a single day being the parent for that man's kid nor do I have the solution to his problems. The most that I can say is that I am the obvious ally, who would be willing to help him, as long as I am not alienated by talk of disease and cure, lines of discourse that will make it nearly impossible for me to hold down a job and eventually get married. There was a good conversation with him and the group and he was really nice to us. We spoke about advances in communication technology that offers alternatives to verbal speech. After the man left someone from the group made a crack that the man was prejudiced with his talk of "all people communicate by talking" Fine, maybe they are right and this man suffers from petty prejudices (don't we all); that simply dodges the real issue at hand that this man is on the front lines dealing with the real challenges of autism and we do not have any readymade solutions to offer.

What we need to have is a dialogue with the parents. All this rhetoric about Autism Speaks giving out $600,000 salaries and only spending four cents to the dollar on families very well may be true, but that simply makes us sound like every other political group this time of year going negative against the opposition. I do not wish to fight all those parents, friends and family who came to the Walk and they certainly deserve better than political attack ads. If given the chance, here is what I would want to say to them: I acknowledge the difficult situation that you are in and that I am in no position to judge you as to whether you are truly "tolerant." As someone on the autism spectrum I am incredibly fortunate in ways that many of your children are not and because of that I feel a sense of responsibility. Whatever the future of autism holds I am here with you for the ride. That being said we need to consider some hard realities. First off, whatever theoretical debates we can have about using a magic pill to cure autism, no magic pill is on the horizon. This leaves us with ever improving methods of schooling and therapy, all of which will remain expensive. Secondly genetic screening and finding out the root causes of autism is not going to help a single child with autism presently. Thirdly, every one of your autistic children is going to become an autistic adult and that is going to require a system of its own that is not in place at present. Autism Speaks, for all of its high sounding rhetoric, offers nothing to help you with any of these real issues. For your sakes and more importantly for the sake of your children you need to start talking to other people; perhaps to people who are on the spectrum, but are still leading productive lives. They might not be able to offer you a cure, but they can at least open up a serious conversation as to how live with autism.

Articles of Interest

Moment magazine has an article on converts to Judaism, in which Y-Love is featured.


Ashley Tedesco writes in Jewcy about attempting to be a Jewish studies major at a Catholic school like Fordham. Catholic schools actually often prove to be quite hospitable places for Orthodox Jews and many Yeshiva University people have specifically gone on to Fordham.


Left Brain Right Brain has Ari Ne'eman's testimony before the Equal Opportunity Commission. In the course of the conversation the issue of eliminating many of the specific autism groupings is raised.


I recently mentioned Malcolm Gladwell on this blog. For those of you who are not familiar with him, here is an article of his from a few months ago dealing with how "Davids" can defeat "Goliaths." This article ranges from military issues and Lawrence of Arabia to twelve year old girls playing basketball with a full court press.


Finally Garnel Ironheart offers a lament about the fact that Haredim can get away with knocking Modern Orthodox leaders, but it is expected as a matter of course that Modern Orthodox Jews will be respectful when it comes to Haredi leaders. In the comments section Rabbi Benjamin Hecht links to an old article of his that I read years ago and consider to be the best piece to come out of the whole Slifkin affair. The article challenges Haredim to justify, in terms of Jewish law and tradition, the claim that their rabbis are the de facto authorities over all Jews including those Jews who do not live in their communities or never learned in their schools. Rabbi Yosef Blau once said something similar, noting that, of all the rabbis who signed the Slifkin ban, there was no one, with the exception of Rav Elyashiv, that he would have ever thought to ask a question a question of Jewish to and even Rav Elyashiv he never would have asked something related to theology.

Articles of Interest

Melanie talks about the recent protest against Autism Speaks at Ohio State. I was involved in the early stages of this event. I really miss the people over at our ASAN chapter.


Also on the Asperger front, Claudia Wallis writes in the New York Times about the strong possibility of Asperger syndrome being removed from the new edition of the psychiatric diagnostic manual to be merged with P.D.D.-N.O.S as autism spectrum disorder. The article goes on to quote Ari Ne'eman as supporting the view that autism is one large community. He views his identity as being "attached to being on the autism spectrum not some superior Asperger's identity." I have personally debated this issue with Ne'eman. My position regarding disabilities in general is to make a division between those who are at a baseline of physical and mental capacity and those who are not. As I see it these two groups have different interests, require different things from society and must therefore operate within different models. For those who are functional the necessary model is that of the minority group. What is needed is not charity (otherwise known as aid) from society, but an understanding that such people have a different though equally valid mode of living. This would apply to someone like me or my friend in a wheelchair, who is completely self sufficient. Now this type of disability model would not apply to those who are disabled in the more traditional sense. Such people would require charity from society. Hopefully this charity would be used with the long term goal of helping as many people as possible to move out of the non-functional disabled category to the functional category. I made the argument once that to call a group the Autistic Self Advocacy Network means that you are dealing with only those who are actually capable of engaging in self advocacy. Self advocacy on behalf of other people is a contradiction in terms. It is amazing how this type of basic tautology apparently could prove to be offensive to some people.


Also in the New York Times, Kenneth Chang has on article on the rise of modern day creationism in the Islamic world. The article points out that because Islam does not share the Genesis creation story with Jews and Christians there has been far less at stake for Muslims to stick with a young earth model. I come to the issue from a medieval perspective. In the Middle-Ages the controversial creation issue was not evolution, but the Aristotelian claim that the world existed from eternity. Muslims were far more likely to be willing to go along with the Aristotelian position because they did not have to defend Genesis. (For more on this topic see Taner Edis writing for the History of Science Society.)


Charles W. Hedrick writes in Biblical Archaeology Review about the continued controversy over Morton Smith's claim to have discovered a different and potentially far more provocative version of the story of the resurrection of Lazarus in the Gospel of Mark. Smith was probably the most colorful figure in the field of twentieth century Jewish studies. He was a former Episcopalian minister who turned Talmud scholar.

Finally Raina Kelley, in Newsweek, takes a swing at the film Precious and the growing genre of underprivileged children redeeming themselves and finding a future through the medium of writing. Kelley writes from a non-humanities perspective, arguing that mathematics is a field far more likely to allow a person to enter the middle class, but there is an inherent bias among writers to push their own profession. This is not to say that Kelley is against the humanities; there is just an acknowledgment that to write requires actual training and, contrary to myth, does not spring spontaneously from the unlettered heart. I take an Aristotelian attitude toward the humanities. The humanities have no utilitarian value and are therefore for those who do not need to make a living or for those, like me, willing to live in poverty. They do serve a purpose, though, and are necessary for anyone wishing to play an active role in society.

In Defense of a Traditional Understanding of Rights: A Response to Ari Ne’eman

This past April Ari Ne’eman spoke at the NFB Disability Law Symposium. His speech was a remarkable display of insight into not just autism and disability issues but basic political theory as well. It is certainly very rare to see someone who can cover the full range from theory to practice. It is, therefore, with the greatest respect, that I offer a few words of disagreement. Not in terms of neurodiversity but simply on the grounds of political theory in the hope of generating further dialogue on the nature of rights and their application to people on the autism spectrum. Like Ari, I strongly support the association of autism and the wider disability cause with that of the civil rights movement and see this as the basis of neurodiversity. In particular, I take the gay rights movement as a model for my autism advocacy. Up until a few decades ago, homosexuality was labeled as a mental illness. Today it is accepted by most of society, in some form or another, as an alternative lifestyle. I hope that one-day autism will gain similar acceptance.

Ari asks the question as to the nature of rights and where rights come from. He first raises the Enlightenment option in which rights come from a social contract. Ari objects to this for two reasons. The first objection is that a state of nature has never existed and no one has ever signed any contract to place themselves under a government. One could also suggest that a contract is signed with God, but that is also a problem in a society, such as ours, that recognizes atheism as a legitimate partner in our political discourse. His second objection is that this notion of rights is very narrow and only covers negative rights. You are protected from people doing things to you but you have no inherent right to pursue freedom in a positive sense. Following Alan Dershowitz, Ari argues that rights come from a historical recognition of wrongs having been committed to a specific group. For example, the gay rights movement has succeeded in making the case to society at large that homosexuals have been mistreated and that therefore it is necessary for society to actively recognize the gay community as a wronged group and actively grant them tolerance.

As a supporter of an “Enlightenment” understanding of rights, I would like to offer an alternative understanding of rights and some thoughts on the place of autism in this system of rights. Let me first respond to the issue of the social contract. For me, the social contract is not something signed in some mythical time in the past when man lived in a state of nature, but something that we sign every day with each other. There are people who would like to persecute homosexuals, ban them from the public sphere and even cause them physical harm. Why should I care, I am not gay? The reason is that many of the same people who want to harm homosexuals and stop them from living their alternative lifestyle also want to persecute me as a Jew and stop me from living my alternative, Jesus-free, lifestyle. This suggests an alliance simply on pragmatic Hobbesian grounds. I will agree to let homosexuals live their non-hetero lifestyle if they let me live my Jesus-free lifestyle. This is ultimately codified in a society-wide cease-fire agreement known as the Bill of Rights where we agree that everyone is going to be granted a list of rights and protections and we forgo the chance to stick it to our group of choice.

I think the real important difference between Ari and me is over the issue of how broadly to draw the boundaries of rights. I believe in a “right” (a deal that I am willing to make) to life, liberty, and property. Liberty, in this case, being the right to pursue one’s own good in one’s own way as long as one does not interfere with the liberties of others. As John Stuart Mill argued, this notion of liberty could only work if one limited it to direct physical harm. The moment you try to apply liberty to a wider notion of harm you are faced with the problem that, when living in civil society, every action affects other people and causes some form of harm. For example, it is of critical importance that we do not allow my Christian neighbors to kick me or my gay friends out of our homes despite the fact that our presence and our alternative lifestyles may be causing real psychological suffering. The moment my Christian neighbors can bring their psychological suffering into play then they get, in essence, a blank check to persecute us and the whole notion of rights, ceasing to have any meaning, collapses in on itself. As part of the liberal tradition, our response has to be that as long as my gay friends and I have not physically harmed anyone we are protected and we are free to live our alternative lifestyles to our heart’s content.

Ari, along with modern liberalism, fails to hold to this narrow understanding of rights and instead takes a broader more abstract understanding of rights. This leads to the ultimate betrayal of the liberal tradition when he places the source of rights within the context of a discourse between minority groups and society. As long as the issue of rights is only one of physical harm then, by definition, rights can only apply to individuals. The moment rights are something belonging to groups then they are no longer something belonging to individuals. Instead of a universal brotherhood of individuals comes the petty tribalism of different groups set against each other.

To bring this back to the realm of autism, we can agree that right now we on the autism spectrum are getting the worst of both worlds. We operate within a political discourse of group identity yet society does not recognize us as one of these groups. This leaves us in a situation where we are not being granted the sort of rights that other groups take for granted. For example, let us imagine I was the parent of a gay child. Now this child, being different from other children, may find himself in a difficult situation, unable to make friends and subjected to various forms of harassment. Our societal discourse would support my insistence on having the school protect my child, beyond even simple physical harm and allow him to be his own special person. Society will not tell me that the problem is my child and that my child needs to change to become more like other children. In our present discourse, the same does not apply to children on the autism spectrum; we are being told that the problem is us and the solution is for us to change to conform to society.

I see two possible roads ahead of us. The first, which I would prefer though I admit may not be practical within our present discourse on rights, is to embrace a traditional more limited notion of rights. This would take away certain rights from us, but these are not rights that we, in practice, ever had in the first place so it would not be any great loss. While we will not have these rights no other groups will have these rights either. This would be helpful, beyond simple Schadenfreude, in that this will allow us to turn around and make some deals with these same groups for our mutual benefit. Right now the gay community has no reason to help us as we have nothing that we can offer them. Now get rid of gay rights and open up gays to everything short of physical harm and we have a different story. I will agree to accept and support the gay child in exchange for support for my autistic child.

The second option, which is most likely the more practical option, is to throw our hat into the game of expansive rights along with every other group. While I do not personally support such a view of rights I can go along with this method of advocacy without hypocrisy. Just like a liberal, pocketing a Republican tax cut, I have no problem with playing the system to my own benefit. If other groups are going to benefit from this expansive notion of rights then I certainly want my group to be at the front of the line. This could even support the case for a narrow view of rights. I believe that the modern liberal expansive notion of rights is a Ponzi scheme that can only work as long as only a few groups try to cash in. Let every group come and hold society hostage to their every whim and the whole system will collapse and there will be no choice but to resort to the more restrictive understanding of rights.

I am perfectly willing to pursue either option. In truth, these two options can exist side by side. One can attack the modern liberal expansive notion of rights and make the case for a more restricted notion of rights. At the same time, while we wait for society to come around, I would encourage autistics to take full advantage of the current discourse on rights. I might even say abuse it to the fullness of our imagination.

As an addendum, I would like to briefly respond to two obvious objections to this piece. I readily admit that my method of thinking has a strongly “Asperger” flavor to it. I focus on individuals at the expense of society and I take a rather pragmatic attitude toward social relationships that does not leave much room for “empathy.” The most obvious objection to my argument is that I am “cold” and “heartless.” I do not see this as a problem. On the contrary, I see this as an example of the strength of “Asperger” thinking. Aspergers are in a unique position to appreciate the distinction between physical and non-physical harm. One of the weaknesses of neurotypical thinking is that it is so wrapped up in social relations that the two become hopelessly mixed together. I believe that being on the spectrum has helped me be a better liberal and supporter of the free society. I would also like to defend my use of the term autism considering that much of what I say would be problematic if applied to many on the spectrum. Any discussion of rights, by definition, only applies to people who have reached a certain baseline of intellectual self-sufficiency. So autism rights, by definition, only apply to autistics on the higher end of the spectrum. If you are capable of reading this piece and understand what I am saying then you can rest assured that you pass the threshold. A completely different discourse would be needed for those on the lower end of the spectrum, one based on care and charity.