Learning Disabilities

Thinking Allowed

BBC

Science, Society & Culture

4.4 • 973 Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Laurie Taylor talks to Simon Jarrett, Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, about the social history of people with learning disabilities, from 1700 to the present days. Using evidence from civil and criminal court-rooms, joke books, slang dictionaries, novels, art and caricature, he explores the explosive intermingling of ideas about intelligence and race, while bringing into sharp focus the lives of people often seen as the most marginalised in society. They’re joined by Magdalena Mikulak, a Research Fellow in Health at Lancaster University who has researched the way the term ‘behaviours that challenge others’ which are attributed to 20% of those with learning disabilities, can stigmatise and exclude people from society,

Producer: Jayne Egerton

Transcript

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0:00.0	Get closer to the action with live commentary from the world's greatest sporting events on BBC Sounds.
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0:23.7	On five sports extra, sports extra two and sports extra three.
0:27.7	Listen, only on BBC Sounds.
0:30.4	Hello, a new book has forcefully reminded me
0:33.8	of the manner in which, together with my fifth-formed schoolmates, we demonstrated our superiority by cruelly categorising our fellow students.
0:43.5	We mocked those who couldn't play games. Yarboo, he missed that open goal. Those who dressed badly. Did you see the state of his gym kit?
0:53.2	But we reserved our most damning invective for a boy, I'll call him Wilcox,
0:58.8	who we routinely and incessantly mocked for his stupidity,
1:03.7	for not remembering the date of the Great Reform Bill,
1:07.4	for mixing up Louis XIV the 14th and 16th.
1:10.6	We had a range of derogatory terms to categorise
1:13.1	Wilcox his lack of intelligence. He was a no-nothing, a dead-ed, a thicky, a nutter.
1:20.5	There was one other derogatory term that we might well have employed to labour Wilcox,
1:24.9	which is now considered offensive, the title of a new book.
1:28.9	Those they called idiots, the idea of the disabled mind from 1700 to the present day.
	...

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