The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.
Helen Adams Keller(1880-1968)
US author & lecturer, blind & deaf, taught by Anne Sullivan, Radcliffe grad. w honors
Why is it that activities for people with disabilities are special? Why do we have therapeutic horseback riding, and the able-bodied just go horseback riding? Why are there therapeutic horticultural programs, and able-bodied folks just grow plants? We should strive to have everyone do just ordinary things and not continue to create "special" activities.
Susan Daniels (1997)
Associate Commissioner
US Social Security Administration,
Office of Disability
Over the years we have set up special buses, that take us to special places, where we learn special things, from special people, and then those same special buses take those same special people back to their special houses where they do special things. We need to break the cycle . . . .
Susan Daniels (1997)
Associate Commissioner
US Social Security Administration,
Office of Disability
Teachers, through an erroneous psychological concept, are compelled to regard the blind pupil as the equivalent of a seeing pupil except that he does not see. They conceive of the child as structurally incomplete,like an automobile engine with one cylinder missing. Therefore, education must not only be education, but must also be a remedial therapy that will supply the missing power and also make the car sound as if it were really hitting on all six cylinders. It occurs to but few that a blind child is a complete mental and physical whole, organized to function perfectly upon his level of sensory equipment . . . [as] a 5-cylinder engine!
Cutsforth (1933)
Blind children can learn to walk just as soon as seeing ones, only they have to be led around in the beginning more frequently than the others.
Kleig (1836)
It is denying the facts to hold, as a great many of our educators of the blind do, that the blind child's organization and growth can continue as in the normal child except for the absent sense.
Cutsforth (1951)
Only when . . . Educators stop applying to blind children the patterns devised for seeing children -- only then can the blind child live up to his real potentialities.
Lowenfeld (1946)
Studies of blind children and their development indicate that the sequence of development is, in general, unchanged by blindness, while the appearance of the various developmental stages varies a great deal from individual to individual.
Lowenfeld (1956)
The growth and development of the blind child is more LIKE than UNLIKE that of the sighted child. In each area his growth and development passes through the same sequence, but his rate may be slower due to direct and indirect influences of his visual impairment.
Scholl (1973)
It is not blindness alone that imperils the child's development, but the absence of vision as an organizer of experience, the absence of vision as the faccilitator of gross motoe achievements and prehension, the absence of vision in constructing a stable mental representation, and the obstacle to finding motor pathways for aggression that can lead to defense and neutralization of aggression in the service of the ego.
Fraiberg (1968)
Thus, we have come to the somewhat paradoxical conclusion that equality of educational opportunity for visually handicapped childrencan only be achieved by giving up the theorem of educational equality in the sense of sameness and by meeting instead the special needs that grow out of the child's handicapping condition by a canon of special methods.
Lowenfeld (1974)
The danger lies in the easy conclusion that developmental norms for the sighted population should be set as goals for the visually impaired population.
Warren (1984)
No matter how much we may wish it otherwise, the worlds of the [blind and the sighted child] are different.
Warren (1984)
It is important to establish the range of normal behavior as well as to study the extent to which differences might be traced to differences in early experience.
Warren (1984)
There is little hard evidence that the rate and sequence of development of visually handicapped infants are any different from those of sighted infants.
Ferrell (1986)
More must be understood about the rate, sequence, and interaction of development in visually handicapped children before lags or deficits -- based on a sighted standard -- can be interpreted.
Ferrell (1986)
It is far more important to ask the question, "How can the developmental progress of the visually impaired child be optimized?" than the question "How can the visually impaired child be made to achieve sighted age norms?"
Warren (1984)
An eye for an eye will make the whole world go blind.
"Mahatma" Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) Indian nationalist & Hindu reformer, lawyer, called Mahatma 'great soul'
None so blind as those that will not see.
Matthew Henry (1662-1714) English minister at Chester, left unfinished Exposition of the Old and New Testament Commentaries. Jeremiah xx.
There's none so blind as they that won't see.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) Polite Conversation, dialogue iii
Who is so deaf or so blind as he That wilfully will neither hear nor see?
16th century English proverb, collected in J. Heywood, Dialogue of Proverbs (1546)