[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Causes, characteristics, and effects on learning in school of exceptional learning conditions
John is different from other students at his school. He falls in the so-called special children’s category. He has a severe disability called Down's syndrome. This is an inherited condition that results in mental retardation. John's I.Q. is 50 (100 is considered normal.John is among a growing number of moderate to severely disable children who are being integrated into regular school classes, largely because of their parent’s determination to see their child as a ‘normal’ individual backed up by federal law. Some of these students are mentally retarded like John. Others are blind, deaf, physically disabled, or speech handicapped. Some have reading or other learning disabilities, often caused by brain injury.
Before 1700, there was almost no compassion for anyone who was different in Europe and America. People who were blind, deaf, crippled, or mentally slow were often abused, condemned as incapable of improvement, or simply forgotten as the ‘abnormal’ souls of the society. Some society of Asia went as far calling these disabled children as God’s wrought on the disabled child. But in the mid-1700s, the French Enlightenment began to spread the idea of helping the weak and disabled Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, in 1817 opened the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons. He himself was a teacher for deaf children. This was the first school in America designed to serve a disabled group. Also in 1850 the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Children was the first institutions set up specifically for mentally retarded children.
The first critical milestone to institutionalizing disabled children occurred toward the death of the 1800s. Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone inventor, believed that keeping the deaf together in institutions did not help them. Bell in a letter to Helen Keller wrote, who later became famous for overcoming her complete loss of sight and hearing...........
