Special education’s invention was progress. For much of human history, people with brain and body differences were denied education and thought to be incapable of learning.

I wasn’t just not normal, which I could have lived with; I was abnormal.

“is arranged in quartiles with an ascending curve that features the desired trait as ‘higher’ than the undesirable deviation.”

This history shows how normal became the normal we live with now: a mash-up of the standard, average, perfect, ideal.

he’s saying we all live in a land governed by these judges’ laws, and there’s absolutely no getting out of it.

in school and work, human beings are judged by categories that did not exist before:

My spelling and writing made me seem stupid, so then I was treated as if I was stupid. Then I began to believe I was stupid, and then I began to act stupid, and then—do it all over again the next day.

“The living world,” Kinsey wrote, “is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects.”

tagline: “Kill defectives, save the nation, and see The Black Stork.”