Isolation

When you identify a type of learning style in someone and then create the environment that will best help them learn, its good. If you take that person out of an environment where others are seen as having learning problems that are catagorized by "junk labels" or where other people are seen as retarded (or where they whisper the term MR) these 3 harms may be done.

1. The students who remain get sent a message about values that devalues them.
2. The student who moves forward (so to speak) sees a value system that can ultimately only serve them until they themself get left back somewhere else later on. How they valued the others when they were left back is how they will value themself when it happens to them.
3. All of society ultimately suffers as everyone who supports such programs, as well as every student in it, has the potential of taking the values that are taught here and applying them to other situations.

If instead you dont identify people as being different and encourage that difference (which includes the acceptance of how they may appear weak by standards that glorify the current standards of strength) you create temporary inclusion that will again ultimately exclude....EVERYONE! (Claiming you are expecting universal standards and saying that you just dont want to patronize people may have nothing to do with lifting someone one else up. It may just be another exclusionary method that provides the person imposing the standards a fleeting and false sense of empowerment.)

Also in and of itself the autism label may not include the need for medical treatments. People with autism do get sick and need medical treatment, but calling autism a medical problem and allowing for people to treat that label has caused terrible treatments as well as abortions. Isolate what needs to be treated. Isolating and identifying the autistic gene will only be used to eliminate the autistic with it.

Autistics can have the same difficulties that psych patients have and there cant and wont be special treatments for autistics without identifying EVERYONES differences and specific needs. Ive known many people who have been terribly hurt by the psychiatric system whose main purpose of existence seems to be to serve and protect the public from the psych patient (whether there is any evidence that the public needs to be protected from someone or not). I dont see how such a screwed up system can be fixed until alot of peoples attitudes about such things change. However....

However, too often liberation for some comes at the cost of oppression for others. This ultimately serves no one and isolates everyone to one degree or another. The attitude needs to be either we all move forward together or we all stay where we are.