A Sociology of Special and Inclusive Education

Exploring the manufacture of inability

Sally Tomlinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138182769
• eBook ISBN: 9781317294399
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A Sociology of Special and Inclusive Education brings sociological perspectives to bear on the social, political and economic policies and practices that comprise special and inclusive education, and the education of lower attainers. Increasingly governments have accepted the premise that education should incorporate all social and ethnic groups, especially those regarded as having special educational needs, disabilities and difficulties in learning, but despite a plethora of literature on special and inclusive education world-wide, governments are still unsure of the reasons for this sector's expansion in their national education systems.

Professor Tomlinson applies critical sociological perspectives to the social processes, policies and practices that comprise special and inclusive education, particularly in England and the USA. She clearly examines the way in which people or groups exercise power and influence to shape this area of education, and discusses the conflicts of interest that arise in resulting social interactions and relationships. Key questions asked include:

• Why and how has a whole sector of education dealing with young people regarded as having learning difficulties, low attainments, behaviour problems or disabilities developed?
• How have special education programmes and resources become subsumed into variations of inclusive education?
• Why have ideological beliefs in hierarchies of ability, limits to learning potential and IQ as measurement continued to legitimate the treatment of young people?
• What happens to young people after their special, included or lower attainers' programmes, in terms of work and life chances?

A Sociology of Special and Inclusive Education will be of interest to a wide range of educators, professionals, practitioners and policy-makers concerned with special, inclusive and vocational education, in addition to undergraduate, post-graduate and research students and academics.

CHAPTER 1


A SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATIONAL EXPANSION

The national education system represented a watershed in the development of learning. It signalled not only the advent of mass education and the spread of popular literacy, but also the origins of state schooling – the system which has come to predominate in the educational developments of all modern societies.

(Green 2013:11)

Why do education systems develop and how and why do they expand? This is not a question most policy makers and practitioners worry about in their busy lives. But the expansion of special education and the development of inclusive education cannot be understood without understanding how whole education systems develop and consequent relationships with the economy. Although there has been limited theoretical interest in the question we know from social historians that public education systems have emerged in western countries over the past two hundred years as nation states were emerging. The role of education in state formation in East Asian countries is also increasingly studied and debates include whether and how their systems developed prior or post industrialisation (Green 2013). Those creating and running the nation states eventually appeared to agree that education should be applied to all social groups and could serve a variety of social needs. There may have been a rhetoric, especially in an emerging USA composed of migrant groups, that education could help create a more cohesive society, and by the early 2000s the maintenance of social cohesion in a rapidly globalising world had become a key policy issue (Green et al. 2006). National governments increasingly hoped that education and training and the inclusion of more young people who were previously excluded, could increase social cohesion. But that hope has always foundered on the contradiction that in western societies mass education was never oriented towards a common good, but developed from economic, social, political and religious interests, often in competition with each other. It remained cohesive for other purposes as, in some countries more than others, the hierarchical structures of education systems and the accompanying ideologies, ensured the reproduction of lower social groups.

In developed countries for well over a hundred years state education systems, made up of nationwide collections of institutions and people devoted to formal education, have continued to expand and serve a variety of interests. The systems are enormous in size and complexity and extremely expensive, which is one reason why governments are now trying to return much provision to private interests. National systems are now interspersed and affected by global interests, influences and conflicts. Education is part of a global industry and what is regarded as valuable knowledge is now a commodity that can be bought and sold. Those in powerful positions can regulate the amount and kind of education offered to various groups, and controlling groups often use a ‘strategic maintenance of ignorance’ (Archer 1988:190) directed at subordinate groups, determining the amount and kind of education they will receive. This has always been the case for those in some form of special education. In global economies educational qualifications are increasingly regarded as a form of capital in themselves, and only the very wealthy can avoid their children obtaining some ‘educapital’, although they usually legitimate their position by educating their children in expensive private schooling, and seek places at the top global universities. Those who have limited or no ‘educapital’ are at a distinct disadvantage in national and global economies and this particularly applies to those young people who have been in the special educational needs, disability, or lower attainers, areas of an education system.

Globalisation

No discussion of education systems and their sub-structures, increasingly organised to deal with these groups of lower attainers, special, disabled and so on, can take place without an understanding of globalisation – the combined consequences of the economic, political, social and cultural changes that now affect every country. More than ever before, education systems, their structures, content and outcomes, are enmeshed in global networks.

Historically, globalisation is not a new creation, as industrial capitalism and imperialism created world trade links, and the connections between an educated and skilled workforce and global competition have been made since the rise of industrial society. W. E. Forster, introducing the elementary Education act in Britain in 1870, claimed that “upon the speedy provision of Elementary Education depends our industrial prosperity. Uneducated labourers are for the most part, unskilled labourers” (Forster 1870), although there was to be no coherent vocational training, and the middle and upper classes were to have a different education. Trade with colonised countries provided ready markets and there was economic competitiveness between countries, especially Germany, where vocational training was emphasised. As a Master of an Oxford College remarked, with the snobbery that has long characterised the English upper and middle class avoidance of vocational education and training, “German education makes good use of its second grade ability which in England is far too much a waste product … it has not made profitable use of second grade intelligence” (Sadler 1916). The persistence of a disdain for vocational skills and the assumption that only ‘second grade intelligence’ will undertake vocational training remains one of the major tragedies of the English education system.

Over the past 30 years governments in developed countries now adhere to beliefs that in developed economies education and skill training are necessary for successful competition in global economies and there is much discussion of a knowledge economy, where a flow of knowledge and information via digital technology increasingly replaces a material economy. British governments in particular, have used a rhetoric of human capital theory, in which all young people, including those with disabilities and learning difficulties, must engage in life-long skills learning and continually ‘upskill’ themselves, whether or not jobs are available locally or nationally. Beck, one of the earliest and more pessimistic writers on globalisation, described the post-war period from 1945 when western states provided a measure of security and economic growth, as a first modernity, now replaced by a second modernity, defined by precarious work and lower wages, especially for the low-skilled. They easily become victims of a ‘jobless capitalism’ as owners of transnational companies transfer their companies and outsource to where labour is cheapest (Beck 2000). Beck also pointed out that the new globality cannot be reversed, especially given the expansion of international trade dependent on multinational corporations who do not give loyalty to nation states and their governments, and where the global financial markets, the ongoing ITC revolution, and he might have added, the money to be made out of selling education, take precedence over citizen rights.

A positive outcome of globalisation does appear to be a demand for human rights and social justice world-wide, which has helped with the movement towards inclusive education. The expansion of educational systems means that defenders of existing arrangements and traditions do have to make concessions and compromises with opponents. Ethnic, gender and disability groups have emerged to influence education and legal structures, especially using anti-discrimination law. But, overall, economic globalisation has not contributed much to social justice or equality in most countries, and Stiglitz has argued that governments in developed countries have always tried to manage globalisation in unethical ways that benefited themselves and their powerful groups (Stiglitz 2002). Dorling has produced the best presentation to date of the inequities produced within the most affluent countries (especially the USA and UK) in which social injustices are being recreated and supported by the self-serving interests of powerful elite groups. Supporting the gross income inequalities, and the denigration of poor people are gross educational beliefs that “the majority of people in affluent societies have come to be taught, and then to believe, that a few are especially able and hence apparently deserving, and others are particularly unable and hence undeserving” (Dorling 2015:115). Countering these views is a major task of this book.

Some theories about educational expansion

Sociology as a discipline is not well-placed to discuss issues of special and inclusive education. In 2013 the new editor of The British Journal of Sociology wrote in his first editorial the “Crisis is our discipline’s default position. The question ‘what is sociology’ is in principle never resolved” (Slater 2013:1) and many sociologists have been preoccupied with theoretical wars rather than with the sociological problems of the social world. Nearly 40 years previously John Rex, who played an important part in developing sociology in the 1960s and 1970s, had predicted a similar dismal future for the discipline if Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts were taken to justify a pluralism, where dogmas and cults, ideological wars and flights back to empiricism (count them, do the surveys and give us the facts) all passed for serious intellectual enquiry (Rex 1978). In the special education area ‘counting and labelling them’ have certainly passed as necessary facts, but usually with little explanation apart from finding deficits in those counted. Sociologist Emile Durkheim was convinced of the necessity of understanding social facts, but he was referring to social phenomena or forces – established beliefs and practices, political and religious ideologies, social organisation – that need to be studied to understand how people are treated in the social world. He was also wary of using psychological explanations for individual behaviour, his famous study of suicide (Durkheim 1897) demonstrating that individual mental states and behaviour could not be understood without understanding the social conditions around them. He would certainly have understood the increase in the number of disabled people killing themselves in England after supposedly being found ‘fit for work’ as a social, not an individual phenomenon.¹ As a European liberal socialist concerned with explaining the role of mass education in creating social integration, Durkheim might have been dismayed with the current policy discourse around education, especially in market oriented societies, which is about education as a prop for the labour market, reproduction of elites, control of recalcitrant groups, and the coercion of even the more severely disabled into (often non-existent) work.

Sociology as a university subject, usually including courses on the sociology of education remains popular, with studies demonstrating the variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, much of it oriented towards explaining and ‘impacting’ on policy and political problems. There are some excellent introductions to the sociology of education (Boronski and Hassan 2015), introducing old, new, phenomenological, radical, critical, post-modern, feminist and other theorists, and usually concluding that what passes for theory is most often meta theorising about inequalities in class, race, gender and disability relations. Labelling, discourse, and deviance theories all have resonance in the special education area, and intersectional theories, such as ‘Discrit’ – merging disability, feminist and critical race theories, describe the perverse patterns of educational organisation that ‘create’ disadvantages (Connor et al. 2016). Essentially, what constitutes theory are attempts to explain seemingly intractable problems, although there is a paucity of explanation about the emergence of structures within which inequalities take place and disadvantages persist. The hand wringing over the lack of social mobility, and the money spent on research to identify how to improve the mobility of the ‘disadvantaged’ are nonsensical in societies where the education systems and labour markets are structurally designed to prevent such mobility.

Whatever theories are put forward to explain the expansion of education systems and the various subsystems of special, inclusive, and alternative kinds, it has to be stressed that education systems and their parts do not emerge spontaneously. They usually develop in order to benefit particular groups of young people, while discriminating against others. The systems develop their characteristics because of the goals pursued by the people in control and there is a need to know about who the controlling forces are and what kinds of educational structures and content they are advocating (Archer 1979). For example, in England in the early 1990s the Conservative government was forcing through a policy of market competition and school ‘choice’ and publication of examination results in football style league tables. This had the immediate effect that schools developed strategies to exclude ‘undesirable’ children who would not improve league tables, with resulting social, ethnic and disability divisions. The Shadow Labour Education Minister produced a paper outlining what a genuine comprehensive school in every locality might look like, which included a section entitled ‘Every Child Matters’ (Taylor and Tomlinson 1994). This was ignored by the ruling party, and repudiated by Tony Blair, the recently appointed leader of the New Labour party.² The Labour party came into government in 1997 and in 2003 produced a paper entitled ‘Every Child Matters’ (HM Treasury 2003), which outlined a new framework of services for all children 0–19. However, they kept in place the increasing competition for ‘good’ state schools, which continued to have a divisive effect on the whole school system and also introduced a policy suggesting schools separate out their ‘gifted and talented’ children, with Learning Support units for the not so gifted. The Labour party had in 2002 set in train a policy by which schools could be removed from local influence and become sponsored ‘Academies’, run by unaccountable individuals and Trusts. By 2016 a Conservative government was proposing to complete this surprisingly undemocratic removal of the school system from any local authority partnership, in a forced academisation programme under which schools would be run by Multi-Academy Trusts (MATS) and overseen by government appointed Regional School Commissioners (RSCs). This illustrates that the provision of education and associate services happens because those with power can impose their views and goals on others, although the effect of this may have serious consequences not necessarily understood by governments. However, even ruling parties may have to compromise if opposed, and forced Academy conversion was eventually put on hold.

The motives of those in control can vary and often depend on how assertive groups can be. The English ‘public’ (private) school system, backed by powerful professional associations, and producing future elite members, has long resisted change, especially suggestions it should merge with the state system. Established religious groups, initially the only providers of education, have in England also retained control over their own schools, joined in the later twentieth century by assertive newer religious groups. A special school teacher union in Germany has been assertive in resisting special school closures. Less prestigious nineteenth-century private school providers in both the UK and the USA were gradually squeezed out by expanding state systems, central, federal and state and district local government coming to exercise control. But assertive central or state governments are now returning much educational control to private organisations. Despite the wealth of developed countries with public education systems, there is private provision at all levels, pre-school, special schooling, faith schools, vocational and trade schools, business schools, and universities. Explanations for this centre round perceived crises of funding for governments as educational systems are claimed to have grown to unaffordable limits, implacable beliefs in the superiority of private provision, or decisions to ‘shrink the state’ and move away from a social contract with citizens that the state will guarantee social provisions. Newer assertive groups in education are ‘philanthrocapitalists’, individuals who have made fortunes often in new technologies, who ostensibly ‘donate’ but in fact organise the financing and thus control of schooling at home and abroad (McGoey 2015).

Some explanations for educational expansion

Popular explanations for the expansion of education in developed countries have usually been described as functional for economies. Industrialising countries needed a workforce with more education and skills, ready for a division of labour with a majority working at repetitive low wage jobs. But links between industrialisation and educational development needed wider explana...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 A sociology of educational expansion
• 2 The emergence of special and inclusive education: England
• 3 The emergence of special and inclusive education: USA
• 4 IQ, ability and eugenics
• 5 A strategic maintenance of ignorance
• 6 Professional and political interests
• 7 Parental interests and grievances
• 8 Vocational inclusion and exclusion
• Conclusions
• Index