Learning From Samuel A. Kirk's 16 Versions of Learning Disability: A Rejoinder to Mather and Morris

Abstract

In 2004, when I first started to investigate the history of the learning disability construct, I quickly found that the available literature on the topic fell into two categories, valid historical scholarship and celebrationist narratives. There were a small number of serious historical works by Carrier (1983, 1986, 1987) and Franklin (1987, 1994), who examined the growth of the learning disability diagnosis as a political and scientific development over many decades. I framed my own research in the tradition of Franklin (1987, 1994) and Carrier (1983, 1986, 1987), upholding the standards of research methodology and critical analysis set by historians (e.g., Danto, 2008; McDowell, 2002). My goal has been to determine where this notion of learning disability came from and how it grew in the work of many scientists over time. I have assumed neither that learning disability is a correct way of understanding the learning difficulties of some children nor that this construct was built as some sort of farce. I view the construct as a historical product, an idea cultivated through scientific practices and theories over generations of research. My research efforts resulted in a book entitled The Incomplete Child: An Intellectual History of Learning Disabilities that chronicled the scientific ideas and practices that brought about the learning disability construct (Danforth, 2009). It is a story of multiple lines of intellectual traditions conflicting and melding, of pre-WWII German holistic science blending with Chicago School functionalism and the environmentalism of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station. In addition, I have written a recent series of articles, including the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities piece that I co-authored with Laura Slocum and Jennifer Dunkle. In these historical articles I addressed topics ranging from the pronounced social class bias of learning disability researchers of the 1960s and 1970s (Danforth, in press, a) to the 1970s epistemological shift toward objectivism (Danforth, in press, b). The Mather and Morris (2011) response paper belongs to the celebrationist category of historical writing that does not meet the standards of methodological rigor and critical analysis set by professional historians. This paper continues a professional line of insider accounts, self-congratulatory, poorly researched historical overviews written by special educators that celebrate the field and its pioneers (e.g., Cruickshank & Hallahan, 1981; Hallahan & Mercer, n.d.; Hallahan & Mock, 2003; Wiederholt, 1974). These works, although often informative, are overwhelmingly acritical. The authors fail to ask serious and troubling questions about the development of the field and the social impact of the ideas in the field. The purposes and the work in the field are lauded without the kind of rigorous scrutiny that historians apply to their subject matter. In their paper Mather and Morris’s (2011) attempt to preserve ‘‘the legacy that Dr. Samuel A. Kirk left behind’’ (p. 118). Their primary goal is to perpetuate a purified narrative of a man living, thinking, and acting without contradictions and errors, without moral uncertainty and fallibility. The truth of the matter is that Sam Kirk was far from clear and definitive in his handling of the learning disability construct. In fact, he articulated 16 substantively different versions of the learning disability construct. I devote an entire chapter in my 2009 book to this issue. In this short rejoinder, I briefly illuminate Kirk’s multiple contradictory articulations of the concept of learning disability between 1960 and 1984. Then I probe for possible lessons we might draw from Kirk’s inconsistencies.