Sherman Dorn’s Reading the History of Special Education asserts that literature on the history of special education is amateur at best; that is, those who have heretofore written such histories have traditionally not been historians, but rather psychologists, and as such they may concentrate too strictly on scientific developments and researchers, while failing to note the true underlying factors that led to the changes they brought about. ⁵⁷  Most historians of special education and learning disabilities continuously cite the WCTS as where it all began, but as Dorn points out there were social currents in play that led to the WCTS becoming a world standard long before it was conceived. As noted earlier, it was the codification of compulsory school attendance in 1882 that brought more “backward” children into Michigan’s classrooms, where they would be recognized by educators as a special group or type of child, leading to governmental decisions to deal with them, such as creating ungraded classes in public schools, and eventually the founding of institutions like the WCTS.

          Though Dorn’s assertion is true, it is also true however that almost every single text available on the history of special education or learning disabilities cites Strauss’s work and collaborations at the WCTS as the origination of the discipline of studying learning difficulty. They are also still cited in books about developmental disorders, lauded as the founders of the theories that led to the diagnosis of Learning Disability, or “LD.” Margret Winzer’s 1993 The History of Special Education espouses this very notion, ⁵⁸  while Kenneth Kavale and Steven Forness write in their 1995 book, The Nature of Learning Disabilities, that Strauss and Werner in fact “laid the cornerstone for the present LD field,” ⁵⁹  while Dr. Strauss was hailed in another book as “the creator of learning disability theory as we know it today.” ⁶⁰  A Harvard dissertation in 1978 is even more generous, asserting that “every current worker in the field of learning disabilities can trace some piece of personal theory or methodology back to Strauss and his collaborators at the Wayne County Training School.” ⁶¹  More recently, Bernice Wong’s 2004 Learning About Learning Disabilities discusses Dr. Werner at length on several pages, once again citing the WCTS as the birthplace of LD theory. ⁶²  In his Learning Disability: Social Class and the Construction of Inequality in American Education, James Carrier also agrees with naming Strauss and the WCTS as the genesis of learning disability theory. ⁶³

          This dramatic paragraph from Danforth’s book, which introduces Dr. Strauss, also simultaneously illustrates just how important the WCTS was to the rest of the world outside the modest town of Northville during the first half of the twentieth century.

          In 1927, a young physician educated at Heidelberg took a position as a research assistant under Goldstein’s supervision in Frankfurt. That physician worked for Goldstein for only one year before moving on to a number of other German posts and ultimately emigrating to the United States. In 1937, that doctor began a new job as a researcher at the Wayne County Training School in Michigan. His name was Alfred A. Strauss. In the following 10 years, his research team, that included psychologist Heinz Werner and teacher Laura Lehtinen, migrated Goldstein’s research on brain injury from wounded soldiers to institutionalized children with mental retardation, reframing learning and behavioral difficulties as a disorder of psychological perception and bodily adaptation to the environment. By the early 1960s, the Wayne School research spawned dozens of parent organizations devoted to what became known as the Strauss Syndrome. Treatment specialists such as Newell Kephart, Marianne Frostig, and Raymond Barsch applied Strauss’s revision of Goldstein’s work to entire regimens of movement education therapy for the rehabilitation of brain-injured children. Little did Goldstein ever imagine when he first hired that young physician to his staff in 1927 that Strauss would carry his holistic biology to America where it would become the foundation of a new disorder called learning disability. ⁶⁴

          Dr. Alfred A. Strauss was born in Germany and completed his medical degree at University of Heidelberg in 1922, eventually becoming director of its Neuropsychiatric Polyclinic in 1930. He published his first work in 1932 on the neurology, diagnosis, and treatment of mental defect. Like Werner, Srauss was forced to flee the Nazis in 1933, and landed at University of Barcelona, in Spain. However when anarchists seized the Child Guidance Center he had founded there, Strauss had to vacate that position as well, and spent a brief stint in Switzerland before arriving on the payroll of the WCTS on October 18, 1937. There he was known as a “team player” on the research staff, who “facilitated a fluid and vibrant dialogue” among them. William Cruickshank, then a young grad assistant who would later go on to achieve prominence for his own work building off of Strauss’s principles, was quoted by Scott Danforth as recalling the “second floor of the School’s research building” as an “active place with ideas constantly being verbalized and integrated…[the] roles of theoretician, ‘idea man,’ conceptualist, implementer, and writer were shared, and these roles passed easily from one to another.” Strauss also was said to have taken on an unofficial role as leader among the minds assembled in the McGregor Laboratory. ⁶⁵