Special Education Inclusion

One of the most talked about issues of students with Learning Disabilities is about the inclusion. Whether they should spend their education time in schools in General Education or be driven away from it, and into a more specific and restrictive field of education often called ‘inclusion’.

This very question was first brought up in 1968 by Lloyd Dunn, and again, 7 years later by IDEA in the USA in which they mention “students with disabilities are educated along with students without disabilities to the maximum extend possible, and only in cases of very severe disability that education in regular classes with the use of supplemental aids and services cannot be achieved properly” (Part B, Section 612)

“Inclusion, is seen as a process of addressing

That often applies to more than one place. That can be the classroom, home, hospitals, any forms of institutes etc. (IDEA, 1997)

If you look closely in the not to distant past, you can easily see that children with disabilities have been segregated and discriminated entirely from society. (Karagiannis,Stainback & Stainback, 1996).

Children with mental retardation, behavioural or emotional problems and children with visual, hearing or physical and other health impairments can be categorised as children with Special Education Needs.

That being said, Special Education can be described as the education of children who have social differences in a mental and a physical perspective from the average person, in a manner that they usually need amendments in the usual educational tasks of schools.

Historically, people with disabilities have not being treated nicely. Before 18th century, people’s lives were filled with superstition and fatalism. Some of the most known cases of discrimination they were involved is exile, isolation, exorcisms, tortures. Apart from physical violence, a major verbal violence took place. Some of the most known terms were “Insane” , “idiot” , “Dumb”. (Winzer, 1993,

There was a huge increase in blind and restarted children’s institutes as well. We can clearly see that the 19th century was pretty keen on being the century of institutionalisation for people with disabilities.

It was until the first 3 decades of the 20th century, that this motive kept going, and growing. After the early 20th century, there was a significant increase in the education of children with disabilities in general public schools , instead of sending them in specialised institutes. After the white House conference (1910), special segregation was introduced in public schools, where children with special needs could attend, with no their isolation in institutes no longer needed. (Winzer, 1993. p. 252-253)

There was a huge improvement in education of people with disabilities in the 60s. It was their parents keen effort that made this change happen. A very coordinated move with both parents and lawyers of children with disabilities lit the fire for the big changes to happen. Shortly after that, the state had to provide an equal educational opportunity for all children with disabilities (Yell Rogers & Rogers (1998). That means that students with disabilities would be “Intergrated into general education classes for some of the total amount of hours spend in school and provided with pull-out itinerant, resource or part-time special services for the remaining hours of the day” (Zigmond,