A Review of Inclusion Game Materials: is the future already cancelled?
Hannu Savolainen, Heikki Kokkala & Hanna Alasuutari (Eds) (2000) Meeting Special and Diverse Educational Needs. Making Inclusive Education a Reality. Helsinki: Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, Department for International Development Cooperation; and Jyväskylä: Niilo Mäki Institute. 150 pp. isbn 9517243251
Harry Daniels & Philip Garner (Eds) (1999) World Yearbook of Education 1999. Inclusive Education. London: Kogan Page. ix + 268 pp. isbn 0749422378. Soft cover publ. 2000, isbn 0749434546. UKP 19.99.
Reviewed by N.D. Wyteman
The inclusion game is as old as the earliest mythology of formal education. When classes of children used to sit on the sands of antiquity, repeating in chorus the words of their teacher, the voices of the stronger covered any problems of the weaker. The united chanting shaped the beginner's feeble piping. Later as children progressed to individual work their differences began to stand out. Those with a clear talent for collecting firewood, hefting buckets of water or dragging a plough through the earth were promoted to these socially valuable tasks. Those less adept at the practical and useful work of the community were kept back at school and allowed to wile away the time playing with letters and figuring with knotted strings. Some of them went on to write poetry and build pyramids and that sort of thing, which kept them out of mischief.
Thousands of years later, we see the same basic pattern of including everyone according to her talents. The practical work of society continues to be done by those with the energy and application to succeed in it. So when it comes to hammering the basics of literacy into classes of 80 to 120 children at rural schools in the developmentally unspoiled parts of the world, the privilege is reserved for teachers with the toughest physique, the strongest voice and the best swinging cane technique. At the other end of the scale, those who do not fit this description are not made to feel unwanted but are placed in large, well-funded play-stations where they edit papers, periodicals or books all day long under the kindly eye of the faculty dean.
Integration Suddenly Disintegrated
The movement in the 1970s and 1980s towards integration or mainstreaming of disabled children in ordinary schools of some parts of Europe and North America resulted, according to one disgruntled parent, in a situation where "all kids could have a shot at mediocre schooling" [1]. While that is perhaps too dismissive of the imaginative efforts made in some schools, it does highlight a major snag encountered by the Western integration movement. Too many schools were offering children of average and above average ability a patently poor deal. To offer the same deal to children with disabilities was no great leap forward. This fact could be disguised for a while by a flurry of activity, installing ramps and messing around with toilet architecture. That meant merely that at the end of the day many schools had become 'rampantly' mediocre.
This mediocrity extended to much of the research conducted in the integration era. It was remarkable for the lack of interest in the existing baseline of attendance of disabled children in ordinary schools. Some children with significant impairments were actually attending ordinary schools and had done so with variable success since as far back as anyone could remember. At least a century's worth of school medical reports could supplement teachers' personal recollections that such children were scattered thinly throughout the system. In some places the scattering was not even so thin, depending where the line was drawn to measure 'significant' impairment.
One reason for ignoring the baseline of unplanned or casual integration was that half the fun of whipping up a campaign for mainstreaming disabled children would be blown if it were admitted that many disabled children were already quietly getting on with their work at mainstream desks. Probably the great majority of children in school with noticeable impairments were not seriously disabled by their condition, nor by the school environment, nor by the poverty of the pedagogy. Yet it would still have been interesting to find out in more detail how they got along, what problems they experienced, whether their teachers or fellow-students made any efforts to help them or hinder them, or a bit of both.
The 'discovery of casual integration' is still being made by European advisors adrift in economically poorer regions. In the book edited by Savolainen et al (details above), the story is told of how Mozambique was made ready to receive the blessings of inclusive education:
"Before starting the inclusive education programme in Maputo province, the education directorate carried out a survey in 1998 in all schools and discovered that many of the schools were already "inclusive": among the total of 170,000 children attending regular schools, 1167 were children with special educational needs. This information was new to the education authorities." [2]
The slightest acquaintance with disability literature in the region would have told the education authorities (and their foreign consultants) that they could expected a far higher proportion of children with special needs to be sitting unnoticed in ordinary schools. In neighbouring Zimbabwe a national survey found evidence that a remarkable 61 per cent of disabled school-age children had had some education. [3] Even on the cautious guess that 61 was a misprint for 6.1, and that not everyone with a disability has special needs, the numbers were much higher than those which surprised the authorities in Maputo province. In neighbouring Tanzania a more modest 1.9 per cent of children in ordinary primary schools were found to have significant disabilities." [4]
Noteworthy in the Maputo report of 1998 is the idea that the ordinary schools where a handful of children with special needs were found were already "inclusive". The idea of 'integration' had been wiped out by the vocabulary of 'inclusion', however ludicrously used in this context. In their introduction to the World Yearbook of Education 1999 (details above), Daniels and Garner refer (p. 4) to "the last World Yearbook concerned with special education", which was that of 1993, titled "Special Needs Education". In 1993, integration was still trendy; inclusion was barely mentioned. Within five years inclusion had seized the high ground and integration was yesterday's discredited bunk.
Deconstructing the Rhetoric
The international switch from integration to inclusion had to be done rather circumspectly. There had been a growing realisation that Integration, while ideologically correct, was not delivering the expected wondrous results. True Integration could be reached only by starting somewhere other than where schools and teachers actually were; and incidentally it would also require a total reconceptualisation of what schools were all about, from top to bottom. Furthermore, it would require these reconstructed schools to be part of a society whose values had undergone a radical and unprecedented upheaval. This revolutionary program was considered rather too much to spring all at once on the general public of any real country; but at least the inclusion term could be launched in a few international conferences, without too much explanation, and then allowed slowly to trickle down to the ordinary teacher at the chalk level.
Periodic churning of the terminology enables universities and teacher colleges to deliver the appearance of bold innovation, while leaving all the kids still having their shot at mediocre schooling. On past form one could expect the Inclusion Bandwagon to have a clear run of 15 years before its wheels are stolen by the next bold innovation. Yet there are signs that the showroom-life of euro-american bandwagons is shortening. This occurs partly because in the internet era new terminology pings rapidly around the world, being half-understood in half the places where it lands and fully misunderstood in the other half. Terms thus have a shorter working life before beginning to sound exhausted, especially on a global level.
By 1994, when most of the world was still struggling to get its head round integration and knew nothing of inclusion, a bandwagon critique was already in preparation entitled "The Illusion of Full Inclusion" [5], largely comprising reprints of journal articles from the late 1980s and early 1990s, arguing about American mainstreaming experiences from the 1970s onward. The use of Inclusion in the title is misleading, but perfectly understandable as it rhymes with Illusion and makes a snappy slogan. The qualified "Full Inclusion" is a code, understood by insiders to mean that the authors are honest, upright professionals who fully support children's right to a range of wonderful educational experiences but find no credible evidence that all disabled children will always be better served by an ideological requirement to have all these experiences in the company of children with very different abilities and needs.
Also in 1994, the United Nations Development Programme published a book advocating "Inclusive Education" [6] in fairly moderate terms. Starting with a series of case studies from the fictive country of Miravia, the 'Third World' obstacles are not glossed over yet most of the inclusion occurs within the ordinary classroom. The book concedes that some educational activities with some disabled children may need to take place elsewhere. (This of course is what a lot of people imagined 'Integration' would look like, unaware that the party doctrine had changed and the Liberation Front was now facing in a different direction...)
The Yearbook 1999 partly tackles the gaps in understanding, though its contributors are writing mostly from countries with strong education systems (US, Canada, UK, Netherlands, Scandinavia, Spain, Japan, Australia), or countries with transitional economies and some strong 'modern' urban areas (Brazil, Czech Republic, Chile, South Africa). Daniels and Garner note the dominance of "token and rhetorical responses" (p. 3) in global conventions and international pronouncements, and clearly wish to avoid adding to them. They have solicited from their contributors a critical appraisal of themes and topics pertinent to the dilemmas and potentials of inclusion, and have not tried to impose the latest round of politically correct terminology, or any unified concept of inclusion.
Alan Dyson's chapter (Yearbook 1999) [7] makes a useful analysis of ways in which the terms and rhetoric of inclusion are being used and their ambiguities and possible contradictions. Several different rationales for inclusion are distinguishable, e.g. the discourses of rights and ethics, of educational efficacy, of political vested interests, of pragmatism. Writers often make eclectic use of arguments from these discourses, so as to reach the required 'answer' (i.e. the superiority of inclusive education). Dyson notes the risk that ongoing discussions which are essential for implementing practices that are more inclusive and inclusive of more disadvantaged groups, may actually be stifled by the ascendancy of a single notion of inclusion.
Such analysis might have been of use in the Savolainen et al book. This ties together material from very disparate sources and thought processes, based on the session "Meeting Special/Diverse Educational Needs: making inclusion a reality" at the World Education Forum, Dakar, April 2000. In summing up the session, Savolainen & Alasuutari [8] note the shift of "inclusion rhetoric" away from a focus on childhood disability or special educational needs, toward the needs of 'all' children. They recognise the difficulties for children with disabilities in the current state of mainstream education, and that resources of expertise from the special education field will be important in reconstructing mainstream education to cater for all children. Here perhaps they are a little optimistic. Trained and experienced human resources don't grow on trees. Many countries have very few such resources whether for education labelled special, integrated or inclusive. In the current climate of denunciation by crusading full-inclusionists there is a discernible dropout of people with skills and experience, and low replacement. What is likely to become available is an increasing number of teachers whose training has included dollops of rhetoric and a brief, largely theoretical exposure to children with significant difficulties in learning and in coping with the ordinary classroom. In a few countries there may be sufficient additional human resources, re-designed space and equipment, so that the rhetoric can actually be made to work, some of the time; but grand inclusion schemes to change the world are very seldom drawn up by people with current, daily experience of implementing such schemes with real children in real classrooms of actual countries.
Facing Reality
Mamo Mengesha (in Savolainen et al) [9] details the serious weaknesses of primary education in Ethiopia, with low primary enrolment, poor conditions, weak teaching and high drop-out rates. A small proportion of children with special needs are catered for either in special schools, or casually integrated in ordinary schools without support (they are "not identified and are left to fate"). Initiatives are now under way for including children with special needs, with some curriculum changes and specific additions to all teacher-training courses. As well as including disabled children, there are efforts to increase opportunities for girls and for other disadvantaged or peripheral groups. There is even 'inclusion', in the sense that all the recommendations by waves of foreign experts are now 'included' in the education plan. The only problem, as Mengesha points out from time to time, is the lack of almost all the resources needed to implement these wonderful suggestions.
At the other end of Africa, and in a country with a far stronger economy, the rural areas present similarly intractable problems. Pam Christie (Yearbook 1999) [10] mentions baseline reports from the Northern Province of South Africa, where
"49 per cent of schools have no water within walking distance, 79 per cent have no toilets, 95 per cent have no library facilities and 41 per cent need serious repairs."
Such data are familiar in most of sub-Saharan Africa, and substantial parts of rural South Asia. Most of these schools have no electricity and no learning materials; if there are 'library facilities' it means a few shelves of tattered old books. The teachers have the weakest qualifications or none. Expectations by teachers, students and communities are minimal. 'Professional motivation' in these circumstances consists of a salary too small to live on, paid several months late if at all.
South Africa's post-apartheid government faced colossal difficulties (though not noticeably greater than those of many other much poorer African countries), and made some efforts that Christie finds commendable, towards redistribution of resources in favour of a population 80 per cent of whom had been seriously disabled in political and socio-economic terms, if not in mental or physical faculties. Nevertheless the national policies for education have been "idealistic texts in an essentially top-down policy process that is not rooted in the realities of schools, or responsive to conditions on the ground." Once again, whatever the nature of the disablement, the response of national thinkers and ideologists has been less than useful for implementation.
One Asian example may give heart to some African educationists sick of dancing to foreign tunes. According to Deng & Manset [11], the Chinese government decided that children with disabilities, whether 10 or 20 million strong and whatever their special needs or peculiarities, should not be at home but in school. The orders were issued, the "Learning in Regular Classrooms" movement began, and between 1987 and 1996 the school entrance rate of children with disabilities is said to have risen from 6 per cent to 60 per cent, the great majority being in their nearest ordinary school. Problems arising from this shift are colossal; the resources to address them are modest. Many of the children in "regular classrooms" are reported to be learning nothing; some are present on the register only, while the actual child stays at home. Yet these are China's own self-generated problems, to which it will no doubt find homemade solutions within its own cultures and resources.
Does Inclusion Have a Bright Future?
Sai Väyrynen (Savolainen et al) [12] of UNESCO hits the expected optimistic note, but closes her chapter with a thought that could suggest some underlying realism:
"Inclusion in education has to be seen within the context of the society -- it is hard to see it happening if the society is overtly discriminatory, segregative or xenophobic."
Does any society exist that is not substantially discriminatory, segregative or xenophobic? Probably not. Yet in at least one society with its share of social problems, and with little political will to abolish separate special education, it has been possible for a young woman with Down's syndrome not only to work her way through the ordinary school system but to report on it in a foreign language, the latter achievement being beyond the capacity of probably 80 per cent of British or American youngsters. Amidst the final chapter of Yearbook 1999 [13], Peetjie Engels, aged 19, gives a coherent account in quite reasonable English of the schools she attended in the Netherlands, her mother's adoption of Feuerstein's Instrumental Enrichment methods, and her own unique success in passing the exams at the end of secondary school. This was a triumph of real life (and of maternal determination) rather than of any particular education policy.
Children with disabilities in the other half or two thirds of the world will get no benefit from distant optimism, poetry or pyramids built in the ideological fun-palaces of Western Europe. The Daniels & Garner book shows inclusion as an interesting experiment which nobody quite knows how to get right on the macro scale. It feels good to many people and is vigorously contested by others. The wealthy countries can probably afford such experiments. They can tear down one system, build another on the ruins, scrap the experiment and come up for a third try, and while they are doing so they can still provide at least a mediocre education for almost all their children.
Such luxury of choice is not affordable by most of the world. Whatever might be the case if everyone were nice to one another and cooperated for the common good, the present scenario seems likely to persist and spread: a growing urban middle class, increasingly threatened by the ocean of poor around them, making ever more vigorous efforts to secure high-quality (though discriminatory) educational opportunities for their own children of whatever ability or disability. In fact Sally Tomlinson (Yearbook 1999) [14] analyses the situation in Britain along these lines; but the middle and aspirant middle classes in most developing countries are much less powerful and so need to be the more ferocious in protecting their benefits. They may vote for palliative measures to divert the anger of the poor, and of disabled people among the poor, but will not send their own children to the half-baked schools available to the masses.
The future of some parts of education may change radically, where for example the lecture-hall with 500 students may give way successfully to the internet audience of 50,000 without loss of quality; but there is little prospect of similar technological fixes for teaching children who need high levels of individual human guidance and closely tailored reinforcement. For many millions of them the future, if not already cancelled, is heavily mortgaged to euro-american ideological battles that are irrelevant to the ground realities of non-developing countries.
References
[1] P.S. Strain & M.M. Kerr (1981) Mainstreaming of Children in Schools. New York: Academic Press.
[2] E. Lehtomäki, L. Chiluvane, & I. Viniche (2000) Case: Strengthening social networks in and around the school: experiences in Maputo province, Mozambique. In: Savolainen et al, Meeting Special and Diverse Educational Needs, pp. 62-64.
[3] Zimbabwe, Government of, & UNICEF (1982) The National Disability Survey of Zimbabwe. Harare.
[4] J. Kisanji (1979) Incidence of handicapped children in ordinary primary schools. In: Education and Development. Proceedings of the IYC Symposium, University of Dar-es-Salaam, Dec. 1979. Nairobi: UNICEF.
[5] J.M. Kauffman & D.P. Hallahan (1995) The Illusion of Full Inclusion. A comprehensive critique of a current special education bandwagon. Austin, Tx: Pro-Ed, Inc.
[6] T. Jönsson (1994) Inclusive Education. Geneva: UNDP.
[7] A. Dyson (1999) Inclusion and inclusions: theories and discourses in inclusive education. In: Daniels & Garner, World Yearbook of Education 1999, 36-53.
[8] H. Savolainen and H. Alasuutari (2000) Closing remarks: making inclusion a reality. In: Savolainen et al, Meeting Special and Diverse Educational Needs, 135-139.
[9] M. Mengesha (2000) Special needs education: emerging in Ethiopia. In: Savolainen et al, Meeting Special and Diverse Educational Needs, 84-94.
[10] P. Christie (1999) Inclusive education in South Africa: achieving equity and majority rights. In: Daniels & Garner, World Yearbook of Education 1999, 160-168.
[11] Meng Deng & G. Manset (2000) Analysis of the "Learning in Regular Classrooms" movement in China. Mental Retardation 38: 124-130.
[12] S. Väyrynen (2000) UNESCO and inclusive education. In: Savolainen et al, Meeting Special and Diverse Educational Needs, 128-134.
[13] J. Lebeer, R. Garbo, P. Engels, & A. De Vroey (1999) Advocacy, self-advocacy and inclusive action: a concluding perspective. In: Daniels & Garner, World Yearbook of Education 1999, 252-265.
[14] S. Tomlinson (1999) Exclusion: the middle classes and the common good. In: Daniels & Garner, World Yearbook of Education 1999, 238-251.
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