Their mission? To mould us.

Dear Debriefers,

Today we're going back to school.

This edition looks at the love-hate relationship with those educating us, the primary school that didn't want to let me in, and the enduring persistence of segregated education.

In today's lesson we go beyond the curriculum: education is much more than just learning. We see the extremes segregation can go to as well as the so-called “civilizing project” that many forms of special education have their origins in.

Schools get children ready for the society they grow into. But that society isn't one that includes people equally, and schools establish barriers as well as breaking them.

I'm trying out Bluesky! Say hello at @desibility.bsky.social.

The Debrief runs on a pay-as-you-can basis. With thanks to Robert Bosch Foundation, Rosangela and Visala for new subscriptions.

“Their mission? To mould us”

The double-edged nature of support to disabled children is captured by Malick Reinhard, a Swiss journalist, in his brilliant newsletter Couper l'herbe sous les roues.

Reinhard went to a so-called “special” school for kids with different disabilities and introduces the “educators” there:

“They were everywhere. A veritable infestation. They were like ants, bustling around us with a concern that was as stifling as it was useless. Their mission? To mold us, to ‘normalize’ us, to transform us into well-disciplined little soldiers, perfectly adapted to a society that, in any case, did not expect us—us, disabled people.” (Translated from French)

Reinhard describes the scrutiny and control with which they examined him. It's not that he disliked his educators on a personal level: they are the “bad guys” of his story, “but bad guys that I still really like”. He begins to play games of cat-and-mouse with them, learning to question their assumptions.

And it's a good thing he did, because one of the most damning assumptions one of them made is that he would live in segregated institutions as an adult. Looking after disabled children ended up limiting them:

“What I hold against [my educators] today is that they tried too hard to protect me, to protect us. From everything. Thus, stubbornly, I have always avoided the good morals of the best social schools, which, on several occasions, almost neutralised me, made me fragile in the face of the slightest ripple in life.” (Translated from French)

A love-hate relationship

These aren't just dynamics reserved to “special” education where disabled children are separated from their peers. Writing about teacher's aides in New Zealand, Semi Cho describes a “love/hate relationship” with those supporting inclusion in a mainstream setting.

Cho says that “the presence of a teacher aid made the other kids notice” her as different. She too learned to resent the way aides imposed, and find ways to avoid it, “a rather cheeky student resistant to their support”:

“The teacher aides then took concern beyond my vision impairment. They nagged me to slip, slop, slap and wrap, but weren’t telling other students to put on sunblock at lunchtime. Plus, wasn’t lunchtime for everyone to take a break? I also adopted a strategy which was to take artsy subjects as these classes had minimal whiteboard time and my teacher aide was not required.”

Cho's retrospective is more positive than Reinhard's. She now sees the aides as “unassuming allies and unlikely friends”. When she lost a group of friends a teaching aide found her counselling support. And rather than limiting with low expectations, these aides gave a base of self-belief:

“Our teacher aides were probably some of the first people, aside from our parents, who saw potential in our future. When self-doubt crept in, my teacher aides believed I was capable.”

“A child like Peter”

The type of supports or environments that students with disabilities need is one of the enduring reasons given for separating us from non-disabled children.

I thrived in mainstream education with relatively minor adaptations and support for my physical disability. But this wasn't obvious to Hamilton Country Primary School, which my parents wanted to send me to age four.

After we visited, the headteacher wrote my parents to express her concerns about how I might be “knocked or jostled”, about whether I could get through a fire door to go to the toilet, or:

“Lastly, I do feel you must carefully consider the difficulties this particular building presents to a child like Peter; the stairs would be a potentially dangerous place for him and there are so many Schools which would present fewer problems and in which he would be able to integrate more easily. If transport were a problem I suspect you would be eligible for help with this.”

Fortunately my parents took a problem-solving rather than protectionist approach, and I went to Hamilton despite the headteacher's concerns.

Reading this letter now I am struck by how unbalanced these arguments are. It makes no mention of the potential benefits of me attending Hamilton, that it was two blocks from my house or the fact my older brother was already there. Or, indeed, how I might go onto do well at or contribute to the school.

As I shared in my poetic autobiography, knocking and jostling was indeed part of my experience there. So was doing well in class and indeed my mother's volunteer support to school trips or the school fete.

In retrospect, it appears a turning point in my life, with important consequences for the type of social inclusion I had growing up. I did well in mainstream education. Indeed, that allowed me to choose a grammar school aged 16: a school segregating by academic achievement rather than disability.

Persistence of segregated education

A lot has changed in education and disability rights since 1990, when Hamilton School wrote my parents that letter. Globally there is a strong emphasis on inclusive education, where children with disabilities are educated alongside their non-disabled peers, in the same classes and schools.

But despite a seeming international consensus there is an enduring existence of segregated provision of education to disabled children. This might take place in “special” schools, like they did for Reinhard in Switzerland, or in separate classes in general schools.

Indeed, even though the UK has now ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the British government did so making a reservation that it thought having a system of mainstream and special schools was “inclusive” and that it understood this to be “allowed under the Convention”.

This was thoroughly rejected by the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In its scathing findings from 2017 on the British approach to disability rights, the Committee critiqued the “persistence of a dual education system that segregates children with disabilities in special schools”.

Segregated solutions for children with disabilities have almost predictably absurd, abusive and expensive consequences. One recent example of this from the UK is private special schools costing councils up to £250,000 ($315,000) per student per year. Families and staff told the BBC how children were being failed by some of these schools. Common issues are “an unnecessary and excessive use of restraint”, unqualified staff, and children not making progress academically.

But even while the UK stands apart in its willingness to argue for continued segregation of some disabled children, it does not stand apart in the practice of doing so.

Indeed, according to the European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education, the UK has similar rates of segregated schooling to other European countries. Across 19 countries, including the UK, the average share of children in separate or non-inclusive education at primary level was 1.7%. This increases to 3% at lower-secondary. (The latest figures are from the school year of 2020/2021.)

Extreme segregation in residential special schools

A particularly extreme form of segregated education is the continued existence of residential special schools. Not only are disabled children and adults in a segregated setting but they live there, apart from their families or in some cases with the school itself acting as guardian.

While there is a supposed advantage in access to specialised services, these schools often fail to provide quality education or care. The complex distinctions between types of institutions are helpfully unpicked by this white paper from UNICEF, on role of boarding schools for vulnerable children in the Europe and Central Asia region.

It points out that, according to disability rights frameworks, “residential special education should no longer be permissible in any education system, for any children with disabilities”. Studies across the region show some of the reasons why, with education sometimes “poor or wholly absent, particularly for children with disabilities or children with challenging behaviours.”

The evidence from the region shows that as well as not meeting children's needs or fulfilling their rights, segregated specialised residential education for children with disabilities:

“[does] not meet children’s needs or fulfil their rights and may expose them to greater risks of violence and abuse, including sexual violence.”

The paper points to some significant successes in closing these schools from countries such as Moldova, which has closed 67 boarding schools since 2008. However, in many places both children and schools falling through the cracks of other reforms:

“Deinstitutionalisation and inclusive education reforms have not yet reached residential special schools to the same extent as alternative residential care. Around two thirds of education systems in 30 countries across Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia still have separate, specialised education in special schools, boarding schools, hospital schools and rehabilitation centres.”

“Part of a wider civilizing project”

If the idea of moulding or normalizing disabled children was giving you a whiff of how education systems can be a form of control over other groups, you're not wrong.

Indeed, research from the Alliance for Inclusive Education in the UK explores the intersections in lived experience of Black/Global Majority Disabled Pupils in education. It shows how the decision whether to send a child to a mainstream or segregated school doesn't just depend on the building or the stairs as it did in my own white, middle class experience:

“A pressing concern arises around how this approach to schooling [separating special and mainstream schools] inadvertently perpetuates racism and ableism. This is because the evaluation of children for admission to special schools is linked to schools’ subjective assessment of pupil’s behaviour, emotions, and communication levels.”

This combination of racism and ableism isn't a new feature of special education for disabled people. In her book Colonising Disability, Esme Cleall looks at disability in Britain and its Empire, and shows how racism and ableism are intermingled from the roots of modern education:

“Over the course of the nineteenth century, a rapidly growing group of philanthropists, educationalists, religious figures and, later, government officials declared they could 'save' the disabled and advocated new techniques and instruments that they claimed could 'rescue' the 'crippled poor', teach 'deaf-mute' people to acquire speech and enable blind people to read. Societies were established to 'educate', 'civilise' and 'Christianise' disabled children, particularly those from the working classes. Like the racialised others of empire, disabled people were deemed incapable of helping themselves and dependent on white, non-disabled people. This was part of a wider civilising project that had imperial resonances and dimensions.”

Finding our own fortune

Recent research on historical development of segregated education for disabled people illustrates the trends described by Cleall of modernising or “civilising” missions and leadership of non-disabled people.

Ranging across different geographies and covering from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, these papers show how international (and often European) references of special schools for blind and deaf people were fundamental to their spread across the world:

• Tirtha Pratim Deb looks at education for the deaf in colonial India.
• Gabriel Bertozzi on the first school for blind children in Brazil.
• Tasing Chiu on tactile reading systems in East Asia.
• Maria Pia Ester Cristaldi on education of D/deaf pupils in the Late Ottoman Empire.

But even as the researchers show how education for disabled people was constraining and stereotyped, they also show how people evade control, challenge assumptions and make their own identities.

For example, in Brazil, Bertozzi points to how learning Braille and having access to printed allowed blind students to:

“Create understandings of themselves and the world around them, going beyond the stigmatizing experience of being blind, perceiving themselves as subjects who shared with other blind people the same physical space, the same history, culture and society, their specificities, customs, values ​​and beliefs.” (Translation from Portuguese)

And in Korea, Chiu describes the fascinating case of first Western missionaries and then Japanese colonialism developing tactile reading systems. Historically in Korea and Taiwan, many blind people had found livelihoods in fortune-telling. One of the goals of education had been to eradicate this practice.

But in Korea in 1917 the blind community united in successfully resisting the Japanese government's attempt to suppress the divination industry. Educators had hoped that braille and tactile reading systems would be a tool to get blind people out of these practices. But they turned out to be a way in which blind individuals could themselves create fortune-telling books, thereby modernising the practice.

Beyond the curriculum

Coming back to the present day, there are still many flaws in the way education is – and isn't – provided to disabled children around the world. But even so, it's missed when it's gone.

The pandemic lockdowns brought home, often quite literally, how much schools do for children, beyond the academic curriculum. And this was particularly felt by children with disabilities and their families, as illustrated in a study by Xanthe Hunt et al, which explores the experiences of accessing education among persons with disabilities during the pandemic in Bangladesh, Ghana, India, Türkiye, and Vietnam.

Even short school closures resulted in significant learning losses for all students, but this impact was more severe for people with disabilities, other minorities or less well-off families. Based on interviews at every level of education, the study shows how the pandemic compounded pre-existing barriers to accessing education. And as in so much of the pandemic response, the needs of disabled people in education were often forgotten.

But while important, learning loss was not the key concern in the families or caregivers of children with disabilities that these researchers spoke to. Rather, the more acutely felt losses were “in functioning, mental health, and family wellbeing”. Children with disabilities faced new challenges:

“For instance, children with disabilities particularly battled with isolation from their peers brought about by stay-at-home orders. They also suffered negative consequences from losing access to the structured environment of school, and where relevant, losing access to therapies that were delivered as part of a package of services through special schools. This caused stress and strain for caregivers who worried about their children’s health and well-being and were not equipped to support their children to participate in online education or continue therapies at home.”

Indeed, the study cites research from Australia that showed the benefits to students with disabilities when schools offered social supports during the pandemic.

Class is over! Cheers,

Peter

Roll on

Homework. See the Debrief library for much more on disability and education, with resources curated from over 70 countries.

Let your friends know. Sharing the newsletter is how people find it!

Connect. Get in touch. Or you can find me on Linkedin.

Help us do more. The Debrief is free thanks to reader support.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Kinanty Andini for the illustration, which includes a self-portrait of her younger self.

I did translations with help from google translate and ChatGPT, overseen by my own bad French and better Portuguese.

And, as ever to the organisations and readers who support this work.