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Educator and psychologist Christel Manske has been working with autistic children, children with trisomy, ADHD and other disabilities for over 40 years. Her view of such children is unusual – bright, free from stereotypes, it restores our own integrity and humanity.
“The mentally retarded children I work with are not born the way they used to be. They become like that. We’re dealing with… lonely kids. Our society does not want to accept them. The parents understood this. The teachers understood this. The teachers understood this. The doctors understood this. The judges understood this. The children understood this. Every day they roll the stone of prejudice uphill. These children survive in the cold conditions of society, like a hedgehog, which, reducing cellular activity to a minimum, falls into hibernation. None of us can endure everyday neglect and indifference from society without losing anything. Thirty years ago, I first read in Vygotsky that mental retardation has a social character. This idea was so new to me that it was hard to believe. When such children come to us at the institute at the age of 30-1 years, they exceed all our expectations. They are beautiful. They are dexterous. They work with full concentration of attention for a whole hour of classes, or even two. They are fast learners. By the end of the lesson, the child is physically tired, but his tired eyes shine.
Don’t define another person
“By calling a child down, autistic, or hyperactive, we put an intellectual label on him, blocking the way to explore his capabilities. Mental retardation and mental development are not natural categories. This division is a product of human culture. We have neither the opportunity nor the right to tell any of the people who he is and what he is. But we can and must, together with a person, go on a quest, as a result of which he will find himself. The other person is closed and alien to us only to the extent that we ourselves are closed and alien to ourselves. If terms like “down”, “autistic”, “ADHD child” cease to exist, only boys and girls will remain. For example, children with trisomy 21 are girls and boys who, at a certain stage of joint-separated activity, learn external speech using letters and gestures. Girls and boys, who today are classified as autistic, are children who, in a joint-shared activity, learn to transform their defense mechanisms into a social shell … Everyone is happy in their own way. Is not it?”
Understand the meaning of their defense mechanism
“The story of these kids is, at best, a story of roadside survival. The relationships that have developed in society and that they encounter practically do not give them a single chance to rehabilitate themselves, to become independent, self-confident people. Their heroic and desperate attempts, in spite of their “inferiority”, to develop at least a little bit, no one wants to notice or recognize. The defenseless child, being alone, develops ways of surviving that make sense to him. I believe this applies to psychosis, epileptic seizures, autistic reactions, depression and behavioral disorders. Children are less and less likely to integrate into society if there are no people on their way who will find them in their loneliness and include them in their cultural environment. Our task is to understand the personal meaning of the defense mechanism and share it with the child in need of protection so that his actions as a lonely being become social actions. “In our hands lies the responsibility for whether a child becomes mentally retarded or not,” Vygotsky wrote 70 years ago. The more pronounced the child’s behavioral deviations from the norm, the more we have to learn from him.
Read more:
- Children as a challenge
Deal with your own fears
“Before thinking about special children, we need to deal with our own fears of the monster called inferiority. The fear of being considered stupid darkens our consciousness much more than the fear of being infected with stupidity by those who create such concepts and decide who is “full” and who is not, who is valuable and who is not. On this basis, selection is carried out, the basis of our education system is laid. Vygotsky believed that the real signs that we ourselves are defective are our paralyzed perception, our blocked ability to feel, the inability to express everything in adequate words, our intuition turned off. Before such ingrained beliefs gain power over us and begin to censor our consciousness, they take root in the external environment and program us day by day, masquerading as our cultural environment.
Let them express their uniqueness
“School should be a place where, with the help of a teacher, children can express their uniqueness… Teachers are neither judges, nor policemen, nor priests, nor all-knowing people. Their task is not to intimidate children, but to encourage them to be curious. They do not expect ready-made answers from children, but make them ask questions. They don’t program kids, they’re looking for exciting adventures.”
Christel Manske, Doctor of Pedagogy and Psychology, Head of the Institute for the Development of Functional Brain Systems in Hamburg. Author of methods for teaching students with Down syndrome reading and mathematics. The first in a series of books by Christel Manske, Every Child is Special (co-authored with Priest Peter Kolomeitsev), was published in 2015 by the Nikea publishing house.