Kids on the spectrum don't belong in mainstream school

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My kid has ASD and in mainstream. I think it's important for ASD kids to integrate with NTs in school (or at least be exposed to them) so they can prepare for the world when we parents are no longer alive.

It did not to prepare me.

Getting bullied and excluded by the others did not help me develop any social skills.

It is only when I have a peaceful environment that I achieve anything.

I could not handle it in 4th grade because I was sort of expelled with a month left after a bully told the teacher I spit in his face. The principle asked me why I spit in his face & I said I did not & then he asked why the teacher said I did & I said because the kid told her I did. He muttered something about me being a smart ellic & then brought me to class to get my stuff. My mom was a teacher at the school & he brought me to her class & talked to her & I didn't have to go back. The school only went up to 4th grade so I was passed on the 5th & it wasn't written as an expellsion on my school report. I went to a Catholic school the next year & had problems being bullied till I went to a school or dyslexia in middle of 6th & I did aLOT better there; the teachers bragged about how good I was.

Integrating with normal students may of helped me in some ways but I still have psychological problems as a result including anxiety that I need to take a med for & possibly PTSD. I occasionally have flashbacks & sometimes have bad dreams about being bullied or other problems I had in school. I know I would of done better in school if I had a better learning environment for me & I could of learned better life-skills if I was in a school with other Aspies or people with special needs. A more individualized learning plan would of been much better for me & I could of maybe learned to socialize better if there was a social skills class.

Really? Tell that to someone who was denied access to proper education and who was in "full seclusion" special ed with non-autistic students there who were worse bullies than NTs. Sometimes special ed can be worse than the mainstream, but at least give people a chance to get the same curriculum as everyone else.

NTs eventually have to learn about how to deal with non-NT people. The problem you had is not special ed or non-special ed. The problem is that the people there weren't doing their jobs, regardless of what environment it was.

For me mainstream school was no good because of the bullying, but at the special school even though I had friends I didn't learn much as a lot of the kids were more backward then I was, so those of us that weren't were left, we really needed a school that was in between. but there wasn't one that would cater for everyone's needs.
It was probably hard for parents to know what to do.

My mother used to be a special school teacher back in the 1970s. Although things have changed there were three things she warned me about that probably still hold true. The first is that the special school caters for special needs and the children are wrapped in cotton wool and not exposed to the outside world. Part of her job was to especially work with kids who could function and were reasonably ok with studies and work toward getting them to transition into mainstream school. The parents of these children wanted desperately to get their kids out of this system...

Secondly the school's student population has a wide variety of kids many with serious problems. A common problem was preschoolers who were autistic would commonly start to imitate bad habits and it was not uncommon for children to pick up head banging or other self-harm behavior from simply being exposed to kids in their class day in day out. More common was bad behavior and lack of compliance, unfortunately the child's role models have similar problems or worse then there is nothing to really benchmark in terms of social development (I realise this may offend some people but it is a reality in special schools).

Third and perhaps most important is the point Aprilviolets made. The curriculum is "dumbed down" and activities are limited. For instance in my daughter's school she has PhD researchers from our local University come and give talks and demonstrations to children on science. There are sports programs and music etc. Special schools are not resourced to provide enrichment in music, art or science. They provide excursions for the children to museums or zoo but there is simply no comparison with mainstream.

Yes I remember on one of my school reports it said "She seems to be attracted to the immature members of the classroom" if only there been something that helped for people like me I never really learnt about Grammar, my mum is trying to teach me some of it although I do know that nouns are a naming word and verbs are a doing word, we never learnt those sort of things at the school I went to.

everytime i hear that i think " no! they do need it," but then i remember

oh wait...

i pulled a knife on a group of students for bullying me because i didnt know how else to handle it

i kicked a boy in the face for taunting me, and i didnt know how to get him to stop

i kicked a boy in the nuts for calling me rudolf when i had a cold because he wouldnt stop once i told him to stop

i punched a boy in the face for calling me a boy because it wasnt true,

i threatened to kill a girl with a tennis racket for saying i was secretly a boy, because other people started to believe it and tease me

i punched, kicked, bit and pulled a girls hair for stealing my hat and throwing it over a fence, because that wasnt hers to take

i threw a bottle at a boys face for making fun of my aspergers, because it wasnt my fault.

i never learned how to deal with bullies. no one would teach me, i would tell teachers, tell them to stop, ignore them. but violence was the only way to make them stop.

all because i was a target.

i really hated school.

That's the same with me (though I was fine with being excluded because that meant there was less chance of being bullied).

How is it exactly supposed to prepare someone for the real world anyway? That's like saying prison will prepare you for the real world.

Leaning to ask for help when needed, knowing what's right and wrong, buying and selling things, and other tangible "life realities" aren't taught at school. Nor are basic social skills.

It's beyond stupid to think it'll prepare you for anything other than...the next year of school.

Wait, I suppose it'd be a good way to get you used to taking orders and indoctrinated into whatever society you're a part of. Which don't appear to be "good" things.

Ok I get it, bullying is inevitable...my daughter's still at a tender age where she simply ignores the bullies at school (for now?).

Beyond stupid? It prepared me. Not perfectly, but better than if I'd been cloistered for 18 years.

It's practice and experiential learning, not being explicitly taught by a teacher. You can spend as much time as you like in social skills class learning all about how normal people socialise : and all that theory is worthless unless you have experience dealing with them.

Most of what my teachers would have told me would be useless anyway.
"Be nice." "Just ignore them. "

What actually worked was learning to say "f**k off ", and I don't imagine that many social skills training programmes give that advice to their kids.
Once I'd learned that, I could actually spend time refining my skills at standing up for myself : but without that first step, people would still be able to walk all over me.

Obviously this won't work for everyone, and I've never meant to say that those people who thought they belonged out of mainstream schools belonged in them, but it was useful for me.

And I still maintain that it is useful to have practice in dealing with neurotypical people during childhood. Note that this is NOT endorsing bullying.

Some do.

Though it doesn't work for bullying. In fact, doing that just feeds it. This is of course talking about the types whom enjoy tormenting others time after time without remorse.

That's more of a, thing to say in basic exchanges that end when the exchanges do and people move on.

Everyone gets called names, a good portion get pushed over, some get into fights, and all of these are generally normal for life; nothing severe tends to come from it.

Bullying itself is entirely different.

Though that's unrelated to whether school prepares you for life. That above, what everyone goes through, is perhaps what can be taught, though I've found it's generally learnt by peers no matter where they are (schools, sports and other activities, family such as siblings, and whatnot), but I don't think school itself is needed to learn that (as evidenced above).

Preparing you to obey authority and take orders [and know your place] appears to be the main lesson, though that can also be there outside of school.

Higher education is where you generally learn the things you put into practice/training at your job being the same. These things benefit from obeying authority.

But then, it's unknown if obeying authority itself is something learnt or innate (or as with many things, a bit of both).

The higher incidence of bullying amongst those with an ASD and those without would be a factor someone should consider, as bullying isn't a minor occurrence or something everyone goes through (just like stalking and other abusive behavior).

(Of course people are bullied out of school too, though there's more opportunities at school and other institutions.)

Your experience is different from mine there.
I was bullied: concerted campaigns by groups of people that were designed to make me miserable: and telling the bullies to f**k off did help matters. Part of the reason why they did it was because I'd just sit there silently and take it.

Did I ever tell you about the time a teacher told an older boy to hit me every lunchtime because "I wanted to be a boy "?
Things were a little worse for me than "being called a few names ".

Or maybe in her case ignoring them works....In my case that really didn't happen my attempts to 'ignore' just brought more and more harassment till I really couldn't take it anymore and got visibly upset. Then of course taunted for that and even then they'd continue....but maybe this ignorning bullies thing works for some people?

After having spent my entire life in mainstream education with neurotypical children that either despised me or treat me as though as I were stupid for not being able to abide by their unwritten social rules, special education doesn't seem so bad. It's such a shame I wasn't diagnosed until the end of secondary school. I might have been happier in school and performed better academically.

Being tortured relentlessly [ okay, there were times when I was not tortured, just living in fear of when it would start up again] taught me no social skills,though it did teach me that I was at the bottom of the heap and hated for it. It taught me that no matter how nice and kind and good I was, I was still considered less than a pile of dog crap.

In case you did not know, the rate of sexual abuse of autistics is more than 96%. And 40% of those sexually abused are abused 10 or more times. Many autistic children passively put up with it for a variety of reasons, one of them being putting up with anything in a futile attempt to fit in.[ and besides, who's gonna believe the 'ret*d"?] TONS of sexual abuse in the schools. Is your little girl supposed to just ignore it as so many of us tried to do?

Wow, I just realized I am sounding like a b###h, and I'm sorry. Just please be careful. And when your little girl gets bullied please do not ask her what she did to get bullied. and when she tells you that the teacher is being mean, please believe that too. And when she tells you that no one wants to be friends with her,please do not tell her that "to have a friend you have to be a friend" or any of that crap.