Rejecting Child Development Programs Although the ideas behind child development are well established, the creation of programs based on forcing its principles upon children rob them of life by focusing all activities on remediation of developmental "weakness". It focuses all thought on what you can't do, rather than what you can do. As far as I can tell, it is a new phenomenon, perhaps brought up by influential people like Freud, Piaget, and Ericsson.
The idea is to simply ignore what one is good at in favor of spending the bulk of time and thought on dealing with and perhaps "curing" aspects that fall below the average. One can easily see that if these deficits cannot really be remedied, society will spend up that person's life on a variety of exercises that won't produce results; in a term, a wasted life.
There is a quite sizable industry around the concept of disability: from the experts and academics that define it, to the therapists that mold it, to the institutions that sometimes warehouse it. One of the most despicable people I ever knew was a man who had gotten rich as the CEO of a disability service organization and won awards for "helping" the poor. He had a very large house in the best part of town and even had a park named after him. His organization of people did a lot of good things and I am sure he was very good at lobbying various governments and businesses for donations and grants, but no very many people enjoyed his nasty presence. His namesake park was likely a more pleasant place in that he probably never went there.
Ignoring an "individual education plan" or "service plan" might be the most altruistic thing a teacher or aide can do for one of these "special education" children, basically neglecting the developmental mitigation effort in favor of something akin to "joy" or "desire". Most members of my son's IEP "team" tell pretty fanciful reports of the marvelous strides made toward all sorts of developmental and educational goals. I usually just nod, knowing that the exact same task has been completed for the past six years in his documentation, but he can't produce the skill for me and the objective will appear again after some evaluation sees it again as a weakness. I get the feeling that it is just some paperwork game played by bureaucrats in which my son is the marker on a board. I would get upset, but these are all nice-enough people and they seem to spend blissfully little effort on these silly "plans". Matt thinks of these people as his friends and, in an often cruel world, "friends" often take advantage of you for their own personal career goals or a paycheck. My son doesn't seem to mind, why should I?