Modern Settlements in Special Needs Education: Segregated Versus Inclusive Education

Abstract

In the history of special needs education, the distinction between human nature and its social environment has been a controversial matter. The controversy regards whether special needs are primarily caused by the child's psycho-medical body or by cultural concepts of normality and deviance. Settlements of this controversy govern whether the pupil or the educational institution becomes the main point of intervention. In Denmark, the particularities of settlements can be identified by juxtaposing the introduction of intelligence testing in the 1930s with the contemporary policy agenda of inclusion. With intelligence testing, special needs education was to service children whose needs were seen as part of their human nature. Inclusion, in turn, assumes special needs to be stigmatizing cultural labels that need to be abandoned by changing school cultures. Drawing on actor-network theory we can approach such settlements as a product of a modern division between human nature and social environment. Although both these settlements depend on a distinction between human nature and social environment, this distinction generates practical tensions for each settlement.

Key Words:

• special needs education
• intelligence testing
• inclusion
• actor-network theory
• modern settlements

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the track Reassembling Education Policy Trends with Actor-Network Theory, European Conference on Educational Research, Istanbul, September 2013. I am grateful to the panel, to Christopher Gad, to the reviewers, and to the editors for valuable comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In England, a similar widening of the concept was introduced in 1978 with the English Warnoch Report, which introduced the term special needs education to replace the term special education. It advocated schools to offer special needs education to ‘all pupils who could not follow the ordinary teaching, regardless of the kind or cause of these difficulties’ and estimated that approximately 20 % of all pupils needed this support. Depicting this report as an important moment facilitating the widespread special needs education in Denmark, the Danish Ministry of Finance in 2010 commented that ‘Denmark followed this development’ (Danish Ministry of Finance, 2010, p. 40).

2 This translation from Danish to English, as well as all following quotations that are listed with Danish references in the bibliography, were made by the author.

3 While Binet in his original test divided children into their so-called ‘intelligence age’ – i.e. a 10-year old could figure with an intelligence of an 8-year old – Meyer took his inspiration from the German psychologist William Stern who related the intelligence age to the biological age (IA/BA*100), giving the result in ‘intelligence quotient’ (IQ). For Meyer, the IQ offered a more precise scale as it was far more serious to lack behind with two years of intelligence as a 6-year old than as an 8-year old (Meyer, 1929b, p. 697).