“Experiencing movies differently” doesn’t seem like a problem to me — as Penny notes it can even be a learning asset. But there are easy (and, alternatively, expensive) accommodations to give blind and deaf people the information they would otherwise miss in a movie. But they won’t fail to experience it altogether because of some new “improvement.” Whatever general school accommodations they have arranged to cope with other visual or audio situations would serve equally well with a movie, I would think.

I agree wholeheartedly that children with cognitive impairments have a variety of needs that won’t match children in wheelchairs. I’m really enjoying how this discussion is taking so many perspectives and needs into account.

When you say:

There have to be ways to include more activity and flexibility in a classroom that do NOT disadvantage people in chairs. It’s not EASY to do, and our paradigm is to build what’s best for most and do individual accommodations for those it doesn’t, but that’s not such a great model. Rather, why not get a broader group around the conceptual table brainstorm better ways to accommodate everyone.

This is absolutely correct. But the “it’s not EASY to do” part is important. I think there is sometimes a tendency to undervalue the cost of just figuring the stuff out. The school system is already pretty strapped for time and money; people who work there are generally already pretty close to their limits. If you want them to spend a lot of time and energy figuring out, agreeing on, and implementing a new paradigm, you must acknowledge that this time is going to cut into other things.

In the end, it’s still going to be a transfer of benefit.

It isn’t simply “non-disabled” (for lack of a better word) versus “disabled”, but accommodations for one disability might be problems for another — you will never be able to get away from the individual, not totally, and that’s good, for the disabled and non-disabled alike, because to the degree possible, education should accommodate all individual differences, not just those that are the result of physical impairment.

If something really is better for the majority of students, then I believe we should adopt it and figure out how to accommodate those for whom it is not necessarily a positive adaptation. But with all due respect, we should not judge every innovation only in terms of how it affects those who can’t enjoy it as is.

But this analogy occured to me: Let’s say the counters are too high for shorter people, anyone under 5′5″, let’s say. Should we subsidize platform shoes for every person of limited height, or just address the fact that the counter isn’t very functional if everyone present can’t do their work? Why should tall people be given the advantage of a better education through participating more fully in classes?

Because tall people are disadvantaged by short counters. We can’t bend over constantly without hurting our backs, so we have to sit down.

If it’s right for us, it’s wrong for short folks,and vice versa. If you’re talking about a single-height fixed counter, for example, there IS NO solution that will allow everyone to get equal access: Someone will always get screwed at the expense of someone else.

This is pretty much always going to happen at some point. In general, for a given expenditure, the more specialized an environment is to serve a certain category of people, the better it will serve that category–and the worse it will serve everyone else.

That may be my fault because of how I framed the debate in my post. I kept my objections strictly limited to my experiences as a wheelchair-user. I think other people have filled the gap in with early comments (#1 and #4 and I believe at least one comment at my blog). I agree that the dichotomy is a false one.

Taking this at face value, I have yet to hear a clear articulation why the interests of the majority should be sacrificed for the benefit of a minority. Morally, there are a few laws that cover this. Though I’ve said I’m uncertain such a perceptual problem would actually be covered by the ADA, in an educational setting there are others. But really, who’s saying one group has to benefit at the expense of another? That’s sort of my point.

I was thinking of public subsidizes for standing wheelchairs generally.

There are quite a few administrative problems with this solution. One is that getting a wheelchair through Medicare/Medicaid can easily take a year or more now. Not everyone can use a manual chair like the example linked above, and a power wheelchair with the standing feature is easily a $15,000 investment.

But this analogy occured to me: Let’s say the counters are too high for shorter people, anyone under 5′5″, let’s say. Should we subsidize platform shoes for every person of limited height, or just address the fact that the counter isn’t very functional if everyone present can’t do their work? Why should tall people be given the advantage of a better education through participating more fully in classes?

So you might study standing kids–cheap, easy, lots of data, simple to measure, lots of available test subjects–in order to test the general theory of whether activity improves education.

That was this study.

What comes out of the study as recommendations may be quite different. It is unlikely to be “standing classrooms.”

Many commentors have expressed doubt that the Mayo study could have demonstrated that kids benefitted from standing during class, and others have expressed doubt that a teacher would want to work in such an environment. Honestly, I’m skeptical myself, but for purposes of this discussion I accept the Mayo article at face value.

[Y]es, sometimes people avoid change because “that’s the way it’s always done.” But Blue’s critique of this idea and the fact that the people who came up with it obviously did not consider how exclusive this classroom would be to wheelchair users and students with other types of difficulties does not fall into that vein of criticism. And, while new ideas can be good, if they follow the same old paradigms we already have (in this case, not taking into account the presence and viewpoint of disabled students), then they generally are of little value, in my opinion.

Again, I question the utility of the able-bodied/disable-bodied dichotomy. Thus I have concern whenever people advance the same old paradigm we already have (in this case, not taking into account the presence and needs of humans).

As Barbara notes, Mayo’s Dr. James Levine is working to find ways to build more physical activity into daily living, based on research suggesting more activity (and especially “non-exercise” activity) has advantages for most people. The standing classroom is merely one proposal for promoting this end.

To be sure, a standing classroom would have both advantages and disadvantages, and different students might derive different advantages and disadvantages. J identifies two categories of people that might derive less advantage than disadvantage from this arrangement: People in wheelchairs who do not use standing wheelchairs, and people for whom long periods of standing would pose a hardship. I don’t gainsay a word of this.

But I cannot help noting that some students do not fall into either category. What about the interests of these students? Limited as it was, the Mayo study suggested that the majority of kids (4th and 5th graders) benefitted from the standing classroom arrangement. Taking this at face value, I have yet to hear a clear articulation why the interests of the majority should be sacrificed for the benefit of a minority. And more to the point, I’m not persuaded of the need to sacrifice the interests of any student for the benefit of another student until we’ve explored all the opportunities for reconciling the needs of all students, a la Getting to Yes. Hence my interest in non-traditional arrangements, including standing wheelchairs.

I would be interested to hear Blue’s opinion about one specific proposal: the standing wheelchair? Sure they’re expensive, but as contrasted with the cost of renovating so much of the world…?

First, are you comparing costs through buying standing chairs for individuals or classrooms…?

But more importantly, why try to solve an access problem by selecting out individuals it effects (guess work at best) rather than addressing the actual environmental issue? From a purely economic perspective, it seems much better to find a solution that is collective rather than individual, wherever this is possible.

I was thinking of public subsidizes for standing wheelchairs generally. I presume the spacial exclusion issue arises other places than in classrooms. Sure, one option is to retrofit the world. Perhaps another option is to retrofit wheelchairs under the theory that “it’s easier to put on slippers than to carpet the world.” I wonder that the ADA doesn’t requires a number of height-related accommodations to people in wheelchairs, and that Congress might not conclude (with the urging of businesses and school districts that might be on the verge of incurring large expenses for retrofits) that the cheaper option is to underwrite the cost raising wheelchair people up rather than bringing tables and counters down.

As far as I know, both seated wheelchairs and standing wheelchairs are human inventions. Consequently I cannot tell why a problem created by putting people into seated wheelchairs should be deemed “environmental,” whereas a solution provided by a different kind of wheelchair would be deemed “individual.”

To be sure, I may well be mistaken about the extent of the problem created by spacial exclusion, or the cost of retrofitting facilities to accommodate the needs of people who are in seated wheelchairs, or the cost and utility of standing wheelchairs. Again, these are just further matters that warrant exploration before I could develop an opinion about the standing classroom proposal.

He is not the only person who thinks that standing rather than sitting ought to be our default position, not simply for purposes of weight control, but just attentiveness. While it is true that kids have been sitting for a long time in school, it’s also true that many more of them used to walk or bike to get there and back, and so on. Is it wrong to try to build more activity into the day?

This experimental classroom was designed by obesity researchers at the Mayo Clinic. Have they ever noticed that all kids aren’t the same height? Did they even talk to a working teacher during the design process? Stef (#14) is right: It’s hard to imagine actual teachers approving “standing desks on wheels”–the very first thing a sensible teacher would do is lock those wheels to prevent a “bumpercars” effect, and that would defeat the researchers’ whole plan. (The very next thing the sensible teacher would do is borrow some chairs from the cafeteria.)

That said, I would be interested to hear Blue’s opinion about one specific proposal: the standing wheelchair? Sure they’re expensive, but as contrasted with the cost of renovating so much of the world…?

First, are you comparing costs through buying standing chairs for individuals or classrooms? If it’s classrooms, then the chair you link to won’t work for many individuals and you’ve probably got to employ some sort of occupational therapist at each school to make sure the school’s standing chairs are safely fitted to each person who would use them. See, the cost goes up right there.

But more importantly, why try to solve an access problem by selecting out individuals it effects (guess work at best) rather than addressing the actual environmental issue? From a purely economic perspective, it seems much better to find a solution that is collective rather than individual, wherever this is possible.

Also, yes, sometimes people avoid change because “that’s the way it’s always done.” But Blue’s critique of this idea and the fact that the people who came up with it obviously did not consider how exclusive this classroom would be to wheelchair users and students with other types of difficulties does not fall into that vein of criticism. And, while new ideas can be good, if they follow the same old paradigms we already have (in this case, not taking into account the presence and viewpoint of disabled students), then they generally are of little value, in my opinion.

That’s my point. If enough people feel that ethics/morals calls for the expenditure, it will be done no matter if it is not economically efficient.

You apparently didn’t understand that my example was only an example of how morals can override economics and that it was not meant to be analagous to the question of whether or not to fund renovations to accomodate disabled people.

Yeah, yeah. I’ve regarded this discussion more as an opportunity to transcend conventional thinking in order to brainstorm ideas for how to integrate the needs of different bodies in a classroom setting; no doubt there are a jillion practical matters to be considered before implementing any of them, including cost.

That said, I would be interested to hear Blue’s opinion about one specific proposal: the standing wheelchair? Sure they’re expensive, but as contrasted with the cost of renovating so much of the world…? Maybe this would be a topic for another discussion.

Again, I favor designing things with a conscious regard for the bodies that will use them. If some bodies would benefit from standing in class, and if there are insufficient countervailing considerations, then we should design a classroom to enable them to do so.

I share Sailorman’s view that the Great Obesity Scare is largely a separate issue. If standing would help obese people, great. If it would help thin people, great. If it would help active people, great. If it would help inactive people, great. If it would help nobody, well, it’s still great that we were able to put the needs of the human body above the demands of convention for long enough to consider the alternative.