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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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I guess there is some theoretical intellectually in tact individual that needs extra resources either because of a physical disability or idiosyncratic mental problem (like dyslexia) that if gotten over the hump of not being able to help themselves, can go on to utilize their education for the betterment of society. Personally, I've never seen one. I mostly only see parents pushing their parenting duties onto teachers through fake special needs, or fake special needs students becoming fake special needs employees, expecting all the same accommodations around their emotional needs and learned helplessness.

I've worked with the disabled in vocational rehab in the past. The young adults I worked with here moderate-function, too disabled for things like extra time on tests to ever really be a thing in their lives. Both of these types do exist; there really are a lot of people that just need a bit of extra help and can find gainful, independent imployment. There really are a lot of parents ruthlessly gaming the system as well. Sometimes these happen at the same time with the same person. Of note with the populations I worked with, there was never really a question about if these people were disabled or not; they were all obviously developmentally disabled to even an untrained observer. One thing I that has stuck with me over the years though was that even some of the more profoundly disabled ones had been coached by their parent to ether exagerate or hide their disablilty depending on the audience. Since I was an authority figure to them at first, one of my biggest challenges was to get them to stop exaggerating.