Abstract
Till the passing of new legislation in Slovenia the experts on integration of children with special needs were divided into proponents and opponents of integration. The passing of new legislation acted as a cohesive force; some antagonisms among experts still remain, yet they took on more subtle forms. With the approaching of the moment when legislation will have to be implemented in practice, new very definite issues are coming to the fore among the professionals; each of these issues poses new problems of applicative nature. The issues of children with learning disabilities, emotionally disturbed and the issue of social integration of children with special need are becoming more urgent. There exist opposing views among the professionals on some issues: which strategies should be used in implementing integration, on dealing with the dislike of teachers for the children with special needs, on adequate training of teachers and counsellors who help children and others. My attention will be focused on children with learning disabilities and on behaviourally disturbed children. In the final part I will point out several theoretical issues and dilemmas rising from the comparison between the ways of dealing with these problems in Slovenia and in some other European countries.
In the beginning of the 1990s more and more information on the process of integration of children and youth with special needs in the developed European countries, in Canada and the USA were starting to reach Slovenia. This information were to be found in pedagogical newspapers and reviews, Slovenian as well as foreign, and some of them were communicated to us via friends and acquaintances from abroad, who came to lecture to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and to the Faculty of Education in Ljubljana; also many Slovenian pedagogues frequently visited the relevant institutions in the developed European countries. Our contacts with the colleagues from Germany and Italy (in the latter integration has been implemented legally already in 1976) were particularly numerous.
Information on the integration movements in Europe and in the USA caused the split of experts in Slovenia into two groups - on one side there were zealous proponents of integration and on the opposite side there were its equally zealous opponents. The most zealous opponents to the idea of integration were special educators, who in the post-war period worked in special schools. They started the fruitful process of building firm network of special schools.
In 1990, when Slovenia declared its independence, we managed to organise the international conference of the members of Alpe-Jadran (Austria, Croatia, Italy, Hungary and Slovenia). Its title was: The care of society for education and social security of children and youth with developmental disorders: integration, alternatives and innovations. For the relevant experts in Slovenia this conference was of a great significance. In the papers that were presented there, we shaped some theoretical and strategic starting points for the integration within our educational system, we were given moral as well as professional support by numerous distinguished experts from the neighbouring countries, but on the other hand the resistance of its opponents became even fiercer than before.
In the beginning of the 1990s there were strong polemics on integration going on in Slovenia on various levels. At that time we began to investigate systematically the models of integration abroad, especially in Northern Europe and in Great Britain; more and more articles on the problem of integration were published in Slovenian professional journals. Yet, the researches on this topic in Slovenia were scarce in number.
In 1993, one of my colleagues, who is a special pedagogue, and I were invited by the Slovenian minister of education and sport, to participate in the team of experts, who were entrusted the task of preparing our new school legislation. Since that year several events have taken place in a rapid succession that have made way to integration also in the formal sense of the word. Here I will briefly mention those events that were of major importance for the integration.
The integration of children with special needs has been enacted by now. Together with its fundamental subordinate clauses, the instruments and bodies of co-ordination, direction and evaluation have been set up.
And now I would like to reflect in retrospect upon the processes just described. During the past ten years in Slovenia an increased dynamics within non-governmental organisations (NGO), expert associations, governmental bodies and public institutions could be felt, concerning the field of special needs. By taking critical stance, one can draw some important conclusions from this dynamics.
Those professionals, who in the past kept away from the efforts to implement integration or even openly opposed those efforts, gradually started to call indirectly for caution and give warnings that appropriate conditions should be created first, and only than it will be possible to make way to the integration of children with special needs to regular schools; in doing this, they quoted as a reference the prominent experts from abroad, who expressed their doubts about the adequacy of several methods, models or strategies pertaining to integration. At the end of 1990s, this part of professional public began to take the initiative, especially in the implementation of statutory provisions.
On the other hand, teachers and school counsellors started to oppose the integration openly. The more the vision of integration was becoming a reality, the fiercer was the opposition of the latter towards it. The reason was that the teachers and school counsellors feared that they would suddenly be confronted with the category of children that they did not know well enough; they feared of having to neglect successful pupils on account of individual pupils with special needs, and finally they feared that they might initiate the process of "defectologization" in schools.
Also those experts, working at the Ministry of Education and Sport and some members of the Slovenian parliament, indirectly opposed the integration movement. This opposition was probably due to their concern that integration might present a big financial burden to the state budget. Oppositions to the integration movement took also the form of hesitation in taking decisions of major importance, especially in the adoption of Guidance Act for children with special needs, which took five years.
The next problem, evident to an impartial observer, is an overestimation of achievement at school, overestimation of efficiency, and thus the cognitive sphere in children with special needs. It appears that the term special needs only refers to learning, to child's deficits and handicaps that make the processes of his education difficult. In my view, the issues of child's social inclusion, self concept, his mental balance, hindered developmental processes, and processes of emancipation are of equal importance. Only the holistic approach and care about entire personality and social functioning enable these children to function more efficiently in the cognitive sphere.
The principle of holistic approach is being repeatedly stressed, yet the Act itself, as well as its clauses, only emphasise learning; minimum standards of learning that pupils have to achieve, on the other hand, there is not a word in the Act about the programmes of social inclusion, about correctional and compensation programmes, the quality of interpersonal relations and the social atmosphere in a classroom and in a school as a whole. Too much emphasis on productivity pushes to fore the classic medical models of diagnosing that assess child's deficits and abilities, his progress and the relevance of curricula - in this way, pupils find themselves in an embarrassing situation that stigmatises them. By means of such methods, dualistic system within unitary school is maintained also for children, that have been integrated.
I would like to stress the fact that in the 1990s too few relevant researches were made in Slovenia and too little money was allotted to the education of teachers and school counsellors. The latter could be the cause of inappropriate practise and its negative outcomes and it could mean that the process of introducing integration will be slowed down or stopped at its very start.
In university education (graduate and permanent) I plead for shaping and relating of the doctrine for working with children with special needs, with school counsellors and headmasters. This doctrine should be based on the principles of social inclusion, equal treatment for all children in a classroom, provision of adequate assistance to all children, a procesual approach (assistance should be of major importance while diagnosis should only serve as a tool in assessing, what kind of assistance is the most appropriate for a child and to what extent it should be provided to him), care for children with special needs within the social context, holistic approach (here, our attention is focused on child's personality as well as his proficiency at school). We should take into account all relevant social factors. We should not either directly or indirectly draw other pupil's attention to the fact, that some them are different from others. We should not make efforts to achieve adequate attitude towards children with special needs, but to establish good interpersonal relations between all pupils in a classroom and in a school as a whole.
Finally, I would like to call your attention to one more fact: integration in Slovenia has already been prescribed by law, but nevertheless, some fundamental issues in this field still remain to be solved between professional people as well as between experts at the Ministry of Education and Sport.
In this place I would like to mention a permanent issue in Slovenia, namely, which technical notion is superior in meaning to the general notions, such as children with special needs. This is the issue of terminology. Is it more adequate to say children with special needs or children with the special educational needs? The lawgiver in Slovenia finally agreed to the expression "special needs". Unlike many of my colleagues, I personally favour the latter expression. The reasons for my option are: the technical term special educational needs attaches too much importance to an individual child within the educational process, and on the other hand it tends to underestimate the significance of child's special needs, that are not necessarily linked to the educational process. Such a trend dissuades a teacher from holistic approach and makes him overlook the possibility that successful pupils could have been even more successful, provided they were given support in other special needs as well. A teacher's holistic approach contributes also to a quality of pupil's life.
Child's special needs are not limited in their scope exclusively to learning. His needs were special even before he started primary school. This child also has special needs when he is not at school. As school is only one episode in a child's life, it would have been inadequate for the teachers to be mindful only of one particular special need he has, also this need might have been the most important within a school field.
I would like to add something else about the children with learning disabilities. Lawgivers in Slovenia, who wrote the Primary School Act, classified pupils with learning disabilities into the group of children with special needs. Additional assistance in the form of instruction and other modes of individual and group assistance were provided for them. On the other hand, the Guidance Act specifies the category of children with learning disabilities and thus this category only includes children, whose learning disabilities are particularly severe. The criteria, on which children belong to this category, are in preparation. The law giver tried to avoid the danger that 20% to 25% of primary schoolchildren would be included under this category instead of only 3% to 4%.
I am ambivalent about this issue. Labelling 20% to 25% of each successive generation of children as having special needs, would mean an imposition of great financial burden on our state budget. In this way, integration would be built into every school and even every school class in Slovenia. From 20% to 25% of all schoolchildren would have been serviced but also stigmatised. All teachers would have to be trained to be able to work in integrated classrooms. The decision, whether to admit children with special needs to a certain class would have been reached by other than teachers.
The category of children with learning disabilities in the broad sense of this word is likely to be extended in the near future. This foresight is based on two facts. On one hand, modern schools are efficiency oriented, competitive, their criteria of grading are increasingly high. In this way the number of pupils with high level of achievement is on the decrease, while there are more and more pupils, who are pushed to the margin. On the other hand, more and more problems and discrepancies in children are evident. In the developed countries many strategies and models of assistance to children with various problems have already been invented. These processes are ongoing and they can no longer be either slowed down or stopped. They will lead in final consequence to individualisation and this is exactly what pedagogy currently wants to achieve. Yet this does not mean, that the category of children and youth with special needs has to be expanded further.
I think, on the other hand, that any kind of learning disabilities should be taken very seriously, even those that only occur at times. The level of achievement at school that is oriented towards productiveness and thus reflects the Western culture, determines the social status of children, it either accelerates or hinders the developmental processes in children; it determines whether they will manifest adjusted or maladjusted behaviour, whether their self-concept will be positive or negative and it determines their self esteem. A child with learning disabilities is in need of an assistance in learning; besides providing to him assistance, we have to find the primary causes of his learning disabilities and explore the secondary consequences that most often manifest themselves by social exclusion and behavioural problems.
 |
 |
03/10/2000