HASWhile the teaching profession faces mounting difficulties in the grotesque conditions in which the inclusive school policy was launched, human rights defender Claire Hédon confirmed in a 2022 report on the issue that “It’s up to school to adjust (for disabled child)…and we see that we are asking the child to adapt to school”. And to cite an example of a teacher who would rephrase a misunderstood instruction to a student, only to note with glee that “the whole class benefited”.
Another example is Martine Caraglio, Inspector General of National Education, featured in the address column World in 2023, the history of the relationship between “mainstream” educational institutions and specialized education. This text illustrates a certain confusion in the understanding of the issue of inclusive education, which would allow ” they associate special treatment and common belonging with the city and, more broadly, with humanity “. And who could really oppose such noble principles?
This mode of setting up the problem, briefly summarized, however, calls for a few remarks.
First, as sociologist Hugo Dupont has shown (Desegregation and full support, Presses universitaire de Grenoble, 2021), the closure of facilities specializing in the care of disabled children in the name of international guidelines for “desegregation” are now reincorporated into public management policies. Today it is about applying a policy based on performance criteria at all costs and validating it on the basis of numerical data, regardless of the difficulties we face in reality.
Ugly situation
However, the parents of the affected children do not have the option of sending their child to a regular school or to a specialized facility: they are forced to accept the school’s measures and methods, even if they are unsatisfactory or even undesirable. And what happens when things go wrong? The orphanage is forcing families to take their children out of school, forcing some mothers to leave their jobs.
The gap between the great ideals of inclusion and their institutional conditions for their realization is an exorbitant price for them and leads to ugly situations: mothers are prevented from working, children do not go to school. As Paul Devin, president of the United Federation of Trade Unions (FSU) Research Institute and National Education Inspector notes: “ The fundamental paradox is that the growing demand for discourses that want to base inclusion on an absolute principle is generally not matched by a similar demand for the definition of the means that would enable its realization. » (“Wanting to think about the educational inclusion of disabled students”, Red notebooks11 January 2019).
You have 50.32% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.