Submitted by crinadmin on
Summary: This article forms part of a paper that is based on a meeting held with member organisations specialising in disability rights advocacy. The paper also contains porposals on changes to on Article 17; changes proposed to make treaty apply to disabled babies and children too, and proposal for changes to Article 16.
Why Segregation Should Never Be A Right
Micheline Mason
Director — The Alliance for Inclusive Education
July 2004
The disability movement throughout the world has generally taken the position that all forms of segregation on the basis of impairment are an infringement of our human rights. This concept was made concrete in the medical/social model analysis of the oppression of disabled people, created by disabled people themselves. This analysis explains how impairment is a physical or intellectual condition belonging to an individual whereas disability is a social construct. Whilst time, medicine and rehabilitation may lessen the effects of an impairment on the individual, the disabling factors within their communities and society generally will still impact upon their lives unless they are addressed by social remedies. The greatest of all these are the attitudes of others towards disabled people. As with all oppressions, these attitudes are formed through misinformation, stereotyping and prejudice towards the target group. In the case of disabled people, the continued use of segregation has created a situation in which these false ideas are not challenged but reinforced within mainstream society. By the removal of disabled people from the mainstream, especially when young, neither group can learn who they really are or how to live together. One of the main purposes of inclusive education is to educate the whole community about impairment and disability and to create mutual empathy resulting from natural relationships within the family, school and community.
For deaf people, mainstreaming took an unfortunate turn in that it was based originally on the medical model, i.e. that deaf people should aspire to be like hearing people, learn to speak, lip-read and cope in an unchanged hearing world. Their language and culture was banned and deaf people were not allowed to become teachers. This had a devastating effect on the deaf community and on the educational attainment of deaf children. Not surprisingly they fought back, demanding the right to be taught in their first language (sign), by deaf educators, and to be raised with a community of deaf people who were proud of their language and culture. This they believed could only happen in segregated schools for the deaf.
Blind people around the world were also amongst the first groups of disabled people to become organised. They fought for the right to special employment and training, and to an education based on the use of Braille at a time when there was nothing for blind people except the bleakest of futures begging on the streets.
Members of both of these groups are still arguing for the right to segregated education despite our general call for the right to inclusive education. We believe this is a misplaced argument and should never become enshrined in any human rights legislation.
Inclusive education is based on the social model of disability. This means it focuses on the barriers within mainstream society, including educational settings, which prevent disabled people from participating on the basis of equality. If a barrier to deaf pupils is the use of a spoken language as the only means of instruction or communication then the use of interpreters, induction loops, radio-aids and a bi-lingual curriculum taught in sign and speech would constitute a social remedy, and this would be inclusion. Likewise, if a barrier to blind or visually impaired, or deaf/blind pupils is the use of written language, small print, dark rooms, unskilled teachers, then the use of Braille, large print, the deaf/blind sign system, closed circuit television, appropriate technology, and competent teachers of people with visual impairments would constitute social remedies and be inclusion.
Although relatively new, there are now examples of mainstream schools which have embraced such accommodations and in which all pupils get the ‘best of both worlds’. This includes adaptations for individual children in their local school, and resourced mainstream provision for groups of children within their locality. Children should have a choice between these, but not between mainstream and segregated education. The result is of benefit to the whole community and must lead eventually to a shift in the general perception of impairment and disability within society as young people grow up together, learning about one another. We believe the right to such an education is the right for which we should all be fighting.