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Seems like people will pay for the illusion that their child is not special needs, even if they are. Probably would be a better use of resources to save that money in an index fund managed by a trust, but maybe the children already have that and money is no object for some parents.
This discussion makes me often think about Forrest Gump, where the titular character's mother is presented as being heroic for prostituting herself to the school superintendent in exchange for allowing Forrest, despite being officially tested as having something like 75 IQ, to attend classes with everyone else, because "he deserves the same education as any other kid" or something like that. The film also, of course, featured the same kid, who needed braces to walk, just one day suddenly becoming capable of running, not only like any other kid, but to a level enough to make him the star running back to what seemed like a high level college football team, despite having zero other football skills.
I'm always highly skeptical of the whole "we must manipulate fiction because fiction inevitably, implicitly, unconsciously manipulates people's beliefs about reality" crowd, but I think there may be a grain of truth in their claims.
Which is an indication that society is at a point where the educated are in oversupply. He deserves it precisely because it no longer makes a difference, and at that point the pageantry of education is what matters: a costly signal from the group in oversupply meant to distinguish themselves as "one of the good ones". Which is important when there are too many of you.
The US hit that point in the '60s, and Forrest Gump is a period piece.
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The Telepathy Tapes was one of the more popular podcasts in 2024 and it's obviously complete bullshit but for spiritually minded and hopeful parents/family of a severely autistic child it's something that takes a terrible situation and gives a shining ray of hope. The same thing with facilitated communication despite all evidence it's a hoax continues to pop up over and over.
It's emotional, and understandable. Accepting the tragedy that your kid can't talk or understand you and it's not fixable is very difficult. And telling these very emotionally driven and loving parents that it's too bad and education is a waste is an awful experience on its own, and that's if you even manage to convince them which you probably won't.
There are some snake oil salesman profiting from the unrealistic hopes of these parents, and in the kind of society I prefer they would be charged with fraud, the schemes exposed to the public, and lashed Singapore-style.
Maybe we can't educate all the children to the ideal, but we can try to protect them and their families from predators.
Good luck with that when a substantial portion of the population believes in the claims. You're not gonna be charging the psychics like Uri Geller or the Ghost Hunters or the Ancient Aliens people or chiropracters or "natural herbal medicines" or other psuedoscientific whack anytime soon because a substantial portion believes it. Just take vitamin pills for instance, the FDA tried to regulate them a few decades ago as medicine and consumer backlash forced them to stop.
Yeah, it's just not possible with the current population's beliefs and political environment. More of a fantasy wish list of policies, laws, and norms that would be nice to have.
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I mean it's also a multi-barreled thing. There's parents with kids in the bottom 1st percentile who won't accept that their kid isn't really going to progress beyond toddlermode and that it's best to focus on enrichment and low-level socialization. There's also parents with like 10th percentile kids where a good outcome is 'achieves enough to be able to reasonably hold a stocker job at Walmart' where they insist on trying to handle them like there's a reasonable chance of them directing the family business on their own.
Also a peculiarity my mom observed a lot was the amount of cases where it was two intelligent parents who'd inevitably throw the occasional major autistic child from overlapping their own recessive tendencies. Probably a byproduct of the socio-economic filtering that the school had, but she saw a lot of Doctor/Doctor older parent couples.
Interesting bit with the doctor-doctor couples. Doctors should know the risks best with maternal age and major autism risks, I heard about it from a friend in the first year of medical school classes. Apparently it wasn't in the textbooks but the lecturer wanted to emphasize the risks because many doctors delay family to focus on their studies. By the time the subspecialty doctors are established in their careers they are 35+ on the young side.
Then again I have a family member who miscarried during her (now illegal) 100+ hours per week residency, so there's the risk of high stress pregnancies too.
Not literally just Doctor-Doctor but yeah a lot of mid-thirties parents where they're both in high-intellect careers and both have vague spectrumatic inclinations.
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