The New York Times: You Are Special! Now Stop Being Different

Xceed was created because our founders and team knew that the current school system needed to be challenged and changed. We believe every student can achieve success when provided with the right tools and environment for them. The New York times article titled You Are Special! Now Stop Being Different explores this concept even further.

“A fundamental battleground for every civil rights movement has been the rejection of the idea that you’re the problem and a demand for cultural and systemic change. Whether one believes that people like me are disabled or persons with a disability, or simply different, we all require the same things: schools, workplaces and communities that are inclusive of the diversity of human minds and bodies. We have to fight for every person’s right to be different.”

Here are some additional excerpts from the incredible article:

“Research shows that learning and attention differences correlate with enhanced problem solving, creativity and entrepreneurship. What disabled me were limitations not in myself but in the environment: the passive learning experience where students sit at a desk most of the day; a narrow definition of intelligence conflated with reading and other right-brain skills; and a medicalization of differences that reduced my brain to a set of deficits and ignored the strengths that go hand in hand with many brain differences.”

“As a society, America has the rhetoric of differences down. On the first day of kindergarten we are told that we are all special. But then the bell rings and that message changes: Now sit down, keep quiet and do what everyone else is doing. They tell you what to learn, when to learn and how to learn. We love the individual; now stop being different. I never did get “fixed.” The rest of my education was up and down. I struggled in cookie-cutter classes and thrived when teachers accommodated my learning differences.”

Take the time to read the full article from The New York Times written by Jonathan Mooney here.