Right to education – what does that mean?

The last day of the school year is over and the summer holidays have begun. For some young people, it was even their last day of school before they start their professional lives. Not all of them finish their school years with the confidence that they will be able to cope with the new challenges. Their school backpacks are not full enough, not only do they lack the basics in school material, but also their social-emotional competences are not developed according to their age. This applies especially to children and adolescents who are subsumed under the term “children with special needs” and who have attracted attention at school due to their behaviour or persistently weak performance. Today, they are usually taught “integrated” in regular classes.
  In recent weeks and months, these children and young people have often been a topic in the media and the question has arisen whether they are in the right place in the mainstream class. The problem was mostly addressed from the perspective of the other children, whose lessons were disrupted or even made impossible by the “special children”. In the discussion, however, the ball is kept low, and at most structural measures are discussed: smaller classes, more support hours, time-out classes, additional class assistants, etc., and “learning islands” and “time-outs” or the reopening of small classes are suggested as solutions. However, hardly anyone asks who is supposed to lead these classes and whether today’s training – geared towards integrative and individualised teaching – methodically and didactically enables teachers and special educators to guide and lead a group of such children. Even less is asked about the causes of the misery.

Have the courage to stop tunnel vision

A deeper discussion would require a closer reflection on the school reforms of the last 30 years. Not only, but also especially, when it comes to the educational needs of children who do not find learning easy or who do not fit in constructively in a larger group of children. During the last few years, they were part of a large-scale school trial without being asked, because integration into the mainstream class was the order of the day. “Education for all”, “Diversity is beautiful” were slogans fed into the education debate. People spoke of “social participation” and praised the experiment as a “win-win situation for all”. The until now conventional offers such as small classes and special schools were badmouthed. They were accused of discrimination, deportation, exclusion, stigmatisation of children and “old-fashioned” pedagogy. Many expressed their views without ever having had an insight into such an institution. Especially the argument of “stigmatisation” was and is often brought in by bodies with little practical experience. However, such tunnel vision only confirms what one wants to see and think, and prevents an unbiased perspective and an honest admission of undesirable developments.

Stigmatisation –
Dare to look at history

To begin with, the way people with disabilities are treated has always been shaped by the respective conception of the human being and reflects the current state of knowledge, scientific preferences and the social and political situation. This is also the case today. Again and again one hears the argument that special education for children and young people with disabilities leads to their stigmatisation. If we take a look at history, we see that, on the contrary, it was an integration project. Until the 18^th century, impoverished, neglected, deaf or blind children were excluded from the mainstream school system. Then, in the 18^th and especially in the 19^th century, individual pioneers took care of these children and laid the foundations for the later development of curative education. This was not a consequence of progress in pedagogy or medicine, as one might assume, but an achievement of the Enlightenment and the associated right to education and upbringing also for those people with a disability who had previously been virtually “forgotten”. For example, Abbé Charles Michel de l’Epée founded the first school for the deaf in Paris in 1760. In 1774, Valentin Haüy opened a school for blind children, also in Paris, and André Venel established the Orbe Hospital School in western Switzerland in 1780. Care also began to be taken of impoverished, neglected or orphaned children and young people who had hitherto led a marginal existence. Special educational programmes were now created for them and for children with physical disabilities. It is therefore historically wrong to claim that special education contributed to stigmatisation, segregation, discrimination, labelling and disintegration of these children and adolescents, because this is rather a question of the social mood towards them. On the contrary, special education has always been concerned with expanding the concept of upbringing and education and conceding the right to education for all.

Empathy and expertise

Personalities such as Heinrich Hanselmann (1865–1960) and Paul Moor (1899–1977) were among others responsible for the further development in Switzerland. When the first chair for curative education in Europe was established at the University of Zurich in 1931, they followed each other as professors. They were guided by the principles of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and understood curative education as a value-based, human-scientific discipline that clearly distinguished itself from medicine and emphasised the educational aspect of the profession’s mandate.¹ The practice-oriented training at the Curative Education Seminar was about training empathy, combined with appropriate theoretical expertise. For a long time, curative education was also embedded in the subject areas of psychology and pedagogy in the training of regular school teachers. It was therefore also about the “education of educators”, as Paul Moor called it. This enabled many teachers in mainstream classes to cope with “difficult” children in their classes, which of course also depended on their personal pedagogical skills and interest.

Increasing academisation

As in many other sciences, special education knowledge deepened over time. Training in special education became more differentiated, and specialised schools and classes emerged depending on the task at hand. The personal view of the human being was fundamental, which encompasses the children in their individual life and learning history. Today, training is designed as an academic bachelor‘s and master‘s degree programme at the University of Special Needs Education, which means that Switzerland has moved away from its long independent path and (not to its advantage) has aligned itself with European and international standards.

Serious paradigm shift
in the conception of man

However, this new training concept involved a decisive paradigm shift in the foundations of curative education work, which is hardly known today. Whereas previously the concept of the human being had been based on a humanistic-social-scientific view of man, curative education today is based on a biologistic concept oriented towards Anglo-American science. Since then, children‘s problems have been recorded using psychiatric methods and diagnosed with ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, depression, etc. Often, medication is used in combination with behavioural instructions for the teacher, which are borrowed from the American-inspired behavioural therapy. The individual life and learning history of a child has receded into the background. The consequences of this paradigm shift are serious. The psychiatric view of a developmental problem includes diagnoses that are drastic for a child’s life and self-esteem. Such labelling sticks to him for life and largely deprives him of the chance to learn to cope with his developmental tasks in an age-appropriate and constructive way.
  Back then, this paradigm shifts evidently did not go unchallenged. Particular criticism was levelled at curative education‘s turning away from a value-guided curative education towards an auxiliary science closely linked to psychiatry. The academisation of special education was also a thorn in the side of many. Emil E. Kobi (1935-2011), another of the great Swiss curative educators, expressed this as follows: “In fact, probably never before has so much research been done in the field of education and at the same time so little has been achieved as in our time, and the relationship between effort and return threatens to shift increasingly to the disadvantage of the latter”.²

Antipsychiatry and school reforms

An important catalyst for this development was also the anti-psychiatry movement in Italy with Franco Basaglia, based on a Marxist concept of society. In 1978, a law was passed which, among other things, decreed the abolition of psychiatric institutions. In the course of this, the special schools that had been opened shortly before were also closed and the integration of children into regular classes was completed. Italy became the model country for integration in Switzerland. “It is normal to be different” was the doctrine according to which society was to undergo a change of consciousness, and therefore “integration” instead of “separation” was the new direction. Teachers were to be obliged to adopt the trendy individualising teaching concepts by integrating the “special children”. – As with other socio-political developments, two seemingly opposing social currents drove the integration/inclusion movement. The associated political strategies have shaped the educational policy concepts of the last 30 years.

Re-interpretation of international
conventions and treaties

In the discussion on integration, reference is always made to the obligation to international treaties and national legal foundations. Here, it should be noted that international conventions refer to school conditions all over the world. They are primarily legal recommendations for countries that could not afford to support people with disabilities until now, and they are fundamentally about the right of all children to schooling, to equal access to a public education. The agreements always allow for both inclusive and separative education. In the German-speaking world, it was derived from these conventions, especially from the Disability Equality Act of the UN, that every child, regardless of disability, is to be educated within the framework of a mainstream class. Otto Speck, probably the best-known professor of special education in Germany, therefore spoke out again at the age of 95 and pointed out that a misinterpretation or reinterpretation in the German-language translation of this convention is the basis of the integrative/inclusive form of education. Doesn’t that make you think?

Missed opportunities for promotion

Every child has only one schooltime, in which they must be able to seize their right to education. Particular care is needed for children with “special needs”. While in one case integration into a regular class may be the right thing to do, in another it is trivialising their problem, combined with a lack of professional support. Unfortunately, studies have shown that integrative education is often discontinued after some time, usually when a change of level takes place. Such children end up in a special school after a more or less long period of missed support and failure. Often parents have to admit that their child has lost the courage to face the learning process with the necessary perseverance. Or they are frightened by the fact that their child has not yet learned to constructively participate in a group of peers and is conspicuous by being restless and loud or by withdrawing into a world of their own. Today, it may well be that parents explain this behaviour to themselves solely on the basis of the child’s diagnosis and see few possibilities for change, but are nevertheless concerned about what his or her journey through life should ultimately look like. It is more helpful for a child if the parents, together with the teachers, can develop a path on which a child can grow out of its discouraged attitude and exercise its right to education.

“Social participation”
is more than “being present”

Whatever the parents‘ position on this: A demanding learning process is called for. It involves effort, practice, perseverance, failure and will ultimately bring success in small steps. Whether this should happen in the context of integration into the regular class or in a small class must be carefully clarified. The repeatedly demanded “social participation” means more than being present in the classroom, but to experience oneself as a valuable part of one‘s social environment and to be able to contribute. That is why one of the primary goals of every lesson is to bring the children together to form a community in which they support and respect each other, which is of course an important learning field for social-emotional development tasks. But shouldn‘t this be the basis of every school if it takes the right to education seriously?

Right to education –
the discussion needs foundations

Without including the issues raised, the question of how the right to education of all children can be realised cannot be clarified, because as Emil E. Kobi said:
  “Integration [...] should not degenerate into an ideology without alternatives, which violates personal identity. Alternatives also characterise a democratic education and school system that has to offer a variety of options”³.  •

¹ The development in Germany and Austria was based on different foundations and took a   different course, which will not be discussed here.
² Kobi, E. E. (1984). “Zum Verhältnis von Pädagogik und Heilpädagogik” (On the relationship between pedagogy and curative education). In: Kobi, E. E./Bürli, A./Broch, E. (eds.). Zum Verhältnis von Pädagogik und Heilpädagogik. Referate der 20. Arbeitstagung der Dozenten für Sonderpädagogik in den deutschsprachigen Ländern in Basel. (On the relationship between pedagogy and curative education. Papers of the 20^th Workshop of Lecturers in Special Needs Education in the German-speaking Countries in Basel). Lucerne: Verlag Schweizerische Zentralstelle für Heilpädagogik, p. 34
³ Kobi, E. E. (2008). “Alternative Integration als integrierte Alternative?” (Alternative Integration as an Integrated Alternative?), https://www.bildungsserver.de/onlineressource.html?onlineressourcen_id=40331&mstn=1;; accessed 12 July 2023

The following books have guided my writing:

Bonfranchi. R./Perret. E. (2021). Heilpädagogik im Dialog. (Curative education in dialogue.) Oberhausen: Athena-wbv

Bonfranchi, R./Dünki, R./Perret, E. (2022). Integration, Separation, Kooperation. Ein heilpädagogischer Blick auf die Bildungschancen für Kinder und Jugendliche mit Behinderungen. (Integration, separation, cooperation. A curative education view of educational opportunities for children and young people with disabilities.) Oberhausen: Athena-wbv

Schöler, Jutta (ed.). (1987): “Italienische Verhältnisse” – insbesondere in den Schulen von Florenz. (‘Italian conditions’ – especially in the schools of Florence.) Berlin: Guhl