Trouble Is Everywhere

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.
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I've finally got myself sorted enough to start reading actual books again, which is nice. I'm just digging in to Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America by Mary Klages.

If it doesn't get itself sorted soon, I'm not going to be happy recommending it to people dipping in to disability history for the first time.

[This brief review is heavily coloured by my being so tired I'm dizzy. Sleep time now.]

The first chapter focuses on philosophical questions about blindness and disability in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and how philosophers like Hume were talking about and describing "being human". I understand why Klages is doing this - the "experiment" of teaching Laura Bridgman ("the original deaf-blind girl" - more on this in a bit) was about testing ideas of how people who had no input but what outsiders gave them would develop religious ideas. (There was a theory that blind people were by definition more likely to be atheists because they lacked the ability to "see creation". Also, they were less compassionate because they lacked the ability to see people's pain.)

So, I'm not sure how much of this chapter I actually followed. I mean, it contains a lot of sentences like this: "Thus, in the system of natural language, disabled people - including the blind - could become both signs and readers, both objects and subjects of the signifying practices constituting sentimental semiotics." Which I think means "blind people were [later than the above-stuff] both objects of pity and people able to pity others more because they were blind."

The chapter also talks a lot about France without ever really talking about France. I think it's important to mention, when talking about the first School for the Blind being started in France, that the origin story is very similar to the first School for the Deaf. I must do some more reading to see what people have said about this conjunction.

But again, I think this chapter needed more context before it's useful to the uninitiated reader.