inclusion: history

[This paper was written in response to a lecture on the history of the education of people with disabilities]

It is quite striking that as far back as 1908, a superintendent made a statement in which he appeared to consider the options of inclusion or segregation. But this appearance is fleeting—the second part of his statement makes clear that he only posed the option of inclusion (all students in desegregated settings, fewer students per teacher, more classrooms, etc.) as a rhetorical device, meant to clarify that segregation was somehow the “natural” choice.

Why, I wonder, was it so easy for him to assume with such certainty that his audience would concur with his automatic rejection of the idea of inclusion? What was so “obviously” wrong with this idea? In 1908, if memory serves, industrial efficiency was just beginning to become an obsession; perhaps the inclusion option seemed too inefficient, in that it required more than the minimum number of workers to produce the desired “product.” 1908 also followed many years of Enlightenment-era obsession with scientific sorting, cataloguing, and labeling; perhaps inclusion seemed sloppy, mixing different “types” of children “indiscriminately.”

Whatever the context, it is saddening to contemplate the loss of the world that might have developed if this superintendent’s assumptions—and his society’s—had run in the opposite direction!