How blind Victorians campaigned for inclusive education

Disabled people’s voices are often missing from mainstream history, but texts reveal that a group of forgotten blind activists fought for inclusive education during the Victorian times.

Historically, education for children with disabilities, in so far as it has existed at all, has tended to be based on segregation.

Over the past 30 years there has been a greater effort, backed up by law, to integrate disabled children into mainstream education. But in the Victorian era they often attended educational institutions supported through philanthropic fundraising.

To encourage donations, schools emphasised the “miseries” of sensory deprivation. Unhappy about these negative representations of disabled people, an un-named “intellectual blind man” of the era said: “I assure you it is not blindness, but its consequences, which we feel most painfully, and those consequences are often laid on us most heavily by the people who are loudest in their expressions of pity.”

His words cut through the Victorian representations of blindness as something to be pitied and were quoted by a group of blind campaigners who emerged to challenge the paucity of available education.

They sought to reform the institutionalised approach to disability that was prominent at the time.

The names of these early activists are all but forgotten today.

Tweet