ABSTRACT

The history of education of visually impaired people in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Great Britain has often been considered briefly, perhaps in a cursory resume of Pritchard's (1963) account which stops at 1960, along with a remark or two about later legislation. There are, in fact, relatively few histories at all, and they tend to follow Pritchard's cumulative approach. In his history Education and the Handicapped, chapters are organised to lead from early “experiment” to “growth” to “consolidation” and imply ordered progression through time and approval of the then current developments in voluntary and statutory provision, largely to do with special schools. The result is an extremely thorough history of educational provision for the visually impaired which is non-critical in a conceptual or philosophical sense. He is pleased to note that early labels such as “defective” have been replaced by labels such as “sub-normal”, the underlying assumption being one of progress. An elaborate and professional system for supporting the visually impaired had thankfully been created. We should add, however, on the positive side, that Pritchard clearly was concerned about recognition of need and provision for visually impaired children. A more recent approach to the subject, contained in the highly influential Warnock Report, which led to Britain's Education Act 1981, was more critical, but its historical content drew greatly from Pritchard's narrative while the approach to history contained within it is another example of Pritchard's cumulative one.