A Class by Themselves?: The Origins of Special Education in Toronto and Beyond
© 2019
In A Class by Themselves?, Jason Ellis provides an erudite and balanced history of special needs education, an early twentieth century educational innovation that continues to polarize school communities across Canada, the United States, and beyond.
Ellis situates the evolution of this educational innovation in its proper historical context to explore the rise of intelligence testing, the decline of child labour and rise of vocational guidance, emerging trends in mental hygiene and child psychology, and the implementation of a new progressive curriculum. At the core of this study are the students. This book is the first to draw deeply on rich archival sources, including 1000 pupil records of young people with learning difficulties, who attended public schools between 1918 and 1945. Ellis uses these records to retell individual stories that illuminate how disability filtered down through the school system’s many nooks and crannies to mark disabled students as different from (and often inferior to) other school children. A Class by Themselves? sheds new light on these and other issues by bringing special education’s curious past to bear on its constantly contested present.
Product Details
- World Rights
- Page Count: 384 pages
- Dimensions: 6.0in x 1.0in x 9.0in
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Reviews
"A Class by Themselves tells a complicated story, but one that embraces the complexities and contradictions. Ellis is creative in including neighborhoods, teachers, students, and parents in a narrative that might easily have stayed at the levels of theory and policy. In the concluding chapter, Ellis points to the ways that this history set the stage for further developments and present-day concerns in education, connections that will already be apparent to many readers by the end of his book."
Penny L. Richards
H Net Reviews"A Class by Themselves offers insights about social, moral, and educational reform across Canada and other Anglo American countries. Smoothly written and beautifully organized, Jason Ellis draws on the most up-to-date research and theoretical approaches from disability history and disability studies."
Kate Rousmaniere, Department of Educational Leadership, Miami University, Ohio"A Class by Themselves is multifaceted and addresses key questions in the field of the history of special education in public schools. The book's heart lies in the vast display of local primary documents that do what all good history should do — bring the period back to life."
Robert Osgood, Department of Education, St. Norbert College -
Author Information
Jason Ellis is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. -
Table of contents
Introduction
1 Eugenics Goes to School and Other Strange Legacies: Auxiliary Education’s Entangled Reform Origins
2 “Inequalities of Children in Original Endowment”: iq Testing Transforms Auxiliary Education, 1919–30
3 Avoiding “Blunders and Stupid Mistakes”: Auxiliary Education for Adolescents, 1923–35
4 “A Mental Equality Where Physical Equality Has Been Denied”: Sight-Saving, Speech and Hearing, and Orthopaedic Classes, 1920–45
5 The “Remarkable Case of Mabel Helen”: Special-Subject Disabilities and Auxiliary Education, 1930–45
6 Changing Ideas in a Changing Environment: The Impact of Personality Adjustment and Child Guidance
Conclusion
Appendix A Pupil Record Cards
Appendix B Auxiliary Program Enrolments
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Subjects and Courses
