70's kids diagnosed Educationally Handicapped.

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In the UK there were three types of educational system and I at some point went into all three. I started off in a nursery school in 1969 which had a mixture of children mainly those with severe, profound learning disabilities and multiple disabilities. I was thought of by the doctor has having brain damage causing a 'lack of awareness and severe mental retardation' The recommendation was to put mein some institution and forget about me. I was prescribed heavy doses of diazepam so a doctor would thought of me as having a learning disability rather than his drugs were making me intoxicated. From 1971 I went into a school for children with severe, profound learning disabilities or multiple disabilities. Back in 1971 a non allistic person would have been termed mentally handicapped at the time. There at this school the staff didn't know I could count and I was forbidden to learn this sort of useful thing and they didn't know I could read or say the letters of the Latin alphabet. Until 1971 disabled children in the UK were deemed as ineducable and would have been put into institutions which were in effect concentration camps. I was not really learning anything at school but I was teaching myself things out of books. It was an escape from an abusive father and an emotionally distant mother (possibly suffering borderline personality disorder).

In 1974 I was put into a school for what were called educationally subnormal children and being about 7 going on 8 at the time was doing a curriculum which was five years below my age and abilities Also Asperger syndrome was not known then and I experienced a lot of bullying so in effect I was bullied at home and at school but I made a few friends though but my mum and dad wanted me to go to a school for allistic children. Actually the UK the term was Educationally Subnormal these would be defined as having borderline intellectual functioning and these schools also included children with conditions like dyslexia, discalculia, dyspraxia ADHD as they would have been termed forty years later. Actually what sort of work that went there was not really taxing at all but a typical 10 year old at that school would have been doing a curriculum for an allistic five to seven year old which was not preparation for adult life at all.

I finally went into an allistic school put a year behind after scoring within the mildly mentally accelerated range in a Raven's Progressive Matrix IQ test. I was also put into a lower tier post 16 qualification. However so much as been learned about autism now since. That was more common for those autistic children of working class Anglo Irish backgrounds than those of more affluent or with more intelligent or educated parents. It would show that this would also have a touch of classism there.

These people really had no idea about how you tick!

They were the stupid ones---they were "subnormal" in intelligence.

These days, I believe the British system of education, at least on paper, is superior to the American system.