C. F. Goodey

This discussion paper is drawn from a qualitative research project comparing the effect of special and ordinary schools on the lives of children, young people and their families. Special schools are recommended by health professionals who seldom know how ineffective these schools are. We question the beneficence and justice of health professionals' advice on education for children with disabilities and other difficulties. Cooperation with local education authorities (LEAs) plays a considerable part in the work of community paediatricians, clinical medical officers, therapists and other health professionals encountering children with "special needs". The "needs" range from physical disability and sensory impairment to learning difficulties and emotional or behavioural difficulties. This cooperation involves routine administrative problems, but it raises broad ethical issues too, particularly in respect of current tendencies in state schooling towards the integration or inclusion of these children in mainstream schools and classes

Some humanist theologians within the French Reformed Church in the 17th century developed the notion that a disability of the intellect could exist in nature independently of any moral defect, freeing its possessors from any obligations of natural law. Sharpened by disputes with the church leadership, this notion began to suggest a species-type classification that threatened to override the importance of the boundary between elect and reprobate in the doctrine of predestination. This classification seems to look forward to the natural history of mind that emerged later in the century

This book details the history of the idea of psychological development over the past two millennia. The developmental idea played a major part in the shift from religious ways of explaining human nature to secular, modern ones. In this shift, the 'elect' became the 'normal' and grace was replaced by cognitive ability as the essentially human quality. A theory of psychological development was derived from theories of bodily development, leading scholars describe human beings as passing through necessary 'stages of development' over the lifespan. By exploring the historical and religious roots of modern psychological concepts and theories, this book demonstrates that history is a method for standing outside psychology and thereby evaluating its fundamental premises. It will spark new interest in the history, sociology and philosophy of the mind sciences, as well as in the rights of children and developmentally disabled people.

The modern human sciences assume a fixed relationship between logic and the place of human beings in the natural order which have sprung from an emerging notion of correspondence between the externality of logic as system and the human being’s subjective logical abilities. Although this notion has evolved over many centuries, its onset was historically specific and can be located in medieval Christian thought which made “Man” the primary illustration for demonstrating the syllogism. First, this evolved so as to contribute to the birth of the study of “Man” in the modern human sciences. Secondly, it was accompanied by a re-definition of the human interior in terms of linear time, with the possibility of salvation as its end or goal; this was structured by “stages” involving the completion or perfection of an interiority that replaced earlier, static definitions of the human essence. Precursor notions for psychological “development” accompanied the interpenetration between logic and theology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The fundamental intra-human divide between “elect” and “reprobate” in the theory of predestination began to overlap with that between the scholastics’ “rational animal” and the non-logical other. The placing of a subjective logic within this fundamental division remains subliminally in foundational human science texts such as Locke’s Essay and Rousseau’s Emile. Thus it was from distant roots in natural logic that it, and modern psychology in particular, called in question the full humanity of two groups: children in general, and adults deemed “developmentally disabled.”