Contributions from: Steve Stoer, Rosa Nunes & Luiza Cortesão
Abstract
In this paper the authors reflect upon:
1. The exponential character of Special Education in Portugal as a strategy (socially legitimated) of social selection. This strategy develops in contrast to a critical inter/ multicultural approach, where the main question would be how to give visibility to a phenomenon which is hidden and which survives on the basis of an apparent increase the raille ized on of decisions made in education policy, which normally have philanthropic overtones making them almost untouchable.
2. The phenomenon of the reflexivity of modern social life (Giddens) developed on the basis of a psychologizatio/lpathologization of education and of the role of expert discourse in the construction of exclusive thinking: the naturalization of Special Education Needs and of the subcategory of Learning Difficulties.
3. Language, communication and the role of symbolic power.
In what is perhaps a provocative way of starting it is important to explain that, in view of the controversies which develop around the meanings of education, we admit that schools live in a tension between two unequal power mandates: according to the first one, which was conferred on them by Modernity, when the capitalist society was still expanding, schools (even if unconsciously) used to fulfil - and they still do - the function of perpetuating a stratified society. They also fulfil functions of preserving and transmitting the national scholarly culture, thus contributing to the resolution of problems of affirmation and consolidation of the nation-state. Thus, as reproduction theories denounce, schools develop a national curriculum. They select and promote some students and exclude others, by practising a normative and a so called "fair" evaluation. The teachers who work in these schools convey "the" knowledge and not knowledges of minority cultures groups, for instance. They are demanding, competent and apply an objective evaluation. They are the mono-cultural teachers.
The second mandate (which unfortunately is less powerful) results from the fact that schools (besides being reproduction places) are also "places of domination and confrontation", spaces where one can contribute "to reflection and to the fight for self-emancipation and social emancipation" (Giroux 1988; 90 & 148). These schools have managed to deal with difference, although with difficulty. They are concerned with the development of minorities and of each student, with his social promotion, in short, with the possibility of contributing to the existence of different levels of affirmation of citizenship. This is the fragile mandate which they receive mainly (but not exclusively) from the periphery of the system, from groups of pedagogically committed people (of which the Freinet and the Paulo Freire movements are an example) and from teachers who see themselves not only as subjects, but also as actors and social agents who are concerned with the exclusion phenomena which are created and/or maintained in schools. The identification of this second possibility is supported mainly by work carried out within the Critical Theory.
We then admit that schools live (or survive) in the tension between these two mandates (which, we would like to stress again, have very different power) and we also admit that they struggle within the resulting conflicts.
From their conflicting functioning result several complex problems, among which are the different degrees of success and the multiple difficulties experienced by minority groups when they attend school.
We interpret these problems within the theoretical framework of critical theory. However, it is clear and has been historically proved that the interpretation framework has been changing: that is why the "Theory of Gifts", or "Biological Handicap", has slowly been replaced by the theory of the "Social and Cultural Handicap". And only recently does one start to question the responsibility of schools in the whole process. This perspective also attributes responsibility to teachers, curricula and the school in general for their attempt to solve - or for their failure to do so - the problems of school failure and exclusion felt by the students (see synthesis table).
It was thinking about this evolution that we decided to modify the focus of this paper. In fact, we think it is important to try to put some questions about why, in spite of this historical evolution, we can notice now an apparent "coming back to the past" which we can identify as a new reinforcement of Biological Handicap Theories. And this is more and more visible, mostly when schools face economically and socially disadvantaged groups, including ethnic minorities and the so called "handicapped children".
In fact, a very popular literature on school failure (at least in Portugal) has been supporting those strategies. However, it fails to explain the complex character of the phenomena involved and ignores their historical and social context, reducing Man to a neuronal being. And that reductionism, which is so typical of scientists, has been enticing the teachers. They are faced with enormous contradictions and seek exogenous justification and support for the inability of schools to promote alternative cultures to that of the mainstream. This inability turns schools into privileged places for the production and reproduction of substantive inequalities.
"The big slogan of the technocrats who lead our society is: adapt yourself!" (Touraine) The psychologisation / medicalisation of school education is a strategy for that adaptation. Along its historical route, the subjection of pedagogy to experimental sciences facilitated and strengthened that strategy. It is by "miming" the impossible objectivity of the so-called "fundamental sciences" and also of experimental psychology that experimental pedagogy will find a medical foundation. And it tries to do so in an impressive effort of conceptual analogy and discursive correspondence.
Also an epistemological reflection on school psychology immediately raises the question of the power that this science, or the practice of this science, has made available. The particular emphasis put on it by Foucault as a technology of power, shows how a science, turned into social therapy and technique, can be an effective means of disciplinary violence. Meanwhile, the attraction of schools for the psychological discourse remains. Strangely, it is even updated and useful for the increased power of those who produce and reproduce it, and for the unilateral control conditions, which derive from it.
According to Frank (1982), the intervention of psychology at schools does not usually seem to modify the way in which they guide the students, nor the social selection they imply. It is instead an instrument for their legitimisation, providing a "scientific" basis for the orientation given by schools. The values it introduces are those of differences in ability, differences in personality and differences in learning pace.
It is not the school that changes under the influence of psychology, it is the school that psychologises itself according to its own needs as an institution. Psychology then has developed a body of knowledge to try to understand, on its own, the reasons for the social gap in schooling, and to solve it. Social, economic, cultural and linguistic variables are called upon, deprivation or cultural handicaps are mentioned, compensatory education is referred to. In all cases the idea of the deficit that the child carries is implicit, the family origin being referred as the main cause. And the current practice makes that obvious. The student's anamnesis is a first stage, which is considered almost compulsory for psychological intervention or special education. It is a process of parents' guilt whose function is also to place the causes of the student's school problem in his recent past, or even in his genetic inheritance. In any case, attention is driven away from the here and now of the school situation, and the school is no longer guilty.
Fundamentally, psychology resumes its position as the scientific basis of the present meritocracy: the idea of "each one in his own place" has returned, disguised as the right to be different. (Pereira, 1982)
As for the medically rooted linear causality models, they are too static, both in their organicist aspect and in the aspect related to individual problems centred on the child and his problems. And they are damaging for the child, who is labelled in a certain nosological category. By limiting their observation field to the child himself, they do not take into account the various ecosystems where he belongs. Besides, the models centred on the child are not only damaging, but also ineffective, and they misshape the social problems. As Bordieu said, "we should ask ourselves what the contribution of academics is for the racism of intelligence. It would be interesting to study the role of doctors in medicalisation (i.e., in the naturalisation of social differences and social stigma). It would be interesting to study the role of psychologists, psychiatrists and psycho-analysts in the production of euphemisms which allow us to refer to the children of under-proletarians and emigrants in such a way that social cases become psychological cases and social handicaps become mental handicaps ("Questions de Sociologie": 267). And also the role of teachers who complacently accept (or claim) those categorisations, failing to discover ways of committing themselves to emancipated knowledge, an ethical, political and aesthetic knowledge.
An example of what we have just said: The Inclusive Schools Project - UNESCO, by Professor Mel Ainscow, appeared in Portugal to shake the progress of its application of clinical school educational approaches. What we perceive and would like to stress as being novel and giving hope in this project is the sense of coherence between the nuclear points of the argument, which the project is based upon, and the adequacy of the articulated group of strategies, which operate this argument.
Systematic use of effective horizontal communication strategies, sparing the speaker and the power a he implies, gives profound meaning to a co-operation discourse which is not just an occasional task. It is, on the contrary, a hard and pleasant task of replacing eternity with the future and inequality with hope.
On the other hand, the suggestion of a courageous isomorphism, leading to the re-location of teachers in training on the condition of students (thus reflecting about their "one down" status), gives full meaning to "nothing about us without us".
A tacit commitment to Critical Action-Research as a permanent way of educating gives strength to the change in the educational paradigm, which this project aims at. However, as history and political science have shown, the system has always known how to regain that, which puts it into question, amplifying itself. In Portugal, the implementation of the Unesco project is sometimes accompanied by the disclosure of administrative actions which are philosophically opposed to this project. On the one hand, alternative curricula to those of the normal and recurrent Basic Schooling, separating children in school failure situations, will become legal and universal. At the same time, the importance of Special Education is strengthened by taking advantage of the Inclusive School experiences, in a recuperation operation, which will show the attempt to identify one with the other.
Who will resist such attractive mechanisms, which free the schools of their responsibility? Are they not useful to a society that seeks legitimisation in order to exclude large groups of its school attendants?
Being a political place, the school is also a place for public action and for the formation of identities, in a surrounding full of diversity and conflict where proximity and reciprocal discourse have meaning. Reflection regains here the function of activating sociological imagination for a human action, which is waiting inside us to be more than just a simple thing of technique, politics, or history.
Bibliography
Bourdieu, P., (1994), Questions de Sociologie, Paris, Minuit
Cortesão, L., (1992), Nos Bastidores da Avaliação in Políticas e Práticas Educativas, Porto, Soc. Portuguesa de Ciências da Educação
Touraine, A. e Cabral, F., (1996), A Formação Humana no Projecto da Modernidade, Porto, Instituto Piaget
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