Old Civilisations, Young Special Needs Ideas

Seamus Hegarty & Mithu Alur (eds) Education and Children with Special Needs: from segregation to inclusion. New Delhi: Sage, 2002. 220 pp. isbn 8178290960.

Lesley Lababidi with Nadia El-Arabi, Silent No More: special needs people in Egypt. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2002. xv + 195 pp. isbn 9774246934.

Asian and Middle Eastern publications in English on "special needs" are slowly building up, mainly by people who have studied in Europe or North America. Such works usually take euro-american norms as the gold standard with a passing nod to the 'native' heritage. This is some improvement on earlier practice in which converts to 'modern beliefs' (i.e. recent euro-american hypotheses in the disability field) would heartily denounce the 'backwardness and superstition' of their own country. The two books under review both provide a good deal of information about current special needs service and thinking in India and Egypt, along with some political spin.

Differences in cognitive capacities and aptitude for education were noted in the Rig Veda nearly 4000 years ago, and students unable to chant the sacred texts with correct understanding were directed toward physical rather than mental tasks. [1] After some centuries, sporadic notes in the early South Asian Buddhist literature suggest a more nuanced educational approach to slow learners and children with sensory impairments. The benefits of motivating the young child by starting with play, and of activity methods and a practical curriculum, were understood, along with some formal knowledge of childhood developmental stages, elementary audiological assessment, and the need for active learning of parenting skills. [2] Yet the present South Asian population remains unaware of the greater part of this heritage.

Every Variety - or Nothing Formal
Historical records suggest that, whether concurrently or at different times and places, many South Asian children with disabilities and special educational needs have been casually integrated with other schoolchildren, some have been included in school by specific measures, some have been excluded deliberately, some have been directed to a different educational pathway, some have been educated together with their peers but on a modified curriculum. Probably a majority of all children in every century had no formal education but learnt the language, customs and work practices of their village or town simply by living within their extended family and neighbourhood. The minority, who received formal education, could more accurately be regarded as the ones who were "segregated". The Indian educationist Vidyavachaspati commented on

"the indigenous system and method of education which gave to India all that has made her famous - the essence of which was the separation of the pupil from his home and natural parents and placing him in a more suitable environment, the elevated spiritual atmosphere of his preceptors' Ashram." [3]

Tweaking the Rhetoric
However, Alur's preface and introduction to the book (pp. 11-38) cite material up to 2000 and indicate that the author discovered the rhetoric of "Inclusion" at the University of London (if not necessarily in London's school classrooms. [5]) This discovery was too late to affect the seminars actually held in 1997, yet permeates Alur's editing of the book, creatively shifting the Indian seminar contents into a context of "Inclusion" or "Inclusive Education". One should not fault Mithu Alur, in a publication dated 2002, for attempting to wring new and improved juice from the 1997 seminar materials. What the Indian contributors were drafting in 1996 has actually been published here; but the editorial hand points to what they might have thought had they all mastered the UNESCO jargon of "Salamanca" [6] (represented in the book by N.K. Jangira, 67-76) and Anupam Ahuja, 77-96), rather than getting on with practical work and experiment in Indian schools, rural uplift programmes and government offices.

There is no problem with a book depicting several archaeological layers of thinking -- a useful corrective to the regrettable western tendency to date-stamp ideas and rush many of them away to remainder stores after six months before most of the public has had a sniff of them. Indians grow up learning that their country and its histories are much too vast, variegated and complex to be understood or described at any point in time. Contradictory ideas from many periods, originating in substantially different Indian languages and thought-forms, are therefore accumulated, mixed, sorted, classified, forgotten, rediscovered, juxtaposed and savoured, without necessarily finding the contradictions problematical.

Such Indian customs and talents also serve as useful barriers and filters for handling neo-imperial educational ideologies, foreign conceptual crusades, and simplified Grand Solutions to complex problems. Of course Inclusion will be embraced by India. Of course Inclusion doesn't stand a chance in India. Both statements are true (also untrue...) Every living being in India is included, and equally included, each having its name, classification, caste and place in some overarching but ever-cycling scheme of meanings and worlds and non-worlds. That being so, the arrival of Europeans waving their arms about and declaring that everyone is of equal value and is equally entitled to be included in society while (counter-intuitively) being also entitled to develop their individual potential and follow their individual dream regardless of society, is a harmless entertainment. Give the clowns a few years and they'll be back with a new act opposing most of what they preached earlier. It's hardly important, since national policies are but a flourish of grand rhetoric, bound to the wheel of destiny, bound to rise, bound to fall, either way having questionable or no effect on what is actually done in home, street or classroom.

Reflecting the Muddle
The chief merit of Hegarty & Alur's book [7] is its clear reflection of some parts of the wonderful muddle arising from many different strands of Indian education history. It provides no clear explanation of what integration is or what inclusion could be in India; and rather few of the authors make a distinguished contribution; yet many of the current dreams and realities are discernible. Dream and reality may be conflated, as when Ruma Banerjee (111-119), from Bangalore asserts that "in most situations children with disabilities are already in regular schools; they have not been segregated. Some have gone to school and others have not." (p. 112) That assessment might reflect the past 150 years of reports on South Asian schoolchildren's health status, which suggest that half or more have mild to moderate impairments and diseases that significantly affect their learning capacities. Banerjee's method (p. 114) of preparing disabled children for integration in regular schools would raise wry grins among Inclusionists in 2004: "After planning the curriculum, the method used is behaviour modification techniques with all disabled children." If they can't be "modified" to fit the available mainstream slots, "they are entered for vocational training."

Results that contradict the dominant paradigm are often the most interesting, and India has not lacked people willing to go against the tide when their experience and belief differed from that of the majority. Room is found for Deepak Kalra (133-136) at Jaipur and Reena Sen (137-140) of Calcutta, whose studies and practical experience suggest that the mainstream of Indian schools usually copes poorly with children having special needs. These two are unafraid to go on record with this widely experienced (but less often admitted) fact. It was one of the less trumpeted conclusions of Salamanca:

"If a principal reason for excluding particular pupils in the first place was that the ordinary school was failing to meet their needs, it makes no sense to bring them back unless changes are made." [6, p.99]

Invisibly Culture-Specific
Alur (p. 13) states the aim "to build different paradigms and support systems which would be culture-specific to India and would enable children with disabilities to be part of the ordinary system wherever possible." The "culture-specific" part of this aim is difficult to find in the book. Even Usha Singh's chapter, specifically titled "Culture-specific paradigms of integration in developing countries" (125-129), has little trace of country- or culture- specific theory or practice -- only a city and some children's names indicate that this is India. It would be more interesting if South Asians - perhaps after spending some observation time in non-Asian countries - would indicate how the range and depth of their own cultures are actually present when disabled children are welcomed in classrooms and playgrounds. After spending time watching such activities, very few observers would think that they might just as well have been in "Birmingham or Kansas" (Alur, p. 11). Despite the global flood of western mass media purveying the cultural norms of "Birmingham or Kansas", there are still ways of interacting, addressing, moving, persuading, encouraging, that are visibly distinct in teachers of different cultural regions.

Nile, Not Senile
The second book, reviewed here more briefly, derives from a civilisation of similar antiquity to India, and one in which physical and intellectual abilities or their absence were also noted from early times. [8] The Egyptian contribution to the education of blind people has been remarkable, though still little recognised. Blind musicians in antiquity certainly received training for ceremonial performances. The 4th century theologian Didymus of Alexandria was the earliest known blind man to have used a tactile system for learning the alphabet. Blind young men have been memorising the Quran and studying its interpretation at Al-Azhar, Cairo, in the company of sighted students, probably from the 12th through the 20th century. A special hostel was built for these blind students by Osman Katkhuda in the early 1730s (some 50 years before Haüy opened Europe's first residential school for blind people), and the sheikh in charge was customarily a blind man. [9] This is very likely the world's longest continuous provision of integrated education for blind people. However, the restrictive nature of the curriculum did not please Egypt's most famous modern blind man, Taha Hussein (1898-1973), who transferred to a secular university for his further studies. He later became Minister of Education (1950-1952), and was a celebrated ambassador for cultural understanding between the Middle East and the Western world. [10]

The American and Egyptian authors Lababidi and El-Arabi, though hardly familiar with the historical background, took pains to interview many informants working in disability services and special schools and thus gathered a brief sketch (pp. 3-17) of Egypt's distinguished heritage, [11] and an extended overview of current services (pp. 18-141). The descriptions of activities are mostly professional (e.g. physician, psychiatrist, psychologist) using medical or social welfare labels, with journalistic summaries that lack critical evaluation. However, the book does indicate the beginnings of an organised movement and voice of disabled adults as well as that of parents with disabled children. Views and opinions have been carefully attributed to live interviews or printed materials (pp. 172-84). Some Egyptian government statements are reprinted (161-71), and a directory of schools, organisations and associations for and of disabled people (185-188); also an index (189-194), and 16 pages of colour photos.

As in every other country, by far the greatest disability-related resources for daily life in Egypt and India are the informal knowledge, skills and efforts of the disabled people, their families, neighbours and friends, without any external or organisational intervention. These continue to be mostly invisible, because they are difficult to measure, record or photograph. However, the Community Based Rehabilitation activities reported in both books make a gesture toward recognition of informal resources in local communities.

NOTES & REFERENCES
[1] R.K. Mookerji (1947) Ancient Indian Education, London: MacMillan, pp. 25-37.

[2] M. Miles (2001) Including disabled children in Indian schools, 1790s - 1890s: innovations of educational approach and technique, Paedagogica Historica 37 (2) 291-315. Medieval Sanskrit literature also contains items such as Vaghbata's specification for design of playgrounds and toys that should be safe and stimulating, reflecting Caraka's earlier list. K.R. Srikantha Murthy (ed. & trans.) (1995-1997) Astanga Samgraha of Vaghbata, Varanasi, Vol. III, chapter 1, Balopacaraniya, verses 75-76.

[3] I. Vidyavachaspati (1957) Past achievements and future ideals of Indian education, in: Z.V. Togan (ed) Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Congress of Orientalists, II: 501-511, Leiden: Brill. Vidyavachaspati also noted that "the tendency to imitate blindly the institutions and ideals of the modern Western world, and the very inconsiderably shallow appreciation and assimilation of the new ideas, have to be attributed to another more fundamental defect of the present situation. Educated India of today lives in more or less complete ignorance of the achievements of Indian civilisation."

[4] US researchers over 20 years ago reported a disillusioned parental verdict on the fashion for mainstreaming: it simply meant that "all kids have an equal shot at mediocre schooling..." P.S. Strine & M.M. Kerr, 1981, Mainstreaming of Children in Schools. New York: Academic Press.

[5] A detailed article by T. Halpin, "School excluded disabled boy from play and photo", The Times, 15 December 2003, p. 9, records how a London primary school provided classroom assistants to facilitate learning by a 6 year old boy with serious developmental delay, yet failed to include him in pre-Christmas activities where all his classmates were involved. This is not untypical of British schools, where mechanisms now exist to give an appearance of inclusion, without the perceptions and skills for actually including children with significant disabilities.

[6] Final Report. World Conference on Special Needs Education: access and quality. Salamanca, Spain, 7-10 June 1994. UNESCO, ED-95/WS/2, 1995.

[7] The senior researcher Seamus Hegarty, named as co-editor of the book, contributes a chapter based on surveys of many countries' integrative efforts around 1990 (pp. 162-172), but eschews comment on India. Several other Europeans contributed chapters. Karl-Gustaf Stukat (173-182) reflects on 30 years of Swedish movement toward physical integration and onward to "problems of creating a non-segregated school for all" in Sweden.

[8] See e.g., V. Dasen (1993) Dwarfs in Ancient Egypt and Greece, Oxford: Clarendon. L. Manniche (1991) Music and Musicians in Ancient Egypt, London: British Museum Press. J.F. Nunn (1996) Ancient Egyptian Medicine. London: British Museum.

[9] B. Dodge (1974) Al-Azhar. Memorial edition, Washington DC: Middle East Institute, pp. 44, 86-87, 101, 165, 206.

[10] F. Malti-Douglas (1988) Blindness and Autobiography. Al-Ayyam of Taha Husayn. Princeton University Press.

[11] Egypt's earliest modern blind school was begun in the 1870s by the Egyptian physician Onsy Bey, after he studied medicine in Paris. Dr Onsy devised an Arabic form of Braille known as Onsy's Point, which was still in use 70 years later. The school's curriculum was mentioned briefly by a contemporary researcher: O. Abbate-Pacha (1882) Nouvelles observations physiologiques de subjectivité chez certains aveugles. Bulletin de l'Institut d'Égypte (2nd ser.) 3: 22-30, (on p.23). Lababidi & El-Arabi (p. 8) have "Muhammad Anas" starting a blind school in the 1890s and devising Arabic braille. Anas is presumably Onsy, dated 15-20 years late.

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