“In Nicaragua in the 1980s, many such children were brought together in the country’s first school for the deaf, where especially the younger children took the various home signs of their classmates and stitched them together into a full-fledged sign language, as you can see in the video below: A clip from the PBS documentary Evolution: The Mind’s Big Bang. Nicaraguan Sign Language has been cited as evidence that although children require a certain amount of linguistic input at a young age in order to learn language, they’re capable of generalizing from incomplete information to something far richer and more complex—a testament to the magnificent potential of the human brain.”
The use of labels for students (and others) with physical conditions can be helpful in some areas and can ensure that resources are directed toward those who need it. If a local government identifies (i.e. labels) people with physical conditions it can allocate money in school and health care budgets.
However, the use of labels can be problematic if they are use to stigmatize people or to treat people differently from the rest of the population where there is no need to do so.