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Argument, Think Autism Sydney 2025
Schools are still teaching young autistic people to mask, a Think Autism panellist said
In short
Kyriakos Gold asked the Think Autism Sydney panel in 2025 how to guide a generation that knows it is neurodivergent and expects the system to be ready. A panellist said school was teaching them the opposite.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
Young autistic people now at school have words for themselves that earlier generations never had. Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, put that to the opening panel of Think Autism Sydney in May 2025. Young people are growing up understanding neurodivergence, he said, and many know they are neurodivergent, and they expect the system to be ready for them. Earlier generations did not know, and took the system as it was, until they realised life was difficult and needed to change. He asked how the panel would guide the people coming after them, and turned first to a panellist he knew worked with young people.
The panellist pushed back on the premise. Young people might know they are neurodivergent, the panellist said, but there was still a very long way to go. They were going into schools and “being trained or taught that masking is what’s expected”. The panellist named the instructions that do it. Children are told they must sit still, and are taught “whole body listening, all of these kinds of concepts that we know don’t work”.
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Sources the story draws on
- Autism in Australia, 2022 (opens in a new tab), Australian Bureau of Statistics
- "Camouflaging" by adolescent autistic girls who attend both mainstream and specialist resource classes: Perspectives of girls, their mothers and their educators (opens in a new tab), Autism (SAGE), vol. 25, no. 7, pp. 2074-2086; Halsall, Clarke and Crane, University of Birmingham
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