Why are people so afraid of Autism?
I have thought about this alot recently. I have a couple of friends at work who are just learning about autism, because their kids are just being diagnosed as someplace on the spectrum. Their kids are young, so I tell them how lucky they are to be able to learn how to help their kids so early.
But they are scared. I have told them BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU READ ON THE INTERNET. I tell them about Brianna, how she is doing so well, even though sometimes she works very hard to do well. I tell them how I don’t think there is something wrong with Bri, she’s just got a different way of thinking that is weird to the rest of us. But that is a good thing, that means she has a leg up on everyone because she’s different.
I had never thought that one of the reasons autism is now seen as this evil monster waiting to steal your children is that autism research is now big business. This guy (who is autistic) thinks that if the autism research community admits that there is a huge group of functioning autistic folks out there, it will unravel their empire.
I guess that could be true, but I think the problem is probably more systemic than that. The class I took last semester was a basic educational psycology class, you know all about memory and how our brains store and retrieve information. It was neat, because I learned the technical terms that were always on Brianna’s testing paperwork. The class taught how our brains work, and what’s the best way to design instruction based on that. I think I understood the class better because I was working backwards alot of the time - I know how Bri thinks, and it won’t work with the models for instruction we have. If I brought it up in class, it would take a few go ’rounds before my fellow students would see my point.
If this is our teachers and researchers are being taught to deliver and design instruction without understanding that we have a population that thinks differently, we’ll always have the problem of not acknowledging the autistics in the crowd. We need to educate the educators and researchers, then the problem of ignoring high-functioning autistic folks will solve itself.