WHY WE FIGHT.
"Your father and I didn't get special treatment, so why should you?" were the words my "mother" said when I told her about what I did the other day. I had to take my father to collect his car from the mechanic, and that involved a trip past my old high school. This year, being the 28th Anniversary of my graduation, I pointed to a classroom and said, "See that building, there?" "Yes." "That's where my interest in Japanese and Japan began." I then went past another building and said, "That building there was where I spent a lot of time 28 years ago. I had Modern History (my other favourite) and Economics there. And that classroom was where I had my maths class." I was unsurprised to discover that the blackboard has been replaced by a white board and there was an orange cushion near the glass door. I then moved past the Home Economics block, where I said to my father, "That classroom was our Home Economics one, and the teacher, knowing I had a bully in my class, used to let me take my bag into class because another little shit used to steal it. Usually, only Year Twelves had that privilege." I also remembered the teacher telling the bully that when he left the school, she wouldn't be sorry. (My mother thought it was sad. Well, Hello, if he'd been a nice kid, he would be missed!)
How was I viewing the school? Well, my view was (unsurprisingly, my "mother" blasted it as stupid) I don't want other kids to go through what I went through at school. I saw an autistic common room as being a great idea, which she said wasn't possible. Evidently, she doesn't know that a common room would be for ALL autistic and disabled students to go to escape from bullies and it would not be divided into different grades, such as one common room for autistics in Year Eight, one for Year Nine and so on.
My "mother's" attitude reminded me of an elderly man I encountered on a bus who said that he remembered ex-servicemen disembarking from a ship in Townsville, after the Second World War, being given an apple, and none of this "namby-pamby counseling stuff." I remember when I was in Year Eight, on April 24, the school principal leading the Anzac Day Ceremony and he began by telling us his earliest memory was when he was about two or three farewelling his father to go and fight in the Second World War and how, when he was five, his father came home. He was disappointed that his father wouldn't tell him stories about the war, and if he asked, his father would say he didn't want to talk about it. That is a sign of a man who is damaged by war.
I don't like talking about the bullying I experienced, save to say that many of the kids who were bullies were not those of influential parents at the school, and nor did they become school captains. I talk about my Japanese teacher and my history teachers, and I say my first years at high school were awful, especially as we were divided into X or Y (X was if your surname began with the letters A-M and Y N-Z) and the bullies were in the core subjects of English, Maths, Science and Social Science. There was one other bully who was extremely narcissistic, but fortunately, he left in the middle of Year Eleven.
When I heard a right-wing senator give a preposterous speech regarding us, and said that we should be put into special classrooms and that teachers tell her that they're not equipped to teach us, I say, well, that reflects poorly on teacher education, and can be a sign of unwillingness of a teacher to learn. I would say that any teacher who has an autistic student in their class who is keen on a subject would be crazy not to encourage them!
So, why do we fight? We fight not to hear our own voices, but because we want a better deal for today's kids and the kids of the future. There should not be segregated classes, but what is really needed in school is for teachers and principals to consider the behaviour of students and put students of similar patterns of behaviour in the one class. In my case, the bullies didn't want to learn, but they were put into classes with those of us who actually wanted to learn, and THEY were the disruptive ones, not us.
We want school principals to listen to those of us who are actually autistic and what we think we need, not the neuro-typical folks who THINK they know what we want.