{"id":2367,"date":"2009-07-16T21:59:51","date_gmt":"2009-07-16T21:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2367"},"modified":"2009-07-16T21:59:51","modified_gmt":"2009-07-16T21:59:51","slug":"apt_pupils","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2367","title":{"rendered":"Apt Pupils"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was talking with a friend and colleague earlier tonight about how people with disabilities continue to be marginalized in various domains of everyday life, like employment and education. And then I came home and read Tyler Cowen’s wonderful article on autism and academia<\/a>. Cowen’s thesis is that the skills and abilities needed to succeed in academia are the same skills and abilities that many with autism possess. Here’s a snip:<\/p>\n

Autism is often described as a disease or a plague, but when it comes to the American college or university, autism is often a competitive advantage rather than a problem to be solved. One reason American academe is so strong is because it mobilizes the strengths and talents of people on the autistic spectrum so effectively. In spite of some of the harmful rhetoric, the on-the-ground reality is that autistics have been very good for colleges, and colleges have been very good for autistics.<\/b><\/p>\n

But the passage that really struck me is this one: <\/p>\n

Current prejudices are based on at least two mistakes. First, too often autism is defined as a series of impairments or life failures, thereby ruling out high achievers. It is more scientific and also more ethical to have a broader definition of autism, based on differing and atypical methods for processing information and other cognitive and biologically defined markers. That way we do not label autistics as necessary failures, but rather we recognize a great diversity of outcomes including successes.<\/b><\/p>\n

If only we could recognize the great diversity found in the whole realm of disability. Each person with a disability has been shaped by a singular combination of experience, opportunity, and innate talent. The disability is only one variable in the equation. But our schools and workplaces consign whole groups of people to lives of ignorance and penury because they cannot conceive that a life with a disability is a life of possibilities. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was talking with a friend and colleague earlier tonight about how people with disabilities continue to be marginalized in various domains of everyday life, like employment and education. And then I came home and read Tyler Cowen’s wonderful article on autism and academia. Cowen’s thesis is that the skills and abilities needed to succeed […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-Cb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2367\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}