I can relate to your discouragement.
Schools for the blind definitely do stunt your emotional and intellectual growth, particularly if you've been there long enough.
Just remember that you do have the upper hand, though. You know that what's going on is wrong. I know that doesn't help you now, and hell, it may never help you. But knowing is half the battle.
You can do a lot in the tech industry, if you want to, but this isn't the topic for that. Do a search for some of the other topics on here about employment if you want to. I seem to remember a couple of very productive discussions on that topic that are floating around.

And about the food, I definitely know what that's like, too. Actually, a couple of months ago, my sister and I got into an argument that resulted in her not speaking to me for over 2 weeks because of that issue, believe it or not.
We were discussing how, in her opinion, it's a good thing that kids no longer can have soda in schools. I responded that yes, in theory, this is good, but by the same token, the food and drinks they do provide should be fit for human consumption. When she asked me to expand on that, I told her about how, when I was at school, my friends and I would always have to be really wary of the milk. It was expired a lot of the time. A couple of my friends were partially sighted, so those of us who couldn't see would pass around our little bottles of milk to those who could so that we could be sure the dates were OK.
So right away, my sister thought I was making that up. That pissed me off, because I may be a lot of things, but I am not a liar. And why would I lie about something like that? So finally, after about 10 minutes of her saying that schools can't possibly provide expired milk without being sued, and that clearly I was just looking to start drama so that I would get attention, I snapped and cursed her out.
Anyway, the milk wasn't the only bad thing on the menu. I got sick a couple of times from undercooked chicken. The food was, in general, quite flavorless, and as a result, I barely ate most days.
And I would make that up...why? I'll never know.

That was a beautifully written post. I agree with pretty much all of what you said.
I don't think I would ever pretend to be confident, though. It seems dishonest in a way.
I'd much rather deal with what is immediately obvious, rather than waste time and energy trying to force myself into a state of mind that's completely foreign to me.
Doing that would probably occupy so much of my thought processes that I wouldn't be able to accomplish anything else, at least not to acceptable levels.

@Devin, a lot of that makes sense, though as I said at my special school the educational standard was if anything higher than a mainstream school just because life was so dam dull and regimented you had little else to do, and because with such small classes the teachers could tayler work to what you needed to learn, though this was no less dehumanising I remember one occasion in which we were having a supply teacher and our teacher took him around the class and stood in front of each pupil discussing their strengths and weaknesses (very much more of the latter), in a quite demeaning way, right in front of the pupils with us having no say about what was said, it honestly felt like being sold at a slave auction or similar).

About food I can relate, though in a slightly different way sinse at my specialist school the food itself was not of a bad standard but you got no choice at all about what you ate, "you don't have to like it you just have to eat it" was an often repeated maxim, and if you didn't eat everything on your plate woe betide you. This situation got so bad my mum negotiated me taking sandwiches rather than me having to sit and attempt to eat something like fresh fruite salad or tomatoes, the texture of which makes me physically sick, though the school definitely disliked this intensively and used every excuse to get in the way of the idea.

Ironically my mum's special school did the same thing to her 50 years ago, and she still! hates any form of pasta.

I have sinse learnt that this paranoyer about "you must eat everything!" is a British cultural thing that was passed down from the generation who went through war rationing and post war rationing (sinse in Britain rationing lasted into the fifties), though that still doesn't make it right.

As far as self reliance goes, university/colige can help with this on a pure living skills level, sinse at my university some things were naturally done, such as providing meals and cleaning the room, others I had to do myself such as laundry and washing up my own cup if I ever wanted a coffee, it was definitely a good preparation for when I moved out and got my own flat, particularly sinse during my masters I was in colige in holidays and thus had to do all my own cooking and washing up too. then again I learnt all of these things at home like anyone else from my mum which helped, so I suppose I did have an advantage.

On the "confidence" thing of camlorn's, I am not exactly sure what he means, but I do remember a point when I used to be quite afraid of things like burning myself on hot items while cooking or getting lost outside. I got to a point however where I realized if any of those things did happen it didn't matter too much, indeed after giving myself a couple of miner scolds with a kettle and getting slightly lost then learning how to navigate back I didn't see the point of worrying too much, but this took experience, and I still had to start slowly and work up, eg I began with a quite small trvel kettle that was easy to pickup and pour from.

Btw, I don't bother ironing, instead I tumbledry everything, then pull it out the dryer while still warm and hang stuff in the creases. This is much easier, provided you can hang things streight, and I would be rather wary of doing myself an injury with an iron, though I know I could  master it if I had to.

Then again all my ultra! smart things like my wastecoats and evening trousers or my tuxedos that I wear on  stage are dry clean only.

I think I understand what you mean now, Camlorn. When you first explained it, I thought it sounded like one of those fruity self-help things, like, for example, the school of thought that dictates that if you want to meditate, you have to completely empty your mind.
I've never believed in that, because you can't completely stop thinking about things. Even repeating to yourself over and over "I must not think about anything" is a thought, thus you're not going to get onto whatever higher plane they claim you should.
Besides, even in sleep it's not like your mind completely shuts down. You dream, and your autonomic nervous system is keeping your heart beating and your lungs breathing. While that can't exactly be classified as thought, dreaming certainly can be, albeit unconscious thought.

Regarding food, at my school the food was not good. Fortunately those who had money were allowed to buy anything out of the school, but anyway, it was not enough as to make you not to feel hungry again. We were allowed to buy any pizza or sandwichs but again, it was not enough. When I was in early grades like first or second one, I remember they forced us to eat the food. We didn’t like it at all and if we didn’t eat it, they made us stay at the eating room for more than 45 minutes, and there was a time when we entered at 1:15 PM and went out of there at 2:30 PM when we usually started studying.

I can say again something that is for sure, those blind students who relyed on associations and special school were, and are still less progressive and less successful in their daily life. If they have to face any problem regarding school or university, for example, if they do not achieve the points or qualifications to go to university or any high school which tests you before you enroll in it, they call the associations for help, and they release an “official document” (I don’t know who the hell made it official and how the government is allowing it), so they enroll in that school or university, but in 70% of cases, they fail and have to do a lot of extra work to achieve what they are supposed to like. I don’t know how the heck they think this will help them in their daily life, calling or asking the associations for help, but in this way, they are damaging themselves badly being weak and vulnerable. When I show these problems to them, and when I tell them how the things go, they call me a person who denies his blindness, and want to be like a sited person (something I never think of doing).

My special school was exactly the same with food, their favourite phrase was "you don't have to like it you just have to eat it"

it wasn't that the food wasn't bad, it was just that there was absolutely no choice, so if there was something you specifically didn't like you had little option, and indeed they'd make people sit for hours and if you didn't eat it you'd be required to do coppying, ---- or still worse on one occasion one of the staff physically forced some tomatoes into my mouth, (I hate tomatoes, the texture makes me feel sick).

It got so bad my mum insisted on packing me sandwiches a couple of days a week, which the school really disliked.

And in terms of studying, you're describing how every school works, ever.

@Afrim, actually Camlorn is correct, if you have a group of friends you help each other out with learning stuff, I used to do this at my final good secondary school (especially revising for exams, and when not playing poker), even at university my friends and I would read each other's essays and comment on them, borrow books or passages from books, and get together to do our very evil formal logic.

The only difference with the specialist school is that it sounds like the bteachers were really lax in not checking what you did. In most schools, if one person literally did the work for four or five others, it'd be far too obvious from their words and the way it was written and you'd get into severe trouble for precisely the reason you said, that if you were relying on one person you never learnt anything. if you did this frequently enough that you actively didn't learn your maths because someone else was doing it for you, it shows the teachers weren't taking the time to mark your work properly, much less make you do stuff in class during the lessons where you had to work on your own.

I'm sorry for arriving to this thread so late. Here's my responces to the questions asked in the original post.

1. i would say I primarily benefitted from the athletics offered. If it wasn't for that, I would probably still suffer from bad asthma, and be terribly out of shape with little idea of what I'm athletically able to do. Not to say I'm an allstar now, but I'm at least better off than a couch potato.

In my last couple years there, I lived in a house on campus with 4-5 other boys. We did all the house chores and cooking, with the aid of a single staff member. That is what gave me my confidence to cook that I mentioned in my prior post. It also taught me that laundry is even simpler and easier than cooking.

There's a chance that if I went to a public school, I might have struggled so much with accessibility in math  class that I'd think highschool math were too complicated. That would have been a horrible thing for me, as math has always been a very important thing in my life. I'm glad I was able to excel in highschool math, and am now doing quite well in university math.

2. deep question. I suppose it would have been nice if they had more big projects to do like in other schools, or those long 6-10 page papers. There's a chance that if my school had more of that, then I wouldn't have these issues with writing essays. However, I'm not sure it would have made any difference. Overall, I felt the school did a very good job considering the inherent restrictions of that type of school, such as limited course offerings etc.

I should point out that the school used to have a lot of problems, especially with their residence staff. A few years ago there was actually a class action lawsuit brought against the school on behalf of all students who attended the school since 1951, which has recently passed what they call the discovery phase. Thankfully, it seems that everybody who attended later than the early 90's had no such gripe, and opted out of the lawsuit.

3. I feel the school benefitted my academics about as much as a regular school would have. It benefited me athletically more than a regular school would have, and socially, it's hard to say if it benefited me. On the one hand, I benefitted from being around similar people, and for the first time, I was able to be just another person in the pile. However, the small environment was very hard to transition from when  going to university. In highschool, if I wanted to hang with friends, I'd go to the one, or maybe two, hangout spots, and socialise with whomever happened to be there. Since there were so few people at the school, the hangout spots would have more or less the same people every day. So I naturally became friends with them. At university, there's uncountably many hangout spots, which are going to have different people on any given day, so developing a circle of friends was a very different task, and I eneded up having basically no friends my entire first year of university. However, I can't really blame the school for this since this is a problem inherent to schools with such small population.

4. I did not go to this school until I was 14. Mostly because I didn't become legally blind until I was 11.

Question to the UK people here. around post 76 or so, somebody mentions something about not even learning how to iron. Is learning to iron a normal skill for most UK children? It isn't here in Canada. I'd be willing to bet that the majority of my friends (aged 24 or less) have never ironed in their lifetime.

Oh my bad. The post about ironing was post 51, not 76. I was off by exactly one page worth of posts.

He also mentiones he attends the school in Alabama, so I shouldn't have even directed that question at people from the UK.

Yeah I knew about that, but I decided to not adjust that setting for no reason imparticular. Thanks for the tip, though.

Indeed. The school is so oppressive! And here I am again, on the buss to school. Going back is always the hardest. But when I get back, the programming kicks in.