Learning the hard way...

Temple Grandin, the most famous autistic person in the world, achieved not only a doctorate and professorship, but also breakthroughs in our understanding of animals

Aamir Khan’s latest film, Taare Zameen Par, has drawn attention to children with academic learning difficulties. I think the word “academic” should be stressed, as such children are often gifted in other areas. Unfortunately, our educational system has very little time for the imagination, for the arts of music, dance, song. I remember our drawing master in school would create a geometrical pattern on the board, colour it in, and we would have to copy it exactly. Amazingly, this still goes on. Those who create the syllabus seem to have even more learning difficulties than the children themselves!
In the context of what “challenged children” can achieve, I’d like to talk about Temple Grandin, the most famous autistic person in the world, who achieved not just a doctorate and professorship, but several breakthroughs in our unders t a n d i n g of anim a l s . Autism is, of course, not in the same category as dyslexia, the subject of the film. It’s a brain disorder which leads to difficulties in communication, social relationships, and causes repetitive speech and behaviour. Even at three, Grandin couldn’t talk, and would merely scream in frustration at not being able to make herself understood. Later, she would repeat the same story over and over again. Children teased her, and called her “Tape Recorder,” or “Retard.”
It was animals who saved her. Her mother sent her to a special school with riding facilities. It turned out the horses had emotional problems too, because they had been abused.
“I wish,” Grandin writes in Animals in Translation, “more kids could ride horses today. People and animals are supposed to be together. We spent quite a long time evolving together, and we used to be partners. Now people are cut off from animals unless they have a dog or a cat.”
Animals in Translation is the result of 40 years spent with animals. It’s not a new book (it was published in 2005), but it’s a classic, with endless implications for our behaviour and our attitudes. “Autistic people can think the way animals think,” Grandin writes. “Of course, we also think the way people think — we aren’t that different from normal humans. Autism is a kind of way station on the road from animals to humans, which puts autistic people like me in a perfect position to translate “animal talk” into English. I can tell people why their animals are doing the things they do.”
Grandin says she is amused when normal people say that autistic children “live in their own little world.” When you work with animals, she says you start to realise you can say the same thing about normal people. “There’s a great big, beautiful world out there that a lot of normal folks are just barely taking in.”
One of the achievements for which Temple Grandin is famous, may be questionable for those who abhor the slaughter of animals. But many plants ask her to help create more humane conditions for slaughter. People wonder she says, and she herself does too, how she can do such work when she loves animals, particularly cows, so much. What she would really like, Grandin says, is that animals should have more than a low-stress life and quick, painless death. “I wish animals could have a good life... I think we owe them that. People were animals, too, once, and when we turned into human beings we gave something up. Being close to animals brings some of it back.”
Animals in Translation is a revelation for the way in which it blurs our confident boundaries between “normal” and “challenged.”

A still from the Aamir Khan film, Taare Zameen Par. Our education system places greater emphasis on academics and lacks the time for music, dance and song

Eunice de Souza, who has introduced many to the delights of the English language, writes on books, reading and writing