What can we "expect" from a Down syndrome child?
Back in September, the Penn State English professor Michael Berube rebutted a claim by the controversial ethicist and animal-rights advocate Peter Singer. It happened during a conference on cognitive disability and moral philosophy, at Stony Brook University's Manhattan campus. Berube, who has a son with Down syndrome, objected to claims that Singer had made about such children in a 1994 book, "Rethinking Life and Death." Rearing a Down-syndrome child "can still be a warm and loving experience," Singer had written, " but we must have lowered expectations of our child's ability. We cannot expect a child with Down syndrome to play the guitar, to develop an appreciation of science fiction, to learn a foreign language, to chat with us about the latest Woody Allen movie, or to be a respectable athlete, basketballer or tennis player." Those observations were part of a larger argument Singer mounted linking our duty not to kill someone or something to cognitive ability (assuming the absence of a soul).
At the New York conference, in remarks later reprinted in part on his blog, Berube said that he "might have fallen for" Singer's argument in 1994, when his son was three. But no more. (Singer attended the conference, but he wasn't in the room at the time.) "I once believed -- and wrote -- that Jamie would not be able to distinguish early Beatles from late Beatles or John's songs from Paul's," Berube wrote. However,
now he knows more about the Beatles' oeuvre than most of the people in this room. His interest in Star Wars and Galaxy Quest has given him an appreciation of science fiction, just as his fascination with Harry Potter has led him to ask questions about innocence and guilt. He is learning a foreign language, having mastered the "est-ce que tu" question form in French …
Neither Michael nor Jamie had much of a taste for Woody Allen, admittedly, but they had had spirited discussions about animal rights, a Singer specialty, inspired by the film "Babe."
This week, at Crooked Timber, Berube reports that these comments only recently came to Singer's attention (via Berube's blog), whereupon the philosopher initiated a friendly email exchange. Singer said he was delighted to hear of Jamie Berube's abilities, and intrigued by the challenge they posed to his theory. He asked for evidence, however, that Jamie was not an anomalous case -- and this was not an idle challenge. "If he is mistaken about Down syndrome," Berube wrote, giving the gist of Singer's remarks with the professor's permission, "he will correct himself in the future."
For non-anecdotal evidence of the abilities of Down syndrome children, Berube steered Singer to the National Down Syndrome Society, and to a 1994 book by two young people with the condition, "Count Us In." But Berube made a broader point as well about kids like Jamie: "Early-intervention programs have made such dramatic differences in their lives over the past few decades that we simply do not know what the range of functioning looks like, and therefore do not rightly know what to expect …"
Being a parent of a Down syndrome youth, Berube said, is not just a matter of countering other people's low expectations for him, but of "recalibrating your own expectations time and time again -- and not only for your own child, but for Down syndrome itself."
