ABSTRACT
Histories of education have rarely moved far beyond the voices of official policy makers in their analysis of policy development in the field of special education. The voices of those who have made policy through government committees and reports and of those professionals who have implemented and sometimes contested these policies have been the dominant voices in the story of special education. History rarely engages with the inarticulate and ‘mentally deficient’. As Ryan and Thomas have argued:
Historical accounts of mental handicap tend to be mainly concerned with institutional and legal landmarks-the building of an asylum, the passing of Acts of Parliament. Or they deal with the deeds of great men-scientific discoveries and educational reforms…. Virtually nothing is known of the lives of idiots and their families. Mentally handicapped people are still hidden from history as they are from the rest of life. What history they do have is not so much theirs as the history of others acting either on their behalf, or against them.1
