Just Thinking

 Autism is a controversial subject at present, with RFK's declaration that the number of diagnoses has increased over the years in correlation with vaccine usage. Those in health research attribute the increase in autism diagnoses to an increase in detection of those afflicted with autism.

   I am not a researcher, but have years of experience in observation. Thinking back to my early school years,  some vaccines were in their infancy and others had not yet even  been developed. Autism was not yet a diagnosis, and there were almost no services offered to those students who had difficulties with doing their schoolwork. 

 Most class sizes were of at least 20 or so students, from 1st grade on. As I recall, there was at least one student in every grade I was in who had a learning disability, which today would be somewhere in the autism spectrum.  No concessions were made to the students in those days. A boy in my 1st grade class sat all day long at the sand table and played with toy cars. He wasn't able to learn to read. A child whose first language was not English labored so hard to read that he pretty much refused to talk. In other grades, one girl who had difficullty learning was assigned the role of hall monitor where she stood all day in the hallway,  not in class. I would say there was a minimum of one learning disability in each class I attended all the way through high school. When we attended school in the neighboring village, classes were larger and so was the number of students who had trouble learning, the majority of them being boys and many of them dispalying anti-social behavior, and subjected to in-school punishment which further alienated them from scholastic norms.

   The specter of what today would most likely fall into the classification of  autism was not apparent only in classrooms. Even some of our childhood playmates, and a few relatives as well, might well have been designated to be in  the spectrum of autism, as defined today. ( I could name a few, but will refrain from doing so. 

During my years of teaching, I would say the percentage of autistic students remained the same. One difference was that services became more available, and more specialized. I still feel some remorse from my early teaching years when certain students were destined to fail my class because they could not fit the mold of the "normal" student. 

I don't know the ratio of vaccine to autism in any of those students, though would assume the percentage being vaccinated would probably have increased over the years, at least until lately.   But my unconfirmed conclusion would be that differences in how children learn and their mental and physical dispositions are not due to the administration of vaccines. As I reflect even further into the past, I recall my father's remembrances of student behaviors that might have been autistic in nature, way before the word was ever even heard of by most.