Book review

Many of the ideas that underpin specialised education for children with disabilities in the Western world owe their impetus to the progressive ideals of the early 20th century.Progressives believed the application of science and rational and reasoned interventions in society would make a positive difference but they also indulged in a frenzy of measurement and categorisation that tipped into eugenics and ushered in bleak forms of social control, such as isolating those deemed unfit.As historians love to say, it's complicated, and there are few policy areas or periods as complicated as the education of children diverted into auxiliary (special) education because they had been labelled mentally defective or feeble-minded, or displayed other forms of disability.Ellis deftly explains the complicated nature of the history of special education in Toronto.It is a slender book, just 211 pages of text, but it is informed by contemporary literature from America and Britain and set against a large body of historical research into progressive ideology and education.It is focused on Toronto but the trajectory Ellis charts can be seen across Canada and in the education and child welfare systems of other English-speaking nations, including America and Australia.Special education was an area where maternalist feminists and child savers came together with other social reformers and harnessed the administration and bureaucracy to combat the perceived social ills of children who were, as Ellis delicately states, exceptional.At the beginning of the 20th century, Toronto, like most capital cities in the Pacific and Americas, had to address the demands of urbanisation as well as a sudden influx of culturally and religiously diverse migrants.Many new arrivals did not speak English well or at all, including Eastern European Jewish migrants.At the same time, crowding and poor sanitation caused horrific infant mortality rates, which social reformers, especially maternalist feminists, believed imperilled the white race.Reformers in Western nations devoted considerable energy to the development and codification of terms like "feeblemindedness" and "mental deficiency" and devised theories and systems of education to isolate children and incarcerate adults who had the misfortune to be labelled in this way, both to stop these individuals reproducing and remediate them.In Toronto, the leading lights included school trustee Edith Lelean Groves and the educator and medical practitioner Helen MacMurchy, who was a powerful force in the National Council of Women.As a result of their work, Toronto introduced auxiliary classes for "mental defectives" and the "feeble-minded", language schools for foreign children, and forest schools, which delivered education along with fresh air and nutrition to counter the miasma of the cities and the perceived deficits of the family home.Ellis overtly rejects the temptation to laud reformers or condemn them for social control but reports on the breadth and complexity of their motivations.Those who instigated auxiliary education sought to remediate individuals as well as society, so offered education

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