The History of Special Education: Humanitarian Rationality or ‘Wild Profusion of Entangled Events’?

Conclusion

The examples given in this chapter of the way in which historical events and processes affect perceptions and opportunities concerning marginalized groups, support the argument that the complexity and paradoxes of social life cannot be expressed through a recitation of legislation, government reports and public records, the setting up or closing down of institutions, the development of formal assessment procedures and the introduction of training programmes. Nevertheless, this material — the formal, public facade of historical development — is important in providing one set of frameworks for understanding social change. But this framework needs to be tested out through the study of other material from a variety of sources — the history of town planning and the design of buildings, representations in novels and films of disabled people, the study of paintings and other historically situated material, and — most of all — the lives of people themselves as they are expressed through their own accounts. It is the connections and discontinuities between these different levels and arenas and the ‘received wisdom’ of traditional accounts which open up new questions and issues concerning hegemonic assumptions about the ‘humanitarian’ role of special education and the positioning and experience of disabled people through institutional practices. The growing interest in researching the positioning and exclusion of disabled people through, for example, representations in films and the media, and the built environment, the effects of legislation and embedded social practices, are part of a wider concern to understand and challenge existing dominant accounts and interpretations of social ordering. These concerns are inseparable from historical enquiry and reflexivity about how historical knowledge is constituted and evaluated.