An Ideological Basis for Definition in Public Argument: A Case Study of the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act

On June 4th 1997, President Clinton signed into law the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA). A sibling of the Americans with Disabilities Act, IDEA was intended to provide children with disabilities a "free and appropriate public education" (Riley, 1995a, p. 1). The term "disability" can refer to a broad range of physical conditions, and consequently, the IDEA identifies several characteristics contributing to students being labeled learning disabled. In the definition section of the act, learning disabled students are identified as those students (i) with mental retardation, hearing impairments (including deafness), speech or language impairments, visual impairments (including blindness), serious emotional disturbance (hereafter referred to as 'emotional disturbance'), orthopedic impairments, antism, traumatic brain injury, other health impairments, or specific learning disabilities; and (ii) who, by reason thereof, needs special education and related services. (US Department of Education, 1997, p. 1) From an argumentation standpoint, this definition serves as a starting point for arguments contained in discourse of learning disability in general and the IDEA in particular. For instance, this definition provides the basis for labeling students as learning disabled and then providing those students with supplemental instruction and/or special care so they may succeed academically. The first objective of this project is to perform an in-depth critique of argument about learning disability so forces constituting public definitions of learning disability may be understood in more detail. Given the complexity of this discourse, the critique is performed on several levels. The first level of analysis concerns speeches by President Clinton, Secretary of Education Richard Riley, and Assistant Secretary of Education Judith Heumann delivered at the bill signing ceremony for the passage of the 1997 amendments to the IDEA.(1) While a systematic critique of these speeches would alone be insightful, such a critique would also be shortsighted. The speeches by Clinton, Riley and Heumann are merely contemporary extensions of a much broader historical argument concerning education, intelligence and learning. Accordingly, the second level of analysis comes from the social and cultural discourse preceding the IDEA bill signing ceremony in 1997. Through an analysis and criticism of arguments using the definition of learning disability, this paper accomplishes a second objective. In particular, I argue that definition in public argument is ideological. Simply stated, the agency and purpose for defining learning disability interact with the scene to reveal markers of embedded cultural assumptions concerning normal and abnormal learners. My purpose in advancing this claim is to illustrate how ideology forms the basis for definition in public argument. The remainder of this essay sets forth a theoretical lense through which the discourse of learning disability is analyzed, presents a detailed critique of the discourse, and concludes by inferring characteristics of definition in public argument; characteristics based upon ideological assumptions of the dominant culture. PERSPECTIVES FOR UNDERSTANDING IDEOLOGY AND DEFINITION Although a variety of rhetorical perspectives may be used to analyze both ideology and definition in public argument, the perspectives of Michel Foucault and Kenneth Burke are used in this particular project. As will be noted, Foucault establishes a basis for forming critical questions concerning the ideological function of the IDEA definition of learning disability. Although Foucault's perspective is aptly suited for generating such questions, it does not provide analytical tools for analyzing discourse. Consequently, Burke's pentad is used to analyze the scene, agency and purpose of the definition. Foucault can best be characterized as a philosophical historian for his work does not exclusively fit either purely historical nor purely philosophical traditions. …