Blind Men Are Made

More than 800 social service organizations and programs seek to help the approximately 1,000,000 blind men, women and children in the United States. According to a devastating and controversial new survey of how the blind are treated, most of these well-intentioned service groups actually encourage a sense of helplessness and dependency on the part of their clients. In The Making of Blind Men (Russell Sage Foundation; $6), Princeton Sociologist Robert A. Scott contends that the agencies have paid far more attention to helping society tuck the social problem of blind people out of sight than to meeting the needs of the afflicted.

"The overwhelming majority of people who are classified as blind can, in fact, see and function as sighted persons in most important areas of everyday life," writes Scott. "There is nothing inherent in the condition that requires a blind person to be docile, dependent or helpless. Blindness is a social role that people must learn to play. Blind men are made."

Invitation to Type-Casting. The making begins with an arbitrary definition: a person possessing 10% or less of normal vision is legally blind; with anything more than that, he merely has "a difficulty seeing." Scott contends that with most agencies this definition is an invitation to relentless typecasting. "A client's request for help with a reading problem produces a recommendation for a comprehensive psychological workup. Inquiries regarding financial or medical aid may elicit the suggestion that he enroll in a complicated long-term program of testing and training. He may be expected to learn Braille, even though special lenses would enable him to read ordinary or enlarged print."

As for clients who resist agency proposals, they are often labeled as "un-insightful," assigned low priorities for job programs and all but written off as hopeless cases. The result, says Scott, is that "the alert client quickly learns to behave as workers expect him to." Too many agencies for the blind offer their clients few choices for job training except a "sheltered workshop," where they make simple handicrafts and numbly acquire "skills and methods of production that may be unknown in most commercial industries." Before long, the trap has quietly closed. Now psychologically blind, Scott charges, the patient is "maladjusted to the larger community, and can function effectively only within the agency's contrived environment."

Scott admits that the agencies are not exclusively to blame. Many of them have tried genuine rehabilitation with their patients and have been rebuffed. "The blind person who deliberately thrusts himself into the everyday life of the community is soon treated as a nuisance; the blindness worker who pursues too seriously the goal of reintegration soon wears out his welcome. There is an unacknowledged desire on the part of the public to avoid contact with blind persons, a covert yet stubborn resistance to any genuine movement of blind people from the agency back into the mainstream of community life." Although such public distaste is deep, Scott says, the agencies have made few educational efforts to change it. He also contends that the agencies tend to restrict their services to those blind people whom the public finds most acceptable: children with no other handicaps and employable adults. The result is that even the occasional benefits of agency programs are generally not available to such groups as women and the elderly, who make up roughly 80% of all blind people in the U.S.

Adjusted Veterans. One organization that Scott exempts from criticism is the Federal Government, at least in its treatment of blinded military veterans. They receive more generous payments than other blind people get under the Social Security Act, and their income is not reduced if they go back to work. After an average of four months in a rehabilitation center, they go back to their homes to find jobs. The treatment may be tough, but it works. Studies have shown that blinded veterans do statistically better than other sightless Americans in adapting to normal life.

The experience of sightless military veterans is the most dramatic proof of Scott's conclusion that the blind could be better trained to lead independent, dignified lives--if the agencies would change their ways. In rebuttal, agency spokesmen strongly contend that Scott's brush is much too broad. They correctly note that many progressive organizations for the blind, such as New York's Lighthouse, have modified their methods since the study began. Ultimately, Scott's attack on help for the blind raises larger questions than those he studied specifically. Most notably, do the same stereotyped expectations that make the blind dependent on the agencies that serve them apply also to programs designed for the mentally retarded, the physically handicapped and even the ghetto poor?

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