Entry tags:	academic stuff: thesis, bitter anna is bitter, disability, disability: blind, disability: disabled people don't exist, grad school, history, history: blind history snippets, history: trust me - i'm an historian, i really like using lots of tags, secret message contained within, watch me procrastinate
Crossposts:	http://troubleinchina.livejournal.com/619869.html

There's a thing going around right now where certain government have decided to move to a charity-based model on public services such as libraries, schools, hospitals, and services for vulnerable populations such as disabled people.

Funny this should come up right now when I've been examining the impact of funding-related decisions such as this on educational facilities for students with disabilities in the late 19th Century. You know, when a lot of Victorians got together and went "This whole funding of public services such as libraries, schools, hospitals, and services for vulnerable populations such as disabled people needs to stop being charity based and come out of taxes."

Funding based on charity appeals is not just bad for Institutions, and it is not just bad for the people served by these Institutions. It also has long-term problems for society.

So, let's talk about my area of expertise: residential-based schooling for children with disabilities.

When the Asylum for the Blind needed to struggle constantly for money, a large part of their activities were based on, in essence, begging for money to support the school. They were constantly having to turn down applicants because they didn't have the funding to take on any more students. They couldn't effectively budget because charitable fundraising is always a crap-shoot that could end up with far too little money to feed the children in their care. They were very limited in what new programs they could introduce, had limited success in retaining teaching staff, and were unable to send their staff to other Institutions to learn how to teach blind students.

However, after a two year long campaign that involved going to every county in the province, the Board of Directors and the Principal for the Asylum managed to convince the Nova Scotia and New Brunswick parliaments to set their funding of the Asylum to the number of students from their respective provinces that were there, rather than a varying amount between $500 to $1000.

That, gentle reader, is when the funding for the school from all charitable donations and all government grants doubled. Because the amount of money it required per student in order to properly function as an educational institution, to feed their students properly, to ensure the building was well heated in a Nova Scotian winter, to introduce new educational reforms, to bring in books the students could read, and to pay their staff suddenly came into their pocketbooks, they could function as an educational institution rather than go around begging as a charity, presenting their students as pathetic.

The response by the Asylum was also quite incredible. The number of students jumped very quickly (suddenly girls were getting educated more often than before because free education usually means girls get education), and the number of options those students had for learning trades they could use to support themselves increased. The Principal was able to start some amazing programs, such as the Home Teaching Network that helped adults who became blind learn to read and navigate the world rather than sink into depression and desperation from their change in status. The Free Lending Library that sent braille books across the Maritimes was started, and there was a successful campaign to make the mailing of braille books free. The Principal also started an awareness campaign on helping prevent blindness in children by targeting nurses who cared for newborns in the signs & symptoms of infant blindness. Various highly successful programs were set up so that blind people could get loans to start small businesses to support themselves after graduation. Suddenly blind people were contributing members of society, getting an effective education in the same vein as their sighted counter parts, and relied less and less on the direct kindness of strangers and family members.

When various governments are saying "Let's take away government funding and turn these service organizations into charities again", they're saying "Let's have these service organisations go back to having to beg, to having to present the people they help as pathetic and helpless." They're saying "We don't think the people these services help are as deserving as rich people who won't need them." They're saying "access to education, to libraries and the services they provide, to assistance for vulnerable peoples such as people with disabilities should only go to those who can afford it, and everyone else can just sit around waiting for the scraps that the rich choose to throw out. Beg, little peons. Beg. And maybe we'll let you into this citizenship thing (except not)."

David Cameron and his ilk are suggesting we go back to a system the Victorians decided wasn't working. Maybe if we knew some of that history, knew why the Victorians decided that using tax money to support education and libraries and the like was a good idea, people would know why this is the worst. idea. ever.