The Tree: A Flagbearer of Institutional Ableism By Jeetisha Sharma

Albert Einstein famously remarked, "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." While this quote is often met with awe, it fails to highlight why the classroom was built in a tree in the first place, or why we’ve designed a world that only imagines one type of learner. Why is the fish’s fins considered the "problem"? When society effortlessly privileges the needs of the majority, we often overlook those who are marginalized or barred from belonging entirely. This underscores why accessibility is a paramount concern in an ableist world. Nowhere is this more critical than in education, where accessibility must stop being treated as an "extra" and start being recognized as an "essential." In this blog, I will address these systemic blind spots to the best of my understanding. 

What is Accessibility ? 

When I looked up accessibility on Google, the definitions were all about ease of access and availability. But to me, accessibility is really about removing gatekeepers. To illustrate this, I recently came across an excerpt from the book “What Can a Body Do?” by Sara Hendren that chronicles the accessibility hurdles faced by Amanda, a curator with dwarfism. It notes that while we instinctively offer her a step stool to augment her height, we rarely think to interrogate the design of the lecterns themselves, which are built exclusively for taller, standing bodies (Waldman, 2020). This exposes how deeply entrenched the norms of normalcy and independence are within our society, where access needs are an afterthought instead of being a starting point. It is deeply ironic that schools and colleges, which ought to teach us to question ableism, frequently serve as breeding grounds for it instead. Accessibility is not simply a logistical checklist but a deeply relational and ethical commitment to reimagining access in educational spaces. 

Branches of Inaccessibility in Education 

One of the most persistent barriers remains the inaccessibility of physical classrooms and teaching methods. On paper, my college meets the legal requirements as there is a ramp and an elevator. But the reality is far different. Many of the ramps are set at impossible angles, the tactile paths are crumbling, and classroom doors are too narrow for a wheelchair to pass through. These design flaws send a clear signal about who is expected to belong here, that is, able-bodied students and teachers. These accommodations were added only as an afterthought when a specific need arose, because the original designers never truly expected a person with a disability to be in the room. This perfectly illustrates how society forces disabled individuals to squeeze into rigid "normal" molds through individual adjustments or retrofitting, maintaining the status-quo by treating accessibility as a reactive, one-off repair. The social model of disability challenges such a biased perspective that views individuals as infinitely flexible and society as unchangeable. 

As Valentine (2020) notes, the root of educational ableism lies in the habit of accommodating you in existing plans, rather than building a plan from the start that centers on the ethics of accessibility. To move beyond this, we must embrace “access intimacy”, which captures the human and relational essence of access (Mingus, 2017). Too often, disabled people are treated as a burden or a charity project. Access intimacy on the other hand, offers something different: the freedom to exist without performing or passing. It is the relief of standing in the mess together, free from the emotional labor of constantly explaining one’s access needs. In this light, access becomes liberatory. It shifts the focus towards collective responsibility and interdependence, where accessibility is seen as the world fixing its own deficiencies, not the individual struggling to fit in (Mingus, 2017; Valentine, 2020). 

Discovering this concept was a revelation as it beautifully frames access as a deeply human connection. It suggests that an awareness of ableism must be the starting point for a collective relationship, one where accessibility does not lie only with disabled people alone, but everyone. During my internship at an inclusive school, I noticed a striking irony that even “inclusive” institutions often fail to truly inhabit the world of disabled people. This manifests in the rigid demand for medical documentation as evidence to be “eligible” for accommodations, which make it feel like a negotiation (Hutcheon & Wolbring, 2012). 

Additionally, the “say-able” reasons used to rationalize inaccessibility are a personal pet peeve of mine. Citing costs, historical inertia or the supposed absence of disabled people serves only to normalize exclusion and deflect accountability. Sometimes, society even applauds independence as a way to push disabled individuals to prove that they are equal in a chilly ableist world (Titchkoshy, 2008; Valentine, 2020). Such justifications spread the lie that inaccessibility is out of one’s hand rather than a deliberate choice, framing violence as inevitable. 

Titchkosky (2008) pinpoints the irony of universal access icons placed on doors that may be physically impassable for wheelchair users. This leads to what is termed as “careless-caring” where people organize their perceptions around visual gestures of care, while ignoring the actual bodily experience of exclusion, which further boils down to “dis-education”, a process by which we learn to take no notice of inaccessibility. Before I began studying about disability, it never occurred to me how few disabled staff members exist in the educational institutions around me. Because we have been dis-educated to accept their absence as normal, we fail to interrogate the hurdles in their trajectory. The crux is that the physical addition of ramps or elevators does not guarantee inclusion if the social and discursive practices continue to treat disability as irrelevant or absent, access is the beginning place for critical questioning to ponder about the social relations between body and environment. 

The current educational spaces are obsessed with rigid ways of working. In an ableist vocabulary, disability is often reduced to an individual’s fatigue or pain. However, as a temporarily able-bodied person, the exhaustion I feel after 8am-5pm college serves as a revelation. It highlights that the system is not built for human bodies at all, but for a neoliberal ideal of tireless productivity. Educational institutions often pretend that classrooms are neutral, value-free spaces, but in reality they are built around narrow norms that inherently exclude disabled learners (Wilson, 2017). When accessibility is not fundamental, disabled people are relegated to a secondary status. The clock, which does not tick at the same pace for everyone, becomes an ableist tool through rigid exam durations, semester lengths and stringent attendance rules (Kimball et al., 2016 as cited in Sapir & Banai, 2023).  Such  a clock assumes a “way of working” that is unsustainable. 

These systems ignore the fact that we all exist on a continuum of ability. While everyone relies on some form of support to function, society normalizes some support while labeling others as special accommodations, therefore framing disability as a deficit rather than a variation in an inaccessible world. By forcing everyone into a narrow “productivity” box the system pathologizes the natural need for rest, transforming the clock into an ableist mechanism that punishes anyone who cannot keep pace. 

In my own experience as a student, it is impossible to ignore the deep-seated neoliberal pressure for constant efficiency and productivity. Educational institutions have begun to run like corporations where students are treated as customers responsible for their own output (Naidoo & Williams, 2015 as cited in Sapir & Banai, 2023). If a student struggles, it is seen as their personal inadequacy rather than the failure of the institution. The individual is painted as the problem, the school offers a case-by-case fix instead of changing the structures that produce the problem in the first place (Baker et al., 2006; O’Shea et al., 2016 as cited in Sapir & Banai, 2023). By failing to be accessible from the start, these spaces place the burden of inclusion squarely on the disabled student’s shoulders. These campuses need to be flourishing for every student, not disabling and unwelcoming for anybody. 

Bottom-line

Lastly, we must ask ourselves: why does a mundane task done by a disabled person become “inspirational” or turn them into “pity projects”? Why are classrooms seen as the natural province of non-disabled students only? I remember watching a documentary about a visually impaired lawyer who highlighted that disabled children are never seen as part of the system from the outset. She asked why a disabled student must be an “extraordinary” just to be accepted, describing her experience of constantly proving her worth beyond disability related legislations as a law student (BBC News India, 2025). As a psychology student, I find the concept of the “normal” person perplexing. Statistically there will always be variation, there will always be people above and below the average (a mathematical measure), by trying to normalize everyone is an attempt to flatten the bell curve that is an impossibility. Instead we must proactively create flexible materials that are adaptable for all learners from the very beginning. 

References

Baker, S., Brown, B., & Fazey, J. A. (2006). Individualization in the widening participation debate. London Review of Education, 4(2). 169-182. https://doi.org/10.1080/14748460600855302

BBC News India (2025, November 26). A day in the life of a blind woman lawyer [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSYYIpq8N-4

Hutcheon, E. J., & Wolbring, G. (2012). Voices of “disabled” post secondary students: Examining higher education “disability” policy using an ableism lens. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 5(1), 39–49. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027002 

Kimball, E.W., Wells, R.S., Ostiguy, B.J., Manly, C.A., Lauterbach, A.A. (2016). Students with Disabilities in Higher Education: A Review of the Literature and an Agenda for Future Research. In Paulsen, M. (Eds.), Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research. (pp. 91-156). Springer.

Mingus, M. (2017, April 12) Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice. Leaving Evidence. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice/

Naidoo, R., & Williams, J. (2015). The neoliberal regime in English higher education: Charters, consumers and the erosion of the public good. Critical studies in education, 56(2), 208-223. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2014.939098

O'Shea, S., Lysaght, P., Roberts, J., & Harwood, V. (2016). Shifting the blame in higher education–social inclusion and deficit discourses. Higher Education Research & Development, 35(2), 322-336. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2015.1087388

Sapir, A., & Banai, A. (2024). Balancing attendance and disclosure: identity work of students with invisible disabilities. Disability & Society, 39(8), 2032-2052. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2023.2181765

Titchkosky, T. (2008). “TO PEE OR NOT TO PEE?" ORDINARY TALK. Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, 33(1), 37-60. 

Valentine, D. (2020). Shifting the weight of inaccessibility: Access intimacy as a critical phenomenological ethos. Puncta, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.5399/PJCP.v3i2.9

Waldman, K. (2020, September 3). When the world isn’t designed for our bodies. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/when-the-world-isnt-designed-for-our-bodies

Wilson, J. D. (2017). Reimagining disability and inclusive education through universal design for learning. Disability Studies Quarterly, 37(2).  https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v37i2.5417