I would just add, recalling the idea that “all technology is assistive technology” (p.86), this characterization of the retrofit as supplemental and not-original shouldn't mislead us into imagining that the construction to which it is supplemental is not itself supplemental (and rather "original").

Dolmage's point has to be: The construction, prior to being retrofitted to "accommodate disability", is already inherently eugenic, and the retrofit merely extends and confirms this.

That is, if the initial construction is already an artificial project of "normalization" and exclusion (moreover one that tends to be thought of as "natural"), retrofitting this construction to "include" abnormality/disability amounts to coercion: it either highlights the fact that these people don't belong (normalization of "us" as opposed to "them"), or it encourages them to try to belong (normalization of "them", i.e. assimilation rather than integration).

Whether we are "accommodating" disability or "excluding" it, in either case we are concealing the fact that "we" (i.e. the more or less "able-bodied" and "able-minded") have always already been accommodated ourselves, and that this accommodation is far from "natural".

Which is to say, in other words, that there is no such thing as "natural ability" or, again, "independence". The illusion (delusion) that these things exist is historically, socially, politically, racially, economically (etc.) determined.

Or yet again, there is no such thing finally as "belonging". No one essentially belongs anywhere. "We ", as "we", belong--but this process of coming-to-belong is too often reducible to normalization.

Judith Butler and Bernard Stielger are crucial references, for me, in this regard.

I would suggest that in this opposition between the so-called abnormal (disabled) and the so-called normal (able), the latter group consolidates itself as a group (as "normal") sort of in the manner of what Nietzsche might have called a "herd".

The aim shouldn't be merely to gain "some control over the power imbalance" but to render power itself inoperative by dismantling hierarchy and thus herdishness altogether.

Is it possible to "undermine from within"?

Pedagogue and education theorist John Holt (author of How Children Fail) eventually decided it wasn't. He abandoned what Dolmage here calls "the system" and, as far as I know, advocated a version of homeschooling instead.

I will never get tired of pointing out that our word "school" comes from the Latin "schole" which translates roughly as "(studious) leisure" (in Foucault's terms, maybe).

This is like what I described above as an "easy but harmful" solution. I first encountered this phrase through an interview about prison abolition on, I believe the "How to be Antiracist" podcast, but I think it's actually a common manner of speaking. I think it's widely applicable.

This whole passage is exemplary--at the level of prose style as well as of content, both of which are appropriately vehement.

In terms of content, it illuminates the fact of the brutality of these so-called cultural, civilized institutions. What, precisely, is the point of education? What is education? Is it professional/entrepreneurial development in a so-called "meritocracy" where the reward for cultivating "abilities" to which we are more or less predisposed (and thus more or less lucky) and which are evaluated as more or less desirable within the rigid, narrow, repressive, destructive, and dumb framework of neoliberalism... -- where the reward for this pathetic and reductive version of "self-cultivation" is: money, status, prestige, luxury, etc.?

Or is it about cultivating a democracy premised on the twin principles of the equality of all people and the irreplaceability of each person?

If it isn't and refuses to be the latter, perhaps we should abandon these institutions altogether and start over from scratch.

This points to the fundamental question of what "education" is actually supposed to be about. Here's Wendy Brown, in Dissent Magazine:

“Once education is no longer about creating an educated democracy but instead about an individual investment in an income and a future, you start to lose the capacity to educate citizens for citizenship. Instead, you produce the capacity of power—economic power, political power, technological power, financial power—to manipulate, manage, and organize those who are seen as not having the capacity to be citizens.”

In short, we either believe in democracy and equality or we don't. Dolmage makes it pretty clear that we don't.