The inclusive school or education has become the norm in school matters.
The dominant discourse that imposes it is adorned with the laurels ofbenevolence and a humanism understanding the suffering of others. It
prides itself on realizing the right to difference treated as an
identity (explicit case of the inclusive school). For its
implementation, a dismemberment of professional specialties is planned,
in particular those relating to public services. As for differentialism,
it serves to standardize behaviors and to deny the realities of people
while boasting of being a personalized response to the difficulties
specific to individuals. The article below details some of these mechanisms.
The discourse of power repeats that it wants to make the school
innovative and, to do this, transform it. The marker of this
transformation would be school inclusion (1). Thanks to this, the school
would have become attentive to difference, adapting to disabilities of
all kinds and providing solutions. We speak of "disability" because the
first steps of inclusion are indeed centered on disabled children and
adults. Our society having a taste for euphemisms, the school today
speaks rather of "difference", but the foundation remains a response to
disability. Teaching staff carry out orders, sometimes even take pride
in the request made to them to intervene in areas for which they do not
have professional knowledge. There is in this observation a first
important victory of power: those who are supposed to be the guarantors
of diplomas and qualifications agree to work at a distance, thus showing
themselves permeable to the social logic of certifications. However,
there is a fundamental problem here, which can easily be explained,
without being exhaustive, by monitoring legislative and institutional
initiatives:
Certification is at the heart of the creation of the 2CA-SH, a
complementary certificate for adapted teaching and the schooling of
students with disabilities. This certificate is only intended for
secondary school teachers. The certification obtained within its
framework is in direct competition with existing diplomas in specialized
education. This 2CA-SH is included in Decree No. 2004-13 of January 5,
2004 creating the CAPA-SH (certificate of professional aptitude for
specialized assistance, adapted teaching and the schooling of students
with disabilities).
The legislator, by decree of February 10, 2017, created the certificate
of professional aptitude for inclusive education practices (CAPPEI).
This decree was published in the Official Journal of the French Republic
No. 0037 of 12/02/2017, alongside Decree No. 2017-169 of 10 February
2017 relating to the "certificate of professional aptitude for inclusive
education practices and specialised vocational training".
These creations illustrate, in the field of education, the logic of
certifications, a weapon of employers against the logic of graduation
(obtaining a diploma), and whose aim is to break the qualification
grids. For state employers, the aim is to weaken the statuses. As such,
public employers and private employers, same fight. No union has found
fault with this implementation of certifications concerning the
professional education sector (2).
Finally, it is worth mentioning the publication on May 3, 2017 of AVS
circular No. 2017-084, "Missions and activities of personnel responsible
for supporting students with disabilities." This is part of the changes
instituted. However, at the same time as this reorganization is taking
place, successive governments are increasing the budget cuts in the
special education sector notified above. They are closing positions in
the Medico-Educational Institutes (IME), in the Medico-Pedagogical
Institutes (IMP), in the Therapeutic Educational and Pedagogical
Institutes (ITEP which were ordered in 2019 to have 50% of the young
people they welcome in school inclusion), in the Medico-Professional
Institutes (IMPRO), at the same time as threats weigh on the adapted
general and professional education sections (SEGPA), that the National
Institutes for Young Deaf People are emptied of their classes and their
teachers, the latter having to follow several deaf students spread
across different schools in the surrounding area. It is obviously no
coincidence that the National Education system, which is pushing for
certified training for the management of disabilities, closed, at the
start of the 2023 school year, the training of teachers specializing in
deaf people at the National Center for Training Teachers of Sensory
Impairments in Chambéry. All these official initiatives are part of the
government's desire to reorganize specialized education at a lower cost
by diluting it (dilution rather than absorption) in general education
through inclusion, and thus perfect the efficiency of the perpetuated
aims of the capitalist education system: social sorting through school
selection.
The size of an article imposes choices. The discourse on inclusive
education adorns itself with innovation, this contribution proposes to
delve into it to reveal its main drivers.
The hard core of the conception of inclusive education is contained in
two words: accessibility and differentiation.
The proponents of inclusive education speak of a "right to
accessibility" (3). We recognize the discourse on disability contained
in law 2005-102 of February 11, 2005 for "equality of rights and
opportunities, participation and citizenship of people with
disabilities". However, inclusive education adds to this discourse the
legal control of teachers' pedagogical choices in order to ensure that
disabled students have the right to access education outside of
specialized education. This "right to accessibility" is defined by the
educational institution and the political power as "a state", "a
condition" of access for the individual to education. For education
staff, the "right to accessibility" means making a course accessible to
all students in a class, regardless of their levels or the disabilities
of each. And the technocrats, the trainers delegated by the inspections,
the hideouts of the rectoral commissions explain that it is enough to
"differentiate the content", to "differentiate the class
configurations", to "differentiate (...) the ways in which the student
will achieve their learning". Without going into these absolutely
abstract and totally out of touch remarks, it should be noted that they
convey the idea that the teacher but also the AESH (accompanying
students with disabilities) know in advance the obstacles that each
student will encounter. We are faced here with a caricatured
exacerbation of the psychology of skills, a sort of psychotechnics whose
anchor point is the set of skills grids (4). Everything is codified so
that each student can work, this is what the institution says, at their
own pace and thus avoid, the official discourse also tells us, "the
uniformity, falsely democratic", of the current school. This
codification includes the forecast, by the ad hoc committee or the
teacher who is subordinate to it, "enrichment activities[for students
progressing faster than the others]/ remedial activities[for students
who have not or have not succeeded sufficiently in the
activity]workshops", in short, support. This post-course phase sees the
emergence of the figure of the special education teacher, a specialist
in all disabilities and all difficulties.
Let us summarize the pedagogy of the inclusive school:
1- differentiate a priori on the basis of the teacher's knowledge of the
obstacles that each will encounter;
2- differentiate during the course by using a pre-established range of
cards, level groups, cognitive groups (hear the echo of the theory of
multiple intelligences: visual, auditory, etc.);
3- differentiate a posteriori by remedial groups with the special
education teacher (who takes charge of the students individually) in
support of the teacher for example (co-intervention). We then speak of
"universal design of learning" (5), of "universal pedagogy".
The student is supervised, framed, broken down into skills because the
assessment drives phase 1 (a priori), is exercised during phase 2 (in
progress or at the end), and underlies phase 3 (a posteriori). A marvel
of techno-bureaucratic discourse, Freinet is explicitly called upon for
the "employment contract": the student plans the work he will do for the
week, and this is subject to verification by the teacher. As usual, the
official conception plunders techniques and ideas from the different
pedagogical conceptions by cutting them off from the general situation
that gives them their meaning. For example, here, the "employment
contract" is integrated but without cooperative pedagogy... which
cancels out its significant charge. The techno-bureaucratic discourse
extracts methods, pedagogical devices, and techniques from the purpose
for which they were designed, and reduces them to the rank of universal
tools.
Thus, this "universal pedagogy", which repeats the need to follow each
student individually in their differences, denies the processes of
knowledge construction. The teacher is the omniscient god, the same one
that old scholasticism values. The use of remediation is an illustration
of this. The declared innovation is only the status quo.
Finally, this "universal pedagogy" operates within an unchanged, deeply
hierarchical educational system. For the propagandists of the inclusive
school, the class as a human group does not exist because
differentiation and adaptation "are carried out on individual bases":
the inclusive school is a school of individualism. As for the injunction
of accessibility of courses to students, it establishes a drastic
hierarchical surveillance on teachers whose pedagogical freedom fades a
little more.
The inclusive school reactivates the notion of support. This notion is
merged into that of individualization which is driven by an
"intervention plan" (as are today the Personalized Educational Success
Program, Educational Support Project, and more particularly the
Personalized Schooling Project, etc.): "It is about multiplying the
means of participation of the students in particular by ensuring that
they focus on their learning, that they establish their own objectives
or even that they carry out a self-reflection on their path". This
"intervention plan" provides, on specific time slots, the interventions
of specialists of a disability including the remedial teacher, the
speech therapist or speech therapist, the specialist of a "technological
aid used by the student to assist him in his learning" (6), in
particular the computer, such software, etc. We note that the individual
is described as deciding on "his" project, which is notoriously
hypocritical since it is upstream and outside of him that everything is
thought out. And it is also hypocritical, since what is thought for him
is identical for all students classified identically on the grids of the
types of students relevant to inclusion. Let us emphasize that the
classification of students in these grids depends on medical and
medico-social staff first and administrative staff (school management)
second. All other staff, including AESH, general education teachers,
SEGPA and localized units for school inclusion (ULIS), are excluded.
This is a subcontracting of the cognitive and the emotional by the
school institution to institutional health partners. In return, the
latter dictate the roles to be applied by the staff who will teach these
students. The choice of support or remediation also comes from the
desire to deny disabilities despite a discourse that says the opposite
and the exhibition of procedures that give the impression of being
concerned about them. To understand this sleight of hand, it is good to
focus on the emerging figure of the "orthopedagogue". Literally, this is
the actor in a pedagogy of recovery. He is the specialist in "students
with special needs". The name matters: it is about providing adaptations
relating to the specific needs of the student "and not in relation to
the general characteristics[of his]disorder or[his]deficiency". In the
texts, he is associated with specialist teachers and his function is
defined as follows: "The orthopedagogue/specialist teacher must be
considered a specialist in pedagogical differentiation rather than a
specialist in disorders and deficiencies." This definition ultimately
allows the recruitment of staff without professional training in either
specific disorders or specific disabilities, that is to say, making them
generalists of "differences" (we do not talk about disability because
that would be stigmatizing). According to the logic of the design of the
individual cut into skills, the inclusive school divides the student
subject into needs (educational state) and disorders (health state), the
school dealing with needs, medicine and paramedical sectors dealing with
health. For example, the school responds to the needs of the dyslexic
student (educational state), and his speech therapist treats his
disorder (health state). So many divisions established in a subject can
undoubtedly only generate disorders or feed them in abundance. The
objectification of the human continues to advance.
The student's person is broken down into myriads of specific needs
treated in the same way as repairing a car engine. This conception of
the individual is adequate for the piecemeal teaching imposed by the
Single School Booklet. The letter U of this LSU - which replaced the
Personal Skills Booklet (LPC) in 2016 -, before meaning "unique", meant
"universal", or the Digital Universal School Booklet (LSUN): the
correspondence with "universal pedagogy" and the "universal design of
learning", which the inclusive school boasts, proves the close link
between the imposition of skills on schools and the establishment of the
inclusive school. Capitalism took its time, but it carried out its
project, forged from the field of vocational training, which is rarely
called "continuous" anymore, a project that it has extended to the
global level.
In conclusion of this partial analysis, the inclusive school aims to
ensure the continuity of the segregated bourgeois school by a discourse
of welcoming differences. The difficulties of each student being
anticipated and coded in software-repositories of needs compatible with
the skills grids of the Single School Booklet, the student is not
invited to construct knowledge but to have access to it by conforming to
the path that has been traced for him. This inclusive conception locks
the student in a bubble from which he does not escape.
Anyone who has taught according to constructivist pedagogical methods
and the pedagogy of creative language learning knows, conversely, that a
student constructs his knowledge by taking multiple paths, and that the
challenge is to follow him so that, participating in the collective
construction of knowledge, he constructs knowledge and constructs
himself as a person. In the inclusive school, knowledge is reified into
abstractions; they are put in forced access, in disregard of any
consideration for the psychogenesis of knowledge and for the development
of children. Through this banking conception of beings, education and
teaching, the hierarchical school ensures the reproduction of humanist
individualism while ensuring the standardization of behaviors.
Philippe Geneste
To go further: interested readers can refer, on the LESART
PSYCHOMECANIQUE website, to "Quality control and school assessment",
"Retrospective look at the professionalization of the teaching
function", "Again on the deprofessionalization of education
professions", "Assessment by skills against the development of students
and each student", and to Philippe Geneste, "School inclusion:
transformation or status quo?", Le Chiendent n° 13, January 2020, 16 p.
Notes
(1) See Philippe Geneste, "L'inclusion scolaire, nouvelle offensive de
l'école bourgeoise", Courant Alternatif, No. 305, December 2020, pp.16-19.
(2) Read Philippe Geneste, Le Travail de l'école: contribution à une
critique prolétarienne de l'éducation, Acratie, 2009, 185 p.
(3) Philippe Tremblay, Ecole inclusive - Conditions et applications,
Academia-L'Harmattan, 2020, 124 p. - p. 51. This work is a promotional
synthesis of the official conceptions of the inclusive school. It is a
product of the Canadian university, spearhead of the competency-based
school and the inclusive school which is a derivative of it. Unless
otherwise stated, the following quotes are taken from this work.
(4) See, for a detailed analysis: Philippe Geneste, Le Travail de
l'école. Contribution to a proletarian critique of education. For a
versatile and polytechnic education Confronting institutional and
employer consistencies on training, Yainville, 2018, 170 p.
(5) The discourse of power does not bother with confrontation with other
theories on the subject: there is only one good theory, that of learning
according to the competency model.
(6) Chouinard, quoted by Philippe Tremblay in Ecole inclusive (...), op.
cit., p. 64. Let us emphasize that individualism applied to school
according to the principles of inclusion makes the machine a teaching
actress. In the quote, it is the technological aid that "assists" the
student... Unless otherwise stated, the following quotes are taken from
this work.
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4297
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