For six years during my childhood I was placed into "special" classes, which I was assigned to after being repeatedly given detentions and suspensions during kindergarten-3rd grade. In 3rd grade I was sent to a psychiatrist who determined that I had special needs (and about half a dozen mental diagnoses) and could not succeed in general education. I believe that being put into these classes has majorly stunted my development of social skills, and also stunted the development of every other child who was dragged through the special education system. Many people have a general understanding that the special education system is a broadly negative thing, but I don't think that they comprehend the full scale of its effects on the minds of children who go through it. It's not surprising that former special ed students have worse outcomes both financially and socially than the average person, and while it's easy to blame this on their mental conditions, I think these can be overcome in the right conditions. Conditions in special education classes are the opposite of the right conditions.
Some say that special ed is a "necessary evil", that although the conditions are not ideal they are needed to encourage the development of mentally disordered students. Instead, these classes almost always completely ruin their development, and this can be explained due to a simple fact: special education exists for the single reason of separating the students who have some perceived learning problem from the "normals". The administration doesn't care what happens after these students are separated, they only care that they are separated - after this they are out of sight, out of mind. After being condemned to the special education program, you will grow up in an environment comparable to a county jail. The easiest part of this comparison to make is the overwhelming culture of paranoia and violence that rules in both places. The special ed "teachers", who tend to be glorified babysitters, are fully unequipped to deal with violent outbursts from the normal unstable individuals (no wonder the profession has such a high turnover rate), so it is common for a security guard to be posted in or near the rooms on call to stop these when they happen. This is of course not a desirable job, so these guards often become spiteful and hostile towards all the students. When all people ranging between those whose issues are nothing more than having trouble sitting still are grouped in with unstable, aggressive sociopaths, and both are treated with the same amount of contempt, the ones who are closer to normal will always feel alienated and start drifting more towards antisocial behavior. The culture of violence comes then, from these now anxious and hurt young people being constantly placed in self defense situations by the nature of the class, and so they grow to expect it at all times. This is an extremely low trust environment.
A more obvious source of social stunting is the lack of "normal" people to interact with. Grade school is the most formative period in a person's life, and especially elementary school mainly has the function of teaching kids to socialize. If your pool of people to socialize with during this period includes no "normal" people, how can you expected to socialize normally later in life? Once again, it's easy to say that this chance of normal socialization was low anyway because of the pre existing mental disorders, but many students in special education are fairly smart and act fairly normal when they are first placed into the system, and their behavior only becomes more antisocial after being enrolled in the classes. One example I have personally seen is a girl who was brought into the special ed class during middle school who probably had mild ADHD, but no other noticeable problems. She acted sort of stuck up during the first week or so, she clearly was very unhappy to be put in this class, and was probably coming from an upper middle class family who (like so many other families) turned to the psychiatrists and treated their word like the word of God, and were convinced into medicating their child and sending her to a class that would help her "develop" better. After a short time exposed to the conditions of the class, the belittling teacher, the violent outbursts, the infantilizing atmosphere, etc she withdrew more and more, and by the end of the year she acted nearly catatonic and spent all her time in the class sitting perfectly straight in her seat, not making a sound, not turning to look at anyone. Also in this class were people was a boy with a habit of throwing chairs, another one who often threatened to shoot up the school, another who would do nothing but sit with his head down and vibrate while making growling noises, among other exciting characters, and the 300 pound security guard who was always ready to take any one of us down at a moment's notice.
My assessment of the special education system is coming mainly from my own personal experiences, but I have spoken to other people from all over the nation and the world who have experienced similar environments in their own versions of special ed. If this is such a widespread occurence, then why is there so little awareness of it in the general public? Most people's perceptions of a thing they have not seen with their own eyes comes from media they have consumed about it. A classic example is how the meatpacking industry had to fully reform after people read about slaughterhouses in the Upton Sinclair book "The Jungle". Special education is not often portrayed in popular media, so there is no cohesive understanding of it for the general public. The most accurate representation of special education I've seen in media is in the show Malcolm in the Middle, where the character Dewey is subjected to a class of emotionally disturbed students, who are given no opportunities to do anything except to be kept busy with pointless work from an oppressive, infantilizing teacher. You can read the plot of the first episode regarding this class here. I find this funny because Malcolm in the Middle is supposed to have an exaggeratedly cynical view of the world, and yet this representation was very accurate (it makes me wonder if one of the writers spent time in one of these classes as a kid). Ultimately though, Malcolm in the Middle is a comedy and is not taken as a serious representation of this problem by most viewers. Until there is wide exposure of the true nature of special ed in a more "serious" light, people who go through this system will continue to have their futures ruined by the conditions they endure as a young child./p>
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