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Special Education
The Histories
Depending on the perspective taken, special education can be defined as follows: a legally mandated system of services that ensures access to educational provision for disabled students and their families; a mechanism that ensures some, but not all, children will be afforded access to life opportunities as a consequence of historically inequitable educational provision; or as an institutional safeguard to protect students and teachers in the general education system from the problems posed by disability and difference in public schools. Despite recent efforts that call for “inclusion” in public schools through the return of disabled students to the general education classroom and their neighborhood schools, special education continues to predominate within practice. In teacher education programs, inclusive education now forms part of the curriculum, either replacing “special needs” provision or coexisting uneasily with it. According to Slee (2001), inclusive education has been adopted enthusiastically by special educators because it has enabled them to continue their practices from a publicly acceptable base and to convert the student teacher into a “card carrying designator of disability” (p. 171).
Rather than retell the often-told story about special education and its origins in the Western world, what is offered here is an attempt to trouble that which Brantlinger (2003) casts as the “peaceable kingdom” narrative of continuous progress in the field of special education. We draw from primary sources and the analyses of some historians (Foucault 1977; Richardson 1999; Trent 1994) to question the naive interpretation of linear progress that typically frames special education despite its obviously problematic core assumptions. These include the following: (1) disabilities are pathological conditions that students have, (2) differential diagnosis is objective and useful, (3) special education is a rationally conceived and coordinated system of services that benefits diagnosed students, and (4) progress results from rational technological improvements in diagnostic and instructional practices (Skrtic 1991). We also draw on contemporary scholars (Baker 2002; Slee 2001, 2004) to trace some of the key elements in the trajectory of special education and to analyze the nature of its resilience.
The Genesis of Special Education
Depending on the perspective taken, special education histories trace back over centuries, with origin stories that generally begin with a recounting of educational provision in special schools for deaf and blind students early in the 1800s and, later, for students with physical, cognitive, and emotional disabilities. The creation of the special school in contexts across the world isolated the disabled individual from the community as such facilities were typically located in rural settings where educational provision was impairment specific and cast in the rhetoric of individual and specialized instruction. Undeniably, contemporary special education is informed by multiple histories, some more nuanced than others and some that remain, as yet, unexcavated. Our analysis aims to inform awareness of the conditions that emerged to establish the need for special education and its unyielding resilience. Our insights fall outside the narrative of rational technical progress in the field of special education “proper” as this remains a naive and unproblematized history of self-congratulation among professionals for the hard-won rights of children. The trajectory we provide considers issues of practice and the resulting effects of special education on children and their families. Likewise, our analysis troubles the critical links between special education and class issues rooted to economic need and the growth of industrial capitalism in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
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