by Paul Edwards
The year was 1976. I was 30 years old and, after lots of soul-searching and a trip to Miami the year before, I had made up my mind to relocate to the United States from Trinidad where I was a successful secondary school teacher. The reasons for this decision are beyond the scope of this message. It was not an easy decision for me to make. I knew who I was and where I fit in, and didn’t fit in, in Trinidad. I had friends and a pretty good job that I did well. I was about to make a very difficult move with a wife and three small children to a country that I hadn’t been living in since 1953. To say that I was frightened and uncertain and ambivalent is a huge understatement.
The only reason I felt I could make this move was the impression I had received from a meeting I had the year before with the guy I assumed would be my counselor with the Division of Blind Services in Miami. He had said that the agency was there to help me and that a man with my skills and ability would have no trouble finding a good job. More than that, he made me feel successful and promised to bridge the gap for me in what, for me, would be a new country.
So, right around Independence Day of the bicentenary, a family of five arrived in Miami, apprehensive but hopeful. My first call when I arrived was to my expected counselor at DBS. Well, he had left and, after much discussion, I was given to a counselor who I was assured was just as good. I will not share his name because, if I were a member of his family, I wouldn’t want someone like me to share his name. He was every client’s nightmare. I can honestly say that in the nine months I dealt with him, the only thing he did was to create more hurdles.
First, of course, none of the promises of assistance with moving or with finding a job happened. Instead, he assured me that I needed training before he would even consider helping me. I could not be trained locally. I had to go to the rehab center that was 400 miles away and leave my family alone. No, they would not allow me to come home for weekends. No, they would not provide financial assistance for me. No, he did not even tell me that I could qualify for SSI. Instead he assured me that the psychological examination and my experience outside the United States clearly demonstrated that I was an inferior, under-prepared, fairly incompetent blind person.
So, as I prepared to go where I really didn’t want to be, I was petrified. Here I was coming from an underdeveloped country to the greatest country in the world where I had dared to believe that I could compete with blind people who had access to training from the time they were tiny and who would make my paltry capacities as a blind person seem insignificant and irrelevant.
Once I got to the rehab center I found that I was not as backward as the counselor made me feel and, about halfway through my time there, I was running the vending stand and helping with braille and scaring some of the administration out of their minds. I thought that it might be helpful for people to have the perspective of somebody who had not grown up in this country and who could look at the process through different eyes. So, since I had lots of spare time, I prepared a report that included suggestions about how some things might change.
By then, there were some students who thought I was pretty weird, too. I would spend hours during the evening practicing my cane technique. I asked that I be given more advanced mobility training than they seemed willing to offer. I asked about careers and about learning more skills. I was a thirsty sponge wanting to be saturated with knowledge that Trinidad or Jamaica, the places where I had lived since I was 13, could not provide.
The longer I was at the rehab center, the more disillusioned I became. Students were doing as little as they could get away with and complained about having to do that much. Teachers were settling for far less than people could do and were setting goals that were minimal and praised students who managed to get even partway to those. Far from being hopelessly behind my blind peers at the center, I was, in many ways, ahead of them. And, more important, I was motivated while the vast majority of those at the center were not.
I suppose if I had things to do over again, I might have done them differently. But I was young, or at least younger. And I had been made to feel like I was inferior. Most egregious of all, though, people had the opportunity to become excellent and they were rejecting training that many in Trinidad or Jamaica would have almost given their lives to get. There was something frighteningly, heartbreakingly wrong with this picture. What could account for the indifference of blind people about their own training? What could justify training where diminishing expectations combined with abysmal indifference to produce graduates who were unfit for the real world?
A quarter of a century later, I still don’t have all the answers. I think I have some ideas but, even now, I cannot credit the complicity of blind people and those who train them in setting standards that demand less than the best from teacher and student alike. I know that part of the problem lies with parents who expect too little from their children. A part of it relates to the isolation that mainstreaming creates and the lack of self-esteem that seems endemic to a system that makes disability synonymous with inferiority.
Part of it has to do with the fact that too many successful blind people don’t feel they owe anything to those who come after and therefore aren’t available as role models. Part of it is due to the low salaries that are paid in our field and to training programs that for far too long focused on process rather than outcomes. And a great part of it is due to the fact that we blind people simply do not expect enough of ourselves or our peers. We buy into the notions of ourselves that the system propagates. One of the things that the American Council of the Blind is all about is helping to change our notion of who we are and to build up our expectations of ourselves.
In places in this message I have been critical of the rehab center. I should say clearly and unequivocally that the center was among the better centers in the country. I should also say that I learned a great deal there and that I owe a great deal to those who put up with me.
Oh, by the way, I got my own job right after leaving the center with the Division of Blind Services itself. I became a rehab teacher right in Daytona Beach. Once I found that I was going to be working there, I got my case transferred up to Daytona and denied the closure to the idiot who had not been my counselor but my nemesis in Miami. I am happy to report that he didn’t last long at DBS and I heard an unconfirmed rumor later that he went to jail.
I think I was unlucky in my counselor. Thousands of blind people have been well served by dedicated counselors. But there is still a lot of work to be done if rehabilitation is to truly do what it was created to accomplish. Most agencies are still not very successful at placement. Far too many blind people go back to the rehab trough again and again. It is easy to point fingers at the system. I think that most of you know that I think we must go much further. We must overhaul that system root and branch. We must somehow create an expectation of excellence for blind people. We must demand that more is done to enable all blind people to become proud of who they are and self-actualizing participants in their own rehabilitation rather than automatons who do as little as they can.
Technology as well as new notions of what rehabilitation is all about ought to make things better. It begins with blind people, though. And perhaps it ends there. Rehab allows people back to the trough and offers them a chance to drink again and again. Do we make it too easy for blind people to decide they don’t like a job? Where is it written, by the way, that anyone must like his or her job? Are we devoting too much of our rehabilitation efforts to people who choose failure?
I got very little out of rehab and many of the most successful blind people tell the same story. Perhaps the bottom line is that we should set expectations about rehabilitation that demand much from counselors but demand as much from blind people. Most written plans focus on what the agency will do without requiring enough from the blind people for whom the plans are being written. Yes, I know that plans are supposed to be written in collaboration with the blind people they are meant to help, but, too often, they still are not.
Rehabilitation is not at all an easy issue. But it is a crucial one. I truly believe that I was successful because I spent much of my youth outside of the system that managed to stifle so many of us. There are new notions of placement abroad in the land now and, unless our whole community can work to build a much better system, the word rehabilitation may become as archaic as the word handicapped.
I call on every member of ACB and every worker in every state agency for the blind to recognize that the time for change is now. We must build a new rehab paradigm or see someone else build it for us! The extinction of vocational rehabilitation will be as calamitous for us as the asteroid was for dinosaurs. I include every rehab worker with us, because we are all a part of a community whose intentions are good but whose results are significantly less than stellar. And the road that leads only to the workforce destination is paved with good intentions! They will not be enough. Only fundamental reform will suffice. Let us all find the courage and capacity to make it happen. The blind people of the future deserve all that we can do!