As this diary, front-paged and recommended told us, a young five year old with Asperger's Syndrome was singled out by a Kindergarten teacher and voted out of the class, exposed to the organized ridicule of his fellow students. Among the other things I could tell you about what happened, I can tell you, that as far as this kid was concern, This did not help. In fact, it could not help.
I make it a policy to tell those I deal with on a regular basis that I have this disorder, because neither I nor they will be able to change it, and its better to know in advance.
One thing that never worked, and in fact made things worse for me, was the peer pressure to conform, especially when it turned nasty. Now there will be some who ask what this diary has to do with politics. Well, if anything else, politics is about communication, and two things will be true: we will deal with folks who have this disorder, and we will deal with situations and communications breakdowns that the conflicts we who have Asperger's Syndrome face on a regular basis, and which even regular people have their encounters with.
As I've said in my comments to the story linked at the start, this would have been a lousy thing to do to a five year old who didn't have this disorder. Kids can be mean, kids are often ignorant, and kids at that age can be quite thoughtless and immature about other's needs.
There is a healthy side to responding to the opinions and thinking of peers, to being able to read other people's thinking and adjust accordingly. Social skills do help people function with others, resolve conflicts better. They shouldn't be utterly relied upon, but a functional reason exists for them.
For that kid, his ability to function in that fashion has been limited by his neurology. He might, depending on the severity of his autism spectrum disorder, be teachable or unteachable on the overall points of social interaction, the charm school material, but he will always have a kind of a limp when it comes to walking in other's social footsteps.
He doesn't intuitively grasp what many of the nonverbal cues and hints indicate about what people are thinking in real time. It's almost as if he's reading a transcript or an audio recording. That, though, is not all. He is like very literal, and very fine grained about verbal distinctions in what people are saying.
As a student of communication theory, I would note here that where normal people might hint towards the probable meaning of what they say, expecting the person to fill in the blanks, a person with Aspergers or any Autism Spectrum disorder loses, fails to recall, or just doesn't understand much of that information. Or if they do grasp it, they may not weight it the way people want it to be weighted. It might be likened to a choppy web video with high quality audio.
Non-autistics are better able to synchronize themselves to the non-verbal, social wavelengths, making it easier for them to weight what others say properly. Shared context saves bandwidth for the transmission of the most meaningful information. Most people build this up from experience and observation. Folks on the autism spectrum are lousier at doing this, and therefore perpetually behind the curve on social meaning.
It also has the effect of isolating and self-absorbing the person in question. The compounding effects of this division and distinction can be painful, because despite their disabilities, people with Autism and Asperger's Syndrome still often contain the drive to be social, to relate to people. They often want to be liked, want to be thought well of, even as they obliviously offend and abrade. We're sort of clueless in that way, but benignly so, for the most part.
Good or bad, there is an impulse to bound down the peg that sticks up, to file off the bur that keeps the gears from meshing, to bring folks behavior back into greater harmony. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as society needs some of it to function. We'd like to think we could universally speak our minds, but there are limits to what can or should be tolerated.
Except, these approaches are usually employed with people who do not miss the hint, people who, even if they reject the drive for conformity, or oppose it, understand what's happening, and are well equipped for dealing with it. This is where it becomes unconscionable, what this teacher did.
Isolation and ostracism doesn't do the kid any favors, it only lets the disorder further distance him from the kind of experience he needs to learn, in his clumsier, more formal way, how to deal with others. That in turn contributes to further distancing. Finally, at some point, as I did, he may decide to stop trying to gain sympathy or make compromises. At this point, things may get decidedly worse, either in what they do to themselves, or in what they do to others.
In part, what can make it worse is when authority figures take the kid's side. For many Aspies, it's natural to take the side of adults, to follow rules, to try and do as told. It can be a severely alienating experience to have that authority turn against you for something you can't help or don't understand. Who do you trust, at that point?
It doesn't help the kid at all, nor does similar treatment help children with this disorder elsewhere.
Your intentions will not matter. The emotional and social problems of a kid with this disorder do not get better with these kinds of approaches, they get worse. It might seem to some an imposition on their initiative to be forced to adjust to one student's problem, or to protect that student from the cruelty of their peers, but it saves trouble in the long run, and as per the overall goals of any school, ensures that the student has an effective education.
I hear on the news about schools teaching regular kids social skills. Then I hear about this kid being ostracised rather than dealt with. The Irony seems to be that those who are naturals at relating to each other are being given lessons on doing it, while those to whom it does not come natural are not being taught. Guidance and protection should be given where they are needed, not heaped up where they are unnecessary.
It may seem like a waste of time or resources, but God already helps those who help themselves, and your help is needed for those whose problems are not so easily solved.