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COMPARING SPECIAL EDUCATION

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................................................................................................................viiPrefatory Note on Languages of Dis/ability and "Special Educational Needs"..........................................................................................ixIntroduction: From Origins to Contemporary Paradoxes in Special Education...........................................................................................1PART 1 THE ORIGINS OF SPECIAL EDUCATION.............................................................................................................................231 Ideas and Institutions: The Enlightenments, Human Nature, and Disability..........................................................................................292 Economic Change, State Making, and Citizenship....................................................................................................................64PART 2 COMPARING SPECIAL EDUCATION..................................................................................................................................913 The Global Institution of Special Education.......................................................................................................................974 Historical Models and Social Logics of Special Education Systems..................................................................................................1235 The Institutionalization of Special Education Systems and Their Divergence over the Twentieth Century.............................................................164PART 3 CONTEMPORARY PARADOXES.......................................................................................................................................1996 Special Education Participation and the Simultaneous Rise of Segregation and Inclusion............................................................................2057 Rights, Liberties, and Education in "Least" and "Most" Restrictive Environments: Contrasting Futures of Public Education and Juvenile Justice.....................2388 Between Global Intentions and National Persistence: From Special Education to Inclusive Education?................................................................258Notes...............................................................................................................................................................287Bibliography........................................................................................................................................................301Index...............................................................................................................................................................333

Chapter One

The education of children with disabilities long preceded the formal expansion of public education. The established organizational forms for the education of the blind, deaf, and "dumb"; the "feebleminded" and "insane"; disorderly, criminal, pauper, dependent, and neglected youth were diverse— from charitable asylums and orphanages to hospitals and various reformatories. Setting aside superficial differences in name, size, and administration, the universality of these organizational forms is compelling. In societies with widely different religious, cultural, political, and economic systems across Europe, such organizations for disabled children and youth were established. The differences lay in their relative importance and the timing of their founding.

Asylums, orphanages, hospitals, work houses, and reformatories have their own and conjoint histories that are more than subordinate chapters in the chronology of national education systems. If we retrieve these histories, we find continuities that offer a broader context for understanding the different structures of contemporary special education. Today, disabled children and youth are classified into special education categories, and their subsequent placement in a particular organizational structure may be thought of as a form of confinement. Such placement has affinities to "binding out" a child as an apprentice, a process that confers certain education benefits while placing limits on liberty. Special education programs that segregate children and youth may be thought of as places of well-meaning confinement. Today's special schools for children with disabilities may be considered as modern-day replacements for asylums; special schools for youth with challenging emotional or social behaviors, as variants of houses of correction or reformatories. At minimum, such a thought experiment underscores the way in which more recent terms, such as "handicapping conditions" or "special (educational) needs," have historically been intertwined with poverty and laboring classes and thus with exclusion and stigma. Yet such an experiment accentuates what has been an education transformation of enormous scope: forms and places of punishment and degradation have moved from historically isolated locations to become legally guaranteed provisions and thoroughly legitimate and ubiquitous sites within systems of mass education.

This chapter explores the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as the ideological origin of what would be called "special education" by the end of the nineteenth century. As indicated by its title, this chapter focuses on the interplay of ideas and institutions. An ironic feature of this intellectually rich century was how the flurry of international exchange of ideas that covered the de cades from 1700 to the 1780s ended with the rise of institutions that brought forth segregated organizations in which deaf and blind people, the mad, paupers, and criminals lived. The contradiction between the ideas that enlightened thinking celebrates, such as freedom from errors and fallacies, and the construction of large-scale institutions and state-sponsored organizations to care for and control those considered "abnormal" or deviant has not gone unnoticed; neither has it been fully explained.

The exploration of this inaugural era of special education is organized around, first, the trinary structure of Enlightenment thought, referred to as the official, counter, and periphery Enlightenments and, second, the sequential order of institutionalization and the founding of organizations to carry out the ideas advanced among the leading thinkers and supported by state initiatives.

Enlightenment thought is commonly divided into central bodies of ideas. The official Enlightenment accentuates reason as the source of truth and understanding. The counter Enlightenment, that of Romanticism, accentuates the moral and the spiritual as sources truer than the rational. By including deliberations about people who suffered social disadvantages and people with disabilities, in particular blind and deaf people, we enlarge the number of contributors to Enlightenment thought...