Parenting & Family Quote by Temple Grandin

Grandin’s line has the blunt, engineer-clean feel she’s known for: no euphemisms, no inspirational frosting, just a hard distinction that most institutions would rather blur. “Knack” is doing a lot of work here. It’s plainspoken, even casual, but it also indicts a system that treats autism support as an add-on instead of a core competency. If the ability to teach autistic kids is framed as a mysterious personal gift, schools can shrug off responsibility: hire a few “good with them” people, route the “hard cases” their way, and leave everyone else untrained.

The subtext is both pragmatic and quietly accusatory. Grandin isn’t saying autistic children are unteachable; she’s saying some teachers are. The sentence refuses the popular narrative that the child is the problem. It flips the spotlight onto adult skill, patience, sensory awareness, and willingness to adapt. The phrase “do not have it” lands like a closed door: not everyone can improvise with communication differences, sensory overload, literal thinking, or anxiety-driven behavior, especially inside classrooms built for compliance.

Context matters because Grandin is not an outside commentator; she’s an autistic educator whose credibility comes from lived experience and professional success. Her intent is protective. It’s a warning against mismatches that harm kids, and a plea for honesty: if some teachers reliably connect and de-escalate while others escalate and punish, pretending otherwise isn’t fairness. It’s negligence dressed up as inclusion.