Double edged inclusion

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

You see the poster "Children Should Learn Together." The first thought that comes to mind is, of course, together. How can a sane person divide children according to any criteria? As soon as you think so, you are trapped. Into the logical and linguistic trap that educational destroyers set in order to disguise their advance.

Because we are not talking about discrimination based on nationality, gender or any other basis. What is it about?

You start to figure out what this poster is talking about and you find out that it is about inclusive education.

Continuing your research, you will certainly receive information that the term "inclusive education", or as it is also called "inclusion", comes from the Latin inclusi - to include or the French inclusif - including itself. That this type of education supposedly implies the availability of education for all in the sense of adapting to the diverse needs of children in order to ensure access to education for children with “special needs”. Children with disabilities are hidden under the term “children with special needs”.

And again, no trick is visible yet - would anyone be against the idea that education was available to everyone? Only an ardent misanthropist, a supporter of regression and destruction of society, can believe that access to education should be limited.

Further, you can find that in Russia this type of education is being introduced under the influence of UNICEF. I will explain for those who do not know this abbreviation that UNICEF is the United Nations Children's Fund, an international organization that operates under the auspices of the United Nations with headquarters in New York.

Since Russia has ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Children, now UNICEF dictates to us the methods of implementing this convention, the interpretation of the clauses of this convention, and so on.

A brochure dedicated to inclusive education in Russia is posted on the UNICEF website. The introduction to this brochure states: “One of the main provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) is the respect and provision by States parties to the Convention of all the rights provided for in the Convention for every child without any discrimination, regardless of race, color, gender, language, religion, political or other beliefs, national, ethnic or social origin, property status, health and birth of a child, his parents or legal guardians, or any other circumstances.

In the end, it all boils down to the fact that in order to ensure the rights of persons with disabilities and exclude their discrimination, they must learn together with other children. Think about it - special conditions, special care, a special training system developed for this or that type of disease - this turns out to be discrimination!

And what do the advocates of inclusive education offer us? They propose (and are already implementing!) The closure of specialized schools and the transfer of students to regular schools.

What is it fraught with?

In order to understand this issue, let's look at the history of the formation of the education system for children with developmental disabilities.

One of the first Russian scientists who applied a scientific approach to the problem of teaching children with disabilities was I. A. Sikorsky. His research is one of the first attempts in our science of anthropological substantiation of the upbringing and education of children with developmental disabilities. Until the Great October Socialist Revolution and in the first post-revolutionary years, research did not receive much government support. But since 1924, thanks to the works of L. S. Vygotsky, they have been actively supported by the state, and scientific and practical activities in the field of defectology are actively developing.

In his works, L. S. Vygotsky showed the need to take into account in education and training the characteristics of different categories of children with disabilities. Vygotsky's work and further research in the field of defectology resulted in the development of various educational and educational systems for children with various mental disabilities. It is no secret to anyone that different diseases, as well as the severity of these diseases, require a different approach to achieve the maximum level of learning.

Someone will say: "Why is the author only talking about mental disorders, there are still wheelchair users?" I agree with this and introduce some rough classification of defects. They can be subdivided into defects in vision, hearing, speech, intelligence, and movement disorders.

Any sane person understands that each category of defects requires an independent approach to learning. Moreover, the severity of the defect can also make its own adjustments. For example, a completely blind person needs to learn Braille, a dotted tactile font developed in 1824 by Louis Braille, who lost his sight at the age of three. And all communication with others in such people goes through hearing and tactile sensations. At the same time, people with low vision have the ability to see large objects, and this can be used as an additional factor in learning.

It is no less obvious that for the deaf and hard of hearing, training should be done with maximum visualization. And so on for each type of defects.

How can this separation be most efficiently implemented?

Develop specialized programs for each type of deviation.

Train educators specializing in a particular type or several similar types of deviations.

Create special schools and bring together trained teachers and children with the same or similar disabilities.

This was done in the USSR. And this gave its result. I have already written in my articles about the famous school of Meshcheryakov and Ilyenkov for the deaf-blind and dumb, one of whose graduates became a doctor of psychological sciences.

Now UNICEF calls it discrimination and demands that such children study in regular classes.

This is what the brochure I referred to above says: “The basic ideas and principles of inclusive education as an international practice for realizing the right to education for persons with special needs were first most fully formulated in the Salamanca Declaration“On Principles, Policies and Practices in education for persons with special needs”(1994). More than three hundred participants, representing 92 governments and 25 international organizations, declared in the Salamanca Declaration the need to "fundamentally reform general education institutions", recognizing the "need and urgency of providing education for children, youth and adults with special educational needs within the regular education system.". ".

Think about it! In the above words, there is not an ounce of reason, not a bit of striving for the maximum level of education for anyone. There is only an insane declaration that special education institutions are discrimination, and the right to education is realized through education in the general classrooms of ordinary schools.

Well, how is this right realized if in general classes the teacher cannot be a specialist in all types of defects? He cannot master all the techniques necessary for teaching children with various kinds of disabilities. But let's imagine for a moment that the teacher has mastered all this. He must give the program to ordinary children and children with disabilities at the same time in the same class. And if there are children with different disabilities in the class? The teacher's job is divided into teaching many programs in a time limited to one lesson.

Maybe I am missing something, and the Salamanca Declaration contains reasonable points? Let's take a look at the principles written in this declaration:

Let's take a look at these points. Let's look for a healthy grain.

The first point is beyond doubt. Indeed, every child should have an affordable education.

But already the second point raises serious questions. To say that all people are unique is to say nothing. Well, unique - so what? Will we make a personal training program for everyone? And get bogged down in millions of programs? This is certainly not possible. No matter how unique people are, you can always identify groups of people with similar abilities and interests. And this is a completely different matter.

If you do not take into account what I said above, that is, the unification of people by interests and abilities, then the third point, which speaks of the need to take into account all the diversity of features and needs when developing curricula, looks absurd.

And finally, the next point speaks about persons with special needs. And it contains mutually exclusive theses.

The first thesis says that these persons should have access to education in mainstream schools.

The second is that they need to provide all their needs.

Think about it - instead of creating (or rather, preserving the already existing) effective infrastructure that meets all the needs of people with disabilities gathered in a team according to these very needs, it is proposed to spray them across different schools and try to create comfortable conditions in each one. This is discrimination when, under the guise of caring for a person, he is placed in an environment that cannot form the conditions for effective education of the child.

Finally, the last point is an unsubstantiated declaration that inclusive education is an effective means of combating discriminatory attitudes. Nobody talks about the quality of education in such a system. It does not interest the signatories of this declaration.

Thus, inclusion turns into a double-edged weapon. A double-edged weapon is a weapon that has a sharp blade on both sides. And in a figurative sense, it is something that can cause consequences on both sides. This inclusion has consequences on both sides: we lose the opportunity to educate people with disabilities in a qualified and high-quality manner, on the one hand, and on the other, due to the lack of time for the teacher, the program is simplified, and the level of education is declining.

In addition, in the process of introducing inclusion, we leave unclaimed the unique knowledge obtained as a result of research in the field of defectology, leave high-class specialists unemployed, and after that we lay off university professors who trained these specialists. That is, we are destroying an entire branch of scientific research.

The introduction of inclusive education, leading to the destruction of the existing systems of special education that have been developed over the years, the destruction of teacher training systems, and the reduction of scientific activity, is another blow to the entire education system in the framework of the war with education.