In this article the historical construction of disability will be investigated through the school experiences of people with disabilities. The central research question is: what kind of identities do the schools offer to disabled students? As material for the research the authors collected biographies written by disabled participants for the biography competition in the year of people with disabilities 2003. The number of articles analysed for this study is 55.

What is disability? In common language we call somebody who has a disability a disabled person. The more visible this disability is, the easier it is to call such a person disabled. From the historical point of view this has been the dominating way of thought. (Braddock & Parish 2001). However, at least from the “linguistic turn” in the social sciences in the 1960s and onwards the matter has been far from self-evident. If we take as the starting point the thought that reality is linguistically constructed—language does not merely reflect reality but also creates it—disability is, as it were, separated from its direct link to impairment. Impairment is one condition—it might be said a necessary, but not a sufficient condition— in the process of the construction of disability. Disability is constructed as the result of cooperation between impairment and the attitudinal, linguistic and physical factors in society. These cultural and structural factors in society determine by and large the paths whereby a disabled person constructs his or her identity and citizenship in society and what significance is given to the original impairment in this interaction. According to this way of thinking it is not ultimately relevant what medical classification a person has been labelled with by the experts. Much more relevant are the social conditions and practices which construct the daily life of the disabled person. (Thomas 1999, Shakespeare 2006, Kivirauma 2007.)

Disability, just like any social phenomenon, cannot be understood without knowing how the phenomenon emerged, in other words it becomes necessary to know its history at least in its main characteristics. In this process it is relevant to know people’s attitudes to disability throughout history. (Baynton 2013). The attitudes to disability in the history of humankind is not an honourable chapter. “The history of disability in the Western world is a history of abandonment, discrimination and repression”, writes Simo Vehmas as a summary to his extensive historical survey (Vehmas 2005, 75).

The data for this article consist of the part of writings which took part in the writing competition and in which the school is mentioned in one way or another. Such writings are to be found altogether 65 or one writing out of five (20 %). Of the writings a clear majority, 48 (74%) are written by women, writings by men are 15 and from two of the writings the gender was not to be identified. From ten of the writings the chronology of the events described could not be inferred, so consequently 55 writings remained for the final analysis.

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