Parents of Disabled Child Get ‘A’ for Effort

Some words of praise for Joyce and Duncan Taylor, who made the effort to give their daughter Sydney a chance to learn in a regular class. Mrs. Taylor was quoted as saying, “Parents have dreams for their children, but for some reason the established system wants to make sure that parents of children with disabilities don’t have these dreams.” Those are brave words, stubborn words, and they underline a truth about individuals that needs to be affirmed as often as any “diagnostic category” is used: that labels are just another of our “imaginative” ways of packaging; they refer to ways of thinking about things, not individuals; they are not nouns to substitute for people’s names.

Forrest Strayer, Laguna Beach