True too. The only problem with all of it is that people with Aspergers don't get to pick their obsessions.. so for every dynamo with an obsession in quantum mechanics, you get another thousand "collecting matchboxes" or playing World of Warcraft all day.

It's a horrible situation! Those individuals Temple Grandin complained about pouring their lives away on their computers probably feel exactly the same way about her -- who cares about being successful and accomplished and making lots of money when I can play Guild Wars and collect Matchboxes all day!

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That's true. Parents need to understand that what is easier in the short term can make everybody's life more difficult in the long run.

However, I don't agree that parents need to embrace and accept autism or autistic traits, as some people within the autism community propose.

Annie Anthrax wrote on May 10^th, 2010 at 3:13pm:

I defer to you with direct first hand experience of this... Is it possible, do you think, to overcome autism or just the symptoms of autism? The guy I referred to earlier (the empty spray canisters) said he was able to (by second nature) simulate intimate relationships because he had intensive therapy as a child... But he was only mildly autistic. Grandin mentioned in one of her interviews that if she let her autism "take over", she would regress... which indicates she must work hard to remain engaged with the world.

aikmann4 wrote on May 10^th, 2010 at 3:18pm:

If it was gone, at the very least, we non-autistics would lose an opportunity to practise the virtue of compassion.

No doubt about it, for the first eighteen years or so of my life, I was a total loser. I can certainly ascribe a portion of this loserdom to Aspergers, but as I have said, my Aspergers was always weak (so other contributing factors where probably more important), and now it is even weaker. I don't consider myself a burden at all anymore -- I'm on the dole at present, but this is because I'm currently between jobs, and not because I'm a bludger (and it's really hard to get a job at present). I didn't complete high-school so it is difficult for me to land a decent job, so my employment history includes some of the most mindnumbing and dull (though I didn't mind them) jobs that could be dreamt up -- staring at a conveyer belt transporting sheep entrails for eight hours a day, five days a week was one of them. I'm currently accumulating savings to go to University; I know I can just get support like any other student, but I want to have enough money to be reasonably comfortable and support myself fully for when I go. I don't know if this qualifies as a societal burden.

I don't self-loathe, but self-loathing or not, I would still be thinking that question to myself. The more I learn, and the more we, our collective body of knowledge, learns, about the biological realities that mankind is ultimately burdened and restrained, the more I am intrigued and the more I ask. Even if that means knowing and confronting the very physical and psychological limitations of myself.

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I still try to avoid welfare when and where possible, but I am not completely opposed to it in some form. The entire teritary education system in this country and other Anglo countries is rotten and dysfunctional (and I'm not talking about curriculums either -- though obviously I don't think highly of those either) and needs major reformation, but because I won't be the person to change it I need to take part in it or else I'll be staring at conveyor belts for the rest of my life.

I watched that Temple Grandin 'TED' talk, when it first came around, and what I took away from it was a little different.
While I certainly recognise the importance of developing better understanding of people who think differently, the primary message I got was that our education system is way to narrow in it's focus, and things like art, dance, and drama, need to be mainstream subjects alongside numeracy and literacy.

We need to be developing more well rounded people, by offering a more well rounded education to them.

I think by expanding the curriculum to include these more artistic types of subjects, we will allow more children to share the feeling of possibility and achievement that a good education should offer them.

I don't think our educational system is 'narrow' in its focus. It's crap, yeah. But hardly narrow. I spent an inordinate amount of time when I was at school performing wishywashy progressive curriculum b.s in class and there was a hell of a lot of art. Heaps of optional art classes in my high school as well, and everybody (including myself) used them as a way to cop out of having to do harder work. Schools have a limited amount of time when it comes to what they can teach, so the good bulk of that time is spent teaching students the subjects that they will most apply in our later lives, and even then most don't come out with even a rudimentary understanding of them. I agree that there should be more vocational learning though (for a certain percentage of students). When it comes to subjects like music, art and dance, there's only a very limited number of people who are capable of truly filling a limited number of positions for them in the real world. For most kids, it's a lot better just to use the limited time they have in school to teach them how to perform arithmetic or read a bus timetable more competently then to draw a little better. Everybody can make use of a mediocre meter-reader or clerk, but a mediocre dancer is of absolutely no use to anybody beyond drunken night-club buffoons.