Special and Inclusive Education: The Lecture

10 days ago I attended one of the best lectures I have been to since I attended to courses on French Literature shaped around Towns and Countryside whilst at the Universite Stendhal in Grenoble. It was short, themed and presumed that the audience were intelligent with at least some basic knowledge.

I administered a Masters in Special and Inclusive Education for 3 years – the Erasmus Mundus SEN programme – so I had a starting knowledge of the field. Having helped run the first EM SENIC conference and then attended a variety of events looking at Inclusive Education.

Now inclusive education is the theory that all students should be educated in a main stream setting no matter what special needs they have. Condemned by some middle class parents as not letting their child achieve as well, condemned by others as not giving the necessary support. It is falsely popular with governments as the lack of specialist schools reduces there budgets and then falsely administered with children either in special units or with dedicated support in the class room, thus removing them from the main stream. There is a statistic that only the top 2% do not get any benefit from an inclusive environment. There are similar arguments that it does not provide any support at all, depending on the report you read.

This lecture weaved the nuances of how disabled people are trying to reclaim the term so that people acknowledge the issues they face into our own experiences. For once I understood the different models of disability: the medical model where the physical ‘defect’ defines the individual and it is this physical problem that causes the problem which differs from the societal model where it is not the individual’s ‘fault’ but rather society’s fault as they are unable to cope with differences from the standard, able person.

Above all, the session was impressive as it made me think. If I believe in an inclusive society (from gender and sexuality through to race and education), where are the limits and tensions in this? Ultimately, if I start to exclude anyone, I start to forget my own special needs and my own need to my included. A sobering lesson if nothing else.