How Was School Today: Part two of the History of Education for Canadians who are Blind, Deafblind and Partially Sighted

Today the Triple Vision team continues with the series on education. In this series we are tracing the history of Canada’s schools for the blind and exploring some key themes around how effective these schools, as well as Canadian schools which undertook the integration of students who were blind and partially sighted, prepared these students for post-secondary study and beyond. In this second episode we talk to two past students of one of Canada’s oldest schools for the blind in Halifax. Terry Kelly attended the Halifax School for the Blind and started his music career in high school, and in 2003, he was appointed to the Order of Canada. Robert Mercer attended the School for the Blind in Halifax, and went on to get a Bachelor’s Degree from St. Mary’s University, and at the age of thirty, he was appointed National President and CEO for the CNIB. "One other thing about the school is that it taught me to be competitive. It's hard to create a full education platform for young children who are blind in a regular school. You can provide the itinerant teaching, and watch over to make sure that if you don't understand the mathematics that we can teach it in a different way, but all of the other skills are difficult. You can't teach people to play football in the backyard when they can't participate. But we played football, baseball, and we played soccer, and we did all kinds of things as blind children that we couldn't have done with children in a sighted school, for example. We changed the rules and we adapted the game to our own circumstance, but those things happened very naturally."