[Tagging] RFC: school:for (to map special education and other ambiguous cases)

[stevea]

As a native English speaker of its US dialect, the word "normal" as it is applied here does feel to be in a gray area.  I am by no means an expert in special education, though I do have family members who have benefitted greatly from such scholarly programs (sometimes called "for those who learn differently") and a long-term old friend is developmentally disabled and I have seen how this affects him in a close way for many decades.

On the positive side, "normal" is a "technically" correct word to use, in the sense that it means "usual, typical, expected" and I'll also add a mathematically (accurate) sense of "towards the middle of the bell curve" (of "normal distribution") in larger populations of somewhat-measurable traits like intelligence and physical / muscle motor skills.  I have also seen the word "neurotypical" used in the literature, contrasted with "neurodivergent," along a spectrum of "developmental disorders."  However, recently (in a 2020 study), the word "neurotypical" was found to be a somewhat dubious construct, because there was nobody who could be considered truly neurotypical.  Language (especially that which splits or diverges people into groups) is difficult in this real-world case.  That said, there really are such schools.

On the negative side (and it is there, neither mild nor extreme, somewhere in the middle) the word "normal" as applied to sensitive subjects like autism (vs. normal), being developmentally challenged (vs. normal), and similar does bring into sharper focus the differences, making it easy to assume there is "normal" and "not normal."  That is the danger, although perhaps it can be mitigated.  It can cause people to bristle a bit (as in "How dare they use the word 'normal' to distinguish from such people?..."), especially if the person is empathic or sensitive and perhaps has little or no contact with these communities / schools.  It can feel like making an "us vs. them" mentality when it doesn't necessarily exist.

Perhaps a paragraph (or entire section) in our wiki (or initially the proposal) addressing this will go some distance to mollifying some of the concerns.  However, before that gets written (use the Talk page?) I would very much like to see more discussion by other native English speakers, especially if they are close (closer than I am) to the special education community.  Really, we are all at least touched by "special" people, as the spectrum is wide and inclusive, and we are almost eight billion humans.  I'm glad to see such sensitivity being strived for in OSM, thank you for posting.