What I am to narrate here is a personal experience with my own special child. So some might not find agreeable points with the experience in our family and other children. It was, and is still, a learning phase in our lives. Our special son is now going 24 on his next birthday on November 12, 2008. We never observed him to be autistic and he did not show any signs of it until he reached Grade 2. He was a bar below average in school from Nursery until Grade 1. When he did not make it to Grade 3 for the second time, we were advised by the school to try and put him in a Special Education School. They observed that he could not cope up with the lessons and could not focus in class.

At home, we observed that he was more content playing alone. He became more attached and comfortable always holding an object that he imagines to be a microphone. He does not have any tantrums. He talks fast that makes it difficult to understand what he says. He had learning difficulties compared to his siblings. Even with those deficiencies, we did not "baby" him and treated him equally and normally as with his sister and brothers.

For me, educating him does not come from school alone. In fact, he was better reading the time on an analogue clock than his siblings and he learned that first from us at home. He is fond of TV and music. If that is one way for him to learn, we let it be. In the special school, he had to go through Grade 2, twice more before making it to Grade 3. He repeated each level a couple of times or more, the reason why he is still in his 3rd high school as of this date.

We did some mistakes along the way, like insisting that he focus more on his studies. Sometimes we forget that he has learning difficulties because we have always treated as equal of his siblings. The first mistake actually was for my spouse training him to write with his right hand when he was really a southpaw. Some educators said that this could have made things more complicated for him. It has affected the development of his brain.

The need for him to learn at his own pace was there. No motivation or inspiration would make him overcome his learning difficulties. We left it all to his interest and curiosity. In treating him as equal with his siblings, we noted that he became curious on what his sister and brothers know. That was one of the best ways he learned. The first thing he got interested in was buying from nearby stores. He learned to go out on his own, watch out for vehicles, know what he wants to buy and learned the denominations of our currency. That was one way for him also to learn arithmetic.

In reading, he loved watching TV and got interested to learn how to read better when he saw the family able to read scripts running on television. Learning on his own was a gradual thing and development was quite slow. What was important was he was progressing and we did not care about the rate. He also likes dancing and learned it from watching television shows. Well, except for break-dancing and others with complicated moves.

The one thing that really amazed us was how he learned on his own to operate the computer and surf the internet. It was quick and all he did was observe how his sister and brothers were doing it. He would only observe them for no more than 10 minutes in maybe 3 hour spaces. He learned this almost at the same time in operating a cellular phone. He has his own mobile phone for more than 4 years now.

So what is the educating mode? We gave him space, time, liberty and left him to have interest through curiosity. He did it on his own pace, no timetables and no deadlines. We talk to some parents who have special children in almost the same level as that of our son. They are amazed on how our son could be sent on errands, go to town on his own and others that their children could not do. All of them are only autistic and not like our son who is also a borderline retardate. After a research done by another special school, he was diagnosed to be a borderline autistic/retardate. He never outgrew his 12 year old looks even now that he is about to be 24.

Autism has different levels and the way we did educate our son would not apply to all, or maybe even to most. It is always good to observe how an autistic child learns and take it from there. Most have their own world, space and time, and it would be nice if they can learn from it.