School begins

Well, it wasn't long after school started that we started to get hints dropped about our son. He was young (just turning four) and his language was still sometimes crytpic. One of the ones they latched onto right away was that he was echolalic.

And we had already been through this with the language specialist, who said that our son repeats questions asked to him as a way to buy time, to think and to try to formulate a response. Echolalia, he told us, was not a simple instrumental repeating of words, but a way in words are repeated as a kind of otherwise-pointless practice, for its own sake, or for the pleasure of repeating them alone. And we were told that echolalia was NOT repeating a question whilst you were trying to think of what to say. A friend who worked with autistic adults who had witnessed it many times said that echolalia was very different from what our son did, and we were slightly reassured.

But we had begun to be worried that school was dropping hints that our child was autistic. And his teacher was the SENCO.

Then the headmistress mentioned to me that she thought our son didn't understand his world. I got off the phone and thought: what the hell does that mean? not understanding his world? I sometimes feel like I don't understand my world - what does that mean??

I mentioned it to our wonderful speech therapist, and she made one of those aHA noises, and proceeded to tell me that she had just seen some literature from the National Autistic Society that said that autistic people were different in many ways, but one of the ways in which they were all the same was that they all had difficulty understanding their world. Then she told me that my son's teacher was making comments to her about his "different way of learning" which she told me is code for developmental difficulties.

So apparently people at school were dropping hints about autism, but no one would come right out and say anything.

A similar comment was made again a week later, that my son didn't understand his world. This time I tried to find out what she was trying to convey. There was a fair amount of hemming and hawing. We waited. It didn't seem that the headmistress knew what she meant by it. And finally, she said "Uhhh, you know, socially."

No, I didn't know. That's why I asked. And after she answered I still didn't know.

Finally I asked why everyone was dropping hints about autism, at which point both the teacher and headmistress virtually erupted with feeble protestations such as "we didn't say that". "Yes," we pointed out, "that's exactly the problem."

We noted that our child had been evaluated by two extremely qualified and respected professionals (and Camarata had done the CARS test on our son) who found that he had a language disorder, no social deficits that were not directly related to it and was not actually autistic.

In the end they asked us what could possibly be problematic with them thinking of our child as autistic, even if he wasn't. It might help them to know to work with him, they said.

And so it came rather quickly that our bubble about this seemingly wonderful school was burst. So much for all the individualism. My very bright child with a language disorder was just too messy a problem and needed to be lumped into a category in which he didn't belong. They wanted to say and act as though our son had a life-long developmental disorder, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, for their own convenience.

Over the summer

Having our child all set to start school gave us a certain amount of relief. We felt confident that we had made a good decision.

Meanwhile, we were starting to get a bit worried about his language acquisition. We knew that it was coming quite slow, but school had him for half a day and said that he was already academically ready for reception year (whatever that means), and they weren't worried about his language at all and felt sure he would be fine by September.

We had arranged to meet with a noted language development specialist when we were out of the country, and looked forward to hearing what he would say. A friend recommended that we see a friend of his as well - a psychiatrist at a prominent medical school, who was also a psychoanalyst, for any additional insights.

As it turned out, both the meetings went well. The language specialist said our son had disordered language, but that he was very clever (he administered non-verbal IQ tests) and that he would most likely have his language normalise by the time he was 8 or 9 years old.

The psychiatrist/psychoanalyst met with us and our child several times and said that our son was a quirky kid, but not autistic, and that the language specialist was probably correct that it was strictly a language based problem.

We were relieved and spent the rest of the holiday enjoying seeing friends and family.

How did we get here?

We were sort of skeptical about institutional education from the outset (before we even had a child); we worried about things that concerned John Taylor Gatto but somehow I felt I just didn't have it in me to home school.

So we set about investigating alternative schools. We looked at a Steiner school (liked lots of things about it, but decided it wasn't for our child, who was already mathematically precocious at 3, when they were quite clear that children didn't do maths until they were a bit older), and considered Summerhill as we found the idea of democratic education quite intriguing. Finally, we found a school on the Human Scale Education website that was not far from us, and decided to give it a go.

We took our son in, and we saw the Montessori nursery, which didn't appeal to us because there seemed to be a rigidity about the way they only allowed the children to play with toys in a particular, "proper" way, and we had always encouraged lateral thinking, and were pleased that our child could use things for all sorts of purposes.

But the rest of the school (the junior school) seemed interesting. We looked around and were impressed with the way everything seemed so individualised. The classes were small.

A teacher showed us some essays recently written by students. One was written by a student who wanted to be a writer. The paper itself was about 8 feet long, constructed of sheet after sheet of paper, attached together to form a long story, somewhat like an epic.

The next essay we saw was by a child we were told wanted to go to into the theatre; it was significantly shorter than the previous one, perhaps two pages long. We very much liked the idea that different children have different aims, desires, needs. The school seemed very much to embody these principles and to deal with the children as individuals, rather than trying to get the to conform to some ideal.

We went away happy after they had confirmed that they would consider our child for early entry to K Group (their nomenclature for Reception Class) after we had him spend part of the day in with the current class. Our child's birthday was on the cusp of the cut-off date for school years, so we were looking at entering school a year early, but given the near birthday, and the previous boredom he suffered at playgroup and other activities, we wanted to give it a go.

Finally he spent the day in K Group and the teacher and the registar told us that he would be absolutely fine to start in the autumn. We were pleased as everything we had seen at the school we liked. We were all set for the autumn then, and our little one would be starting school in just four months' time.