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Comment by ndarray | Hacker News Reader

Normal schools are not appropriately prepared for blind people. They're bullying hells for blind kids (from social exclusion to assault) and the lectures heavily rely on vision, so a blind kid will be left behind even when he makes audio recordings (can't write braille fast enough for useful notes), which some teachers may even take issue with, for extra drama.

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Well, I was in public school from 6-18, and loved it!

And yet, blind kids must learn to integrate into the mainstream world. And schools for the blind are few and far between; at least in the US, they're typically residential (boarding) schools. One option, if it happens to be feasible in the OP's area, might be for the kid to attend a school for the blind early on, then move to a mainstream school later.

If blind communities are like some deaf communities, they may have a strong separatist bent which does indeed allow their child to avoid integrating with the rest of the world if they so choose. This is an option.

The blind communities I'm involved in don't have any such separatist bent that I'm aware of. If anything, perhaps we go too far in insisting on assimilating into the mainstream.

Achieving integration & inclusion by putting severely disabled kids in normal schools is a fairy tale. Integrating into the world at large is a separate issue - you're not stuck with the same class throughout, you're not dependent on the same teachers. Arguably, you face some of those issues when you get a job but there's a much larger choice and the people around you are at least adults, in a hopefully professional environment. I just don't see the case for having to go through school as a definitive outsider and endure guaranteed bullying to somehow prepare you for the world better. Trauma doesn't prepare, it disables further. No idea where OP lives, alternatives will obviously depend on that and/or OP's ability move accordingly.

Are you a blind person or a parent of a blind person? I'm inclined to give your position more weight if so. I'm legally blind (with some usable vision).

If we want disabled people to not be treated as outsiders, then it seems to me that disabled people need to be integrated into as many aspects of society as possible, including school, so that kids have disabled people as peers from as early an age as is practical. If some of us have to suffer the consequences of bullying or unfair treatment, then hopefully that's a temporary state, and the fact that more people have interacted with us from a young age is a step on the road to equality. Of course, the reason I can say that is that my experiences in mainstream schools were mild, in retrospect.

John Hughes deserves to be a pauper for what his films have done to American society. The way that American children have systemized and perfected bullying culture is disgusting and needs to have been shattered two generations ago.

Bullying to anywhere near the same extent as you see in America is so alien to most of the rest of the world. Do you know that nerds have the total opposite reputation in most of the third world compared to America?

Kids in school who are bullying blind kids are sick and deserve the full wrath of their superiors who ought to be catching this.

We should not just accept the idea of our youth being little shits. This is not a clockwork orange, and they are subordinate to us, not the other way around.

What a ridiculous take. Kids or adults don't bully because they saw it in the movies.

We live in the literal era of life imitating art and you think I'm off base?

You're off base. Sure there is a sort of "natural" instinct to play hierachy games and even for some to bully within all humans, but to imply that this isn't wildly skewed from country to country or culture to culture indicates that you simply haven't been exposed to one of the situations where bullying is cracked down upon.

It's quite rare to see "bullying" in the traditional sense within a lot of south east asia since the teachers are so shitty and strict, often there's an "us vs them" mentality that develops unique amount of camaraderie between students and teachers.

Bullying reasons are also totally different. "Four Eyes" and other stuff against glasses is super duper uncommon, again in Asia since almost literally everyone there now wears glasses. Go to South Korea and you won't be bullied for sitting in front of a computer all the time, but you certainly will for being fat.

But nerds getting shoved in lockers? The entirety of the "Krelboynes" in malcom in the middle? In poor countries, smart kids are seen as a one way ticket out of the hell-hole known as poverty and are often the most popular in their schools.

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