Petition Signed, and thank you for bringing this to our attention.
Sadly this is actually not that surprising. The teacher probably learned of this technique from some manual written by an egghead psychiatrist who was never friends with an autistic person, but instead viewed them as diseased patients. Psychology has a long history of seemingly sadistic treatments and of labeling any deviants as defective mutants. Forty years ago they were still treating homosexuality as a dangerous derangement. Today they still treat autistic people as handicapped even though they possess a unique perspective which sometimes grants to them talents and capabilities nonautistic people do not or can not possess.
So long as we view the autistic as defective, there will always be treatments like this because the brutality of the treatment is weighed against the merit of curing their 'disease'. That teacher probably thought she was a good person who was helping the child with his condition. Therefore the problem here is not some sadism on the part of the teacher but the way the autistic are viewed in general as handicapped.
I may be guilty of the reverse bias for I personally prefer the autistic to the so called normal people and might go so far as to argue that we are in fact the ones who are handicapped. Most 'norms' go about the world wearing complicated masks and when you look at them you never really see them, nor they you. We interact using these masks but all the interaction is fake, for we never actually meet one another. Normal people also see the world as a dead inert place, populated by the occasional human. The autistic, on the other hand, have no masks and they see the world as alive, hence their often strange, to us, interactions with animals and physical objects. Devoid of the masks we wear and generally incapable of the same sort of social maneuvering and manipulation most people engage in constantly, the autistic are in fact far more likely to achieve what is often considered, even by norms, to be the highest state of human existence, love, a state which can only come about when we drop our masks and quit seeing others in terms of what we can get from them. Also, by seeing the world as alive, the autistic naturally grasp an all encompassing ethic that the rest of us must learn from books, meditation, or deep thought. When I look at the destruction natural world and the way animals are treated, I see the direct result of the nonautistic psychology, the view of the world as a dead thing devoid of feeling or sense.
Of course, as with all conditions there are levels of intensity and with low functioning autism the condition is so dramatic that it truly can be considered an impairment. Treatment in these cases would be ethical but we still must keep in mind an appreciation for the gifts that come with the burdens of autism, otherwise such treatments will tend toward severity and seek to cure the autistic condition rather than moderate it.
