Inclusion is a delusion. Explain and discuss
To start with, we should have a concise definition of what Inclusion means. But this is not an easy task. The meaning of Inclusion shifts depending on who is using it and who they’re speaking to or about; who is being included in what and how are they being included. This is part of the reason why inclusion is a delusion, there is a no definition that is used by everyone but rather the term is understood and used in different ways. Inclusion is a political battleground with multiple participants; parents, children, teachers, the Government, disability groups that may oppose each other, etc. All these groups have a different vision of what Inclusion means. Therefore it is almost impossible to judge whether the policy of inclusion is effective or not.
The UNESCO Salamanca statement and framework for action on special needs education of 1994 states, to paraphrase, that every child is unique with different abilities and all children should have access to the same standard of education. This education should be in regular schools and the focus should be a child-centred pedagogy, taking the wide diversity of needs into account. This is taken as the basis of much policy related to inclusion. The incoming Labour government of 1997 introduced a Green paper that refers directly to the statement and subsequent policy documents use the statement as their reference point.
Inclusion can take on a meaning wider than Education to include Social inclusion. The idea that groups or individuals, who are seen to be socially excluded, can be reintegrated into society through Government intervention, not least with Education, is an idea shared by most mainstream political parties. Education is seen as a way of providing a highly skilled workforce that shares common values. The aims of Social Inclusion are not concurrent with Educational Inclusion. If people with disabilities are seen to be incapable of becoming members of the workforce (Not necessarily because they have a physical or mental impairment that would prevent them from working but rather that Employers are reluctant to employ people with disabilities.) and seem to be taking resources away from an able-bodied, but somehow social excluded group, wouldn’t the Government be justified in directing funding to the group who are more likely to provide future tax revenue?
Even if we restrict ourselves to describing Inclusion in schools for students with disabilities there can be different degrees of inclusion. Being physically in the same school building but excluded from other children, in class and socially, could be seen as inclusive. As would being socially included, at breaks and lunch for instance, but still being taught separately. Or it could be that the student is being taught in the same class but the teaching style or materials have not being altered. Maybe the student has a teaching assistant to provide additional support. All these different levels will be described as Inclusion. I would argue that the fact that there are different standards that are regarded as inclusion is an argument that inclusion is a meaningless term.
Assuming that the definition that we take is essentially the Salamanca statement, aiming towards total inclusion, then the stated aims of inclusive education are laudable, to provide every child with access to education of a similar standard, an education that takes particular regard to them as individuals, their needs, disabilities and impairments. But is this materially possible?
For a variety of reasons there is a rise in the number of children identified as having a SEN. Every year more parents try and get Statements of Educational Need from their Local Education Authority because they feel this is the only way to get the proper level of support for their child. More conditions and syndromes are identified as creating a special educational need. As more conditions are identified greater numbers of children are labelled as having one of these. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) was unknown 50 years ago, now some doctors estimate that 1 in 7 children have symptoms of ADHD. Some conditions, such as Autism, are said to be on the increase. The figure of 1 in 5 children with some degree of special educational need is used by some Local Authorities (Kent County Council). Although the Government wants to reduce the numbers of children receiving Statements of educational need it is also increasing the scope of its social inclusion programme (Every Child Matters DfES 2003. Early years NOA 2004 page 9) which if implemented will have an effect on teachers’ workloads and school budgets. Education currently costs around 4% of GDP (Figure based on OECD statement that UK GDP is £1000bn and Education spending is £45bn) and this is expected to rise. If a fully inclusive education was to be implemented to a standard acceptable to most parents of children with SEN the costs of providing high levels of individualised education are almost incalculable. Many parents feel that they have to fight for the minimal level of support their children currently receive. Of course these costs would only need to be paid if Inclusion was to be fully implemented with sufficient funding. Which brings us to another point of delusion, there is not sufficient funding (or will to fund) fully inclusive education. If Inclusion and all the additional costs are not sufficiently funded they do not work effectively. An aspiration could be said to be a delusion if the facts point to the aspiration never being met.
There is an increase in reliance on the teacher being the primary means of providing support- “Every teacher should expect to teach children with SEN”(Figure based on OECD statement that UK GDP is £1000bn and Education spending is £45bn). Truly inclusive education would require teaching materials and practises to be altered to suit the needs of the individual student. In a Class of 30 pupils with 1 in 5 with SEN there could be 6 pupils with very different educational needs. The teacher is expected to alter their teaching style to accommodate all these students’ needs. Although meeting these needs may not be contradictory they will still require additional preparation. Research and extra training may be required. The Government recently announced plans for all students to have Personalised Learning, including plans to remove grading in favour of continuous assessment and feedback, regular one-to-one meetings between teachers and pupils as well as plans to give parents access to lesson plans, amongst other proposals, most of which imply additional work for teaching staff. Teachers are being expected to be educational experts as well as fulfilling the roles, increasingly demanded of them, of bureaucrat and social worker.
Can schools alter social attitudes? Can they transmit cultural morals in such an artificial environment? The fact that classes are segregated by age militates against the transmission of cultural values. Young people do not see older people in normal everyday activities, instead they are taught by little more than a stranger in the artificial environment of the schoolroom.
Other factors militate against Inclusion. Schools are judged in League tables, none of these schools wants to be identified as failing behind. Students with SEN may not do well in exams and assessments thereby lowering the overall score of the school. Disproportionably large numbers of children with SEN are permanently excluded from school, meaning that their scores will not affect the schools League profile.
Is an increasingly interventionist schooling system even desirable? For deaf children this means an early introduction to a specialist team who will advise their parents on intervention options available. For large numbers of children the options provided are initially medical, for example, Cochlear Implants and hearing aids. Most parents of deaf children are hearing and would like their children to be like them. They may hope that an implant will make their deaf child into a hearing one. They are unlikely to know any deaf adults or sign language. The implant could seem like an easy option. But once implanted that child is forever an implant patient. The cochlear implant will not make the child hearing but a deaf child with an implant. Many parents will assume that learning sign language should be avoided for children with cochlear implants. Many deaf adults who were implanted when they were young find that they feel excluded from hearing society but they find learning to sign difficult later in life. Early intervention could also mean long hours in speech therapy learning how to speak, therapy that may continue throughout the Childs school life. Being sent to a mainstream school may lead to greater social exclusion especially if the only person able to communicate in the class is the Childs support staff.
With deaf people the delusion is the mistaken conviction that they as individuals can be integrated into the hearing world of school with a hearing aid, a teaching assistant and a few hours of speech therapy. The trend is towards further mainstreaming of deaf children and the closure of residential deaf schools resulting in deaf children being isolated within mainstream schools. Residential schools for the deaf are seen by many in the deaf community as key to the continuation of Deaf culture. Many deaf people maintain close friendships with people they went to school with throughout their lives. Deaf schools may be the first experience that many deaf children have to share their experience with other people. All children have the capacity to learn a natural language through exposure and opportunity to practise. Most deaf children have little chance to acquire their natural language, Sign language, in their family or in hearing schools. If these children as sent to mainstream schools they will be isolated from their hearing peers and they will not have an early exposure to sign language leading in effect to a poor acquisition of any language. Residential schools for the deaf have been recognised throughout the world as focal points of the deaf community. In deaf clubs in Britain when two deaf people of any age initially meet one of the first questions asked is which school they attended. The creation of Nicaraguan Sign Language can be traced directly to the establishment of a residential school for the deaf.
The Montessori Method of teaching developed a century ago and is based on the premise that children are competent beings capable of self-directed learning. Its development was stimulated by Maria Montessori who as a member of the University of Rome’s Psychiatric Clinic was prompted to develop her teaching theories whilst working with those who were classified as mental retarded or uneducable. Her experiences lead her to the conclusion that “Education should no longer be mostly imparting of knowledge, but must take a new path, seeking the release of human potentialities.” She did not design special policies on inclusion but instead focused on what education is for.
And indeed the question of the purpose of education needs to be addressed. Is it to create a society of highly skilled workers who act as consumers in their spare time or a path “seeking the release of human potentialities”? What are we all being included in? Who makes the decision about what and how? The children don’t, their parents don’t, teachers don’t, All decisions are made by a higher power accessible only through the Courts.
Paulo Freire writes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, "Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion." According to Freire, freedom will be the result of praxis--informed action--when a balance between theory and practice is achieved. Inclusive education as outlined here fails to find a balance between theory and practise. It becomes an inhibitor of freedom. Inclusive education for many deaf people is a denial of who they are. It leads to the destruction of separate schools for the deaf and the inclusion into the isolating experience of schools designed for hearing people.
Rights are gifts, entitlements. The philosopher, Max Stirner, wrote "Right is above me, is absolute, and exists in one higher, through whose grace it flows to me: right is a gift from the judge; power and might exist only in me the powerful and mighty". By this he meant that there should be no higher power than the unique individual. Rights are “spooks in the head” or delusions that we brainwash ourselves with. Rights are not the possession of the individual they are bestowed by some higher power and as such could be removed or altered. This idea is echoed the reality that many so-called human rights have been acquired by individuals expressing their own power and might. Actions by people like Rosa Parks, Gandhi, Millicent Fawcett, Bobby Seale, Steve Biko, Malcolm X. Human Rights are regularly abused by authorities at all levels. A delusion is a false belief that persists despite the facts. It may be that human rights only exist if, like Freire’s freedom, they can “be acquired by conquest, not by gift.” The battle for conquest not being the right to inclusive education but the ownership and control of education to best suit your needs.
Deaf education and much of special needs education is colonial in its attitude. The recipients treated as incapable of making valid choices. The deaf are not in control of their own education instead it is hearing experts who decided what will happen. The Audist establishment, that sees deafness as an impairment that can only be ameliorated by the ministrations of the hearing expert, is in control of the education of deaf people. There are very few deaf teachers. Most hearing teacher of the deaf teach using the spoken word, very few have anything more than rudimentary knowledge of sign language. As Harlan Lane outlines in his book The Mask of Benevolence the paternalistic attitudes of most researchers and educators of the deaf bears striking similarity with the attitudes of Colonial authorities towards the natives they were sent to govern. All colonial powers are reluctant to surrender their authority.
"Authentic" education, according to Freire, will involve dialogue between the teacher and the student, mediated by the broader world context. He warns that the limits imposed upon both the coloniser and the colonised dehumanise everyone involved, thereby removing the ability for dialogue to occur, inevitably barring the possibility of transformation. Communication is only possible between equals. To move beyond the current colonial attitude in deaf education requires dialogue using a shared language.
Christopher Alexander describes the Pattern Language, it is a design tool that is used to design cities and buildings. The patterns are a combination of the context, what could be seen as the problem and its possible solution. The patterns are interconnected and interrelated and as such constitute a language. It could be considered as a collection of rough rules-of-thumb. The point being that the patterns act as a language. They offer a solution to a problem in a particular context, but to be effective, other patterns have to be taken into account. The more the patterns are connected the more alive they become, creating a quality of life that people will feel. When patterns are understood and shared by people, as they were in the past with building construction, everyone instinctively knows how to design the built environment. Now the built environment is organised by experts; planning consultants, architects, plasterers, electricians, interior designers, etc. The patterns are fragmented into expert fields of knowledge. They lose their power. This leads to a built environment that seems hostile and/or soulless; tower blocks and drive-in shopping centres with municipal decoration.
Education is a social construct, as manufactured as any object or building in society. It is made of systems, collections of patterns, and bought to life by people. The systems/patterns are the buildings, policies, teaching methods, subjects, staff training, lunch provision. All these elements come together to create a collection of patterns. Education has ceased to be a craft activity performed by the family and village and is now industrialised and enacted by specialist workers in factory units. If the language used to construct the systems is not shared by the people it will be dead and the systems constructed will lack the quality that brings a sense of wholeness and wellbeing. By handing education over to experts, we are creating the educational equivalent of the out of town shopping centre; It has easy access, all the staff are trained in customer service, there are a wide selection of products at all price levels, etc. But it fails to meet the needs of particular sections of the community. The shopping centre because it destroys local shops, farmers, etc and instead relies on global supply lines, homogeneous culture. Inclusive Education because it will be dominated by central Government with its own agenda on Inclusion, supported by various fields of experts with a vested interest in maintaining their authority. This will create an education system that is increasingly colonial in attitude and fails to create an inclusive education, even on its own terms.
A healthy human being is able, essentially, to solve problems, to develop, to move towards objects of desire, to contribute to the well-being of others in society, to create value in the world, and to love, to be exhilarated, to enjoy. The capacity to do these many positive things, to do them well, and to do them freely, is natural. It arises by itself. It cannot be created, artificially in a person, but it needs to be released, given room. It does need to be supported. It depends, simply, on the degree to which a person is able to concentrate on these things, not on others.Alexander, C, The Nature of Order Volume 1, Oxford University Press 2001 p373
Many deaf children, because of inclusive education, do not have the opportunity to just “concentrate on these things, not others” instead they have to learn skills that are expected of hearing children, like speech, skills that are time consuming and difficult to acquire. It would be possible to have an inclusive education in an inclusive society. As they say, School is a reflection of Society. Except that there probably wouldn’t be the institution of School in that truly inclusive society, Education would be an inclusive part of everyday life.
References
Alexander, C, The Nature of Order Volume 1, Oxford University Press 2001
Alexander, C, The Timeless way of building, Oxford University Press 1979
Alexander, C, A Pattern language, Oxford University Press 1977
Freire, P, Pedagogy of the oppressed, Pelican Books, 1972
Lane H, The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf community, Vintage Books, 1992
Lillard A, & Else-Quest N. "The early years: Evaluating Montessori education." Science. 2006 Sep 29; 313 (5795): 1893-4.
Polich, L, The emergence of the Deaf community in Nicaragua. Gallaudet University Press, 2005
Stirner, M, The ego and its own, Rebel Press, 1993
Early years: progress in developing high quality childcare and early education accessible to all. National Audit Office report 2004
http://www.kent.gov.uk/education-and-learning/special-and-additional-education/special-educational-needs/Faq/
Removing Barriers to Achievement: The Government’s strategy for SEN, Department for Education and Skills, 2004
Salamanca statement and framework for action on special needs education, UNESCO, 1994
