Once upon a time, students with disabilities were completely excluded from education.
They were believed to be ‘ineducable’ and were kept at home or sent to institutions.
This still occurs in some countries but began to change in most around the late-1800s with
the establishment of schools for children with hearing and vision impairment.
It took a lot longer for children with physical and intellectual disabilities
to receive an education. Many of these children were excluded until
institutions were closed in the 1960s and 70s. What happened in the one-half century – between –
to convince modern society to embrace inclusion? An important moment to begin is 1948.
This was the year that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was established.
The UDHR has 30 Articles covering basic dignity and liberty, the right to life,
prohibition of slavery and torture, legal rights, the right to political freedom,
and rights to healthcare and education. It came just three short years from the end
of World War Two, which also brought an end to the Holocaust.
Most people know that 6 million Jewish men, women and children were murdered in the Holocaust,
but few know that the process of extermination by the German Nazi state
began with the systematised murder of children with disabilities.
This was known as the T4 Aktion Program and is estimated to have led to the deaths of
some 300,000 people who the Nazis killed in the belief that it would strengthen the gene pool.
Another historical landmark came just six years later, this time in the United States.
In 1954, Oliver Brown – the father of Linda Brown – a third-grade student from Kansas,
tried to enrol his daughter in their local school. But her enrolment was rejected because Linda
was African-American and, in those days, American schools were segregated by race.
So, while Linda’s white neighbourhood friends were able to attend their local school,
she was forced to travel on a bus to a different school; one for African-American children.
Her father teamed up with other parents in a class action law suit,
which eventually went to the US Supreme Court. This landmark case is known as
Brown v. Board of Education. The court’s verdict was that “separate
educational facilities are inherently unequal”. Almost 20 years later, the legal precedent
set by Brown v. Board of Education was successfully used in another class action.
In 1971, 14 students with disability and their families argued that segregated education
violated the rights of students with disability, under the 14th Amendment.
The courts ruled that all students with disability were capable of benefiting from education
and that placement in a regular school was preferable
to placement in a special or segregated setting. Four years later, a Federal law mandated that
all children be provided access to a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive
environment. Not long thereafter, a parliamentary inquiry
took place in the UK, which aimed to eliminate existing difference in education for students
with disability and students without disability. This inquiry came to be known as
The Warnock Report. One of its recommendations was that
initial teacher education programs should include at least one mandatory unit to
prepare all classroom teachers to teach students with disability.
The Warnock Report was hugely influential both in the UK and Australia.
With increasing numbers of students with disability
accessing education at their local school, there was an international desire to seek
a framework for inclusive education. In 1994, UNESCO’s Salamanca Statement on
Special Needs Education broke new ground by providing a framework for inclusive education.
All over the world, governments responded by revising education policies and updating practice.
However, while the Salamanca Statement was successful in raising awareness of the concept
of inclusion, inclusive education was not clearly defined and many imitations emerged.
In 2006, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) was adopted by the
United Nations and came into force in 2008. It protects the rights and dignity of people
with disability and has eight guiding principles. These include: respect for dignity and autonomy,
non-discrimination, participation and inclusion, equality of opportunity, and accessibility.
Article 24 of the CRPD: Education explicitly states the right to an inclusive education.
Ten years after the United Nations adopted the CRPD, the CRPD committee published
General Comment No. 4 which articulates the right to an inclusive education
and the steps necessary to achieve it. General Comment No. 4 not only defines inclusion
but also other incompatible forms of education provision, like integration and segregation.
All of the events of the past have contributed to the formation of the General Comment in
some way, and it marks a turning point in history. Inclusive education has been defined;
it's meaning is not up for debate. The objective now is to implement it.
And this course will provide you with the essential knowledge needed to do that.