On June 18 2015, Eric LUCAS gave some explanations during a conference about education at the United Nations (at the Palais des Nations in Geneva), presided by Mr. Kishore SINGH (UN Special Rapporteur on education).
Here is the audio recording :
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And the text :
Good afternoon, thank you very much Mr. Singh,
My name is Eric LUCAS and I am a member of Alliance Autiste, a small NGO made by high functioning autistics.
We try to help oursleves, and also to provide peer support to the younger autistics who still have lots of problems understanding how to live with society.
The social difficulties and other troubles of autistics can be reduced significantly if the proper measures are undertaken in early childhood.
1 % of the children are autistics. Not only they need some special accomodation to receive the usual, classical teaching, but also they need an additional kind of education, which I would call “social education”.
Indeed, one of our biggest problems is to learn how to live with society, to learn its’ codes and non-written conventions, which are strange to us, because they vary with the different groups of people, who all think that their system of rules is the only one correct.
In order to learn society, we need to live inside society, not in hospitals or institutions.
The governements either ignore the autistics (mostly because they don’t know what to do with them), or they park them in special medical places, where they have a kind of non-life, in a fixed artificial world which does not allow them to progress, to experience freely the path of their own destiny, like all of us here.
In France, a lot of public money is given to private institutions (so called “Instituts Médico-Educatifs”) which just keep the autistics instead of educating them, and this is probably an example of bad “private education” with absolutely no positive effect for the user, only suffering and exclusion, and lots of money wasted, whereas it could be used more much efficiently outside of this medical and secluded world.
We can say that these vulnerable children are exploited by a medical lobby, which of course does not want to change.
I talked about this with the health advisor of the french presidency, and even herself mentioned this “reluctancy” as a major problem.
We, the highly integrated autistics, can help society to help autistic children getting out of this nightmare, because we are like a bridge between both worlds, like a Rosetta stone : we understand you (not too bad), and we understand autistics of various levels (at least when they don’t speak we can guess approximately what is going on).
We talk to the governments and even the international organisations, but so far, Im’ sorry to say that I barely figure what to do and who can help us, or at least who really wants to help autistics, at least the youngest ones.
Puedo ver que hay mucha gente que habla español aqui, y quisieramos tambien hacer enlaces con America del Sur y otros paises, para ayudarle comprender los autistas y permitirle una vida con menos sufrimiento.
If someone here can advise us, they can write to contact@allianceautiste.org – or talk to me directly, I do not bite 😉
Thank you very much.
एरिक लुकास