okay so one time back in grade 7 my class had an assignment where we had to design and create an invention for helping other people then present it to the class. At that time my next door neighbor had multiple sclerosis and was almost always in his wheel chair. My mother was his carer and one afternoon i was telling him about my day and watched as he struggled to balance his food on a stable table. At that moment i knew exactly what I was going to make. It took hours of searching the most common types of wheel chairs, heaps of money (which we didn’t have much of) to get the materials and a fair bit of tricky wood work but i was absolutely determined to make my project the best i could. Finally when it was done I took it over and tested it on his wheel chair and my god did he love it. It was a wooden tray table that clipped onto the arm of the wheel chair and had a cup holder and non slip material. He used it everyday until I had to take it in for presentation.
Now i was sure that i would get the best mark in class for my project. it met all the requirements and i had worked extremely hard on it. But when i got my mark back i had only just passed with a C. I went up to the teacher thinking there had to be a mistake of some kind. Even now I still remember exactly what she told me, word for word, “Sorry Cassie but that’s not exactly a useful tool for everyone now is it. There aren’t that many people in wheel chairs, it isn’t worth it to us in the same way the other children inventions are.” But the boy who taped a stick of deodorant to a fucking piece of wood got a fucking A!! As if that wasn’t an idea already thought up. For fucks sake he did it that day, literally drew up the plan that morning!
Look I know this is a big long post but I am saying this to point out Ableism is a big, important issue. I gave that tray to my neighbor, despite the school saying they had to keep it because it was technically “school work” and he used it until the day he died. And after that he gave it to a friend to use it. I made three others for more of his friends when he had to move into a home and they loved them because even in a place that was supposed to cater to their needs a stable tray that would not fall off their knees was apparently not something they had thought to provide, especially to people with inhibited dexterity. And yeah this probably had been made before at the time when I was making mine but looking now the cheapest I can find is at least 50 bucks! Hardly assessable for people with little money.
Years later and my blood still boils when I remember that the kid with stick deodorant got a better mark then I did, that his “invention” was considered useful while mine was not. I am still so angry that a school teacher would tell a child that what they had built to help someone they cared for was not useful or important or wanted or needed and that those people were so few and far between that they didn’t matter. That the only thing that did matter was US, the able bodied people. I didn’t quite understand the way I do now at the time but I was still upset, my mother was pissed as hell and my neighbor, well when I told him it looked as though he had expected it.
These issues need to be addressed, and they need to be fixed. Teachers at schools separating the able bodied from those who aren’t and putting the able bodied above them only continues the discrimination and the attitude that there aren’t enough disabled people to really make it an issue worth their worry.
tldr: Albeism is taught from a young age to not only be the norm but to also be taught to the point where making everyday simple things for disable bodied people isn’t worth their time, effort or focus
Speaking as a person with multiple disabilities (though mostly not mobility-related), I’m offended by the teacher’s attitude that inventions for people like me are automatically worthless just because no application for non-disabled people is immediately obvious. The teacher needs to learn that 15 percent of the world population are people with disabilities. And yes some of the individual conditions may be rare, but in aggregate we are not such a small portion of the general population. And many devices invented for people with one disability may be useful for people with other, somewhat similar disabilities. For example, closed captions on TV were first invented for deaf and hard of hearing people, but they also benefit people with auditory processing disorder. And inventions that start with helping disabled people may eventually be shown to be helpful for many other people: ramps help not only wheelchair users but also parents with baby carriages and travelers with wheeled suitcases. So an invention that initially seems relevant for only a few people may often turn out to be something that can have much wider use than initially envisioned. I wish that teacher of yours had not had such limited thinking.
I am guessing that part of the problem may be that the teacher was assuming that, because NON-disabled people think they don’t know many disabled people, that somehow we never find each other, never form a rich and thriving community, never share ideas and information and products with each other. She might have assumed that we can’t possibly form a cohesive “market”. But of course, we people with disabilities DO often find our way to the disability community and therefore have a LOT more contact with a LOT more fellow disabled people than do people in the general population. We also eventually find blog sites and email newsletters etc aimed at sharing information of interest to people with disabilities, whether in relation to products we want to try or in relation to policies and laws that might impact us and so forth. So once a new product has come along that is well tailored to our needs, we will learn about it a zillion times faster than non-disabled people do and may start integrating it into our daily lives for years before most non-disabled people realize the technology even exists. So marketing disability-oriented products for their intended audience is not nearly as much of a hurdle as some non-disabled people seem to ignorantly assume.
Wish I could give your former teacher a lecture.
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