ASPECTS OF SPECIAL EDUCATION IN WESTERN EUROPE: A PERSONAL IMPRESSION

Abstract

Education is politics. How it progresses in any one part of the world is not a function of the dissemination of knowledge among those skilled in the discipline; for if it were, one would have to conclude that communication on this planet had not yet emerged from the stage of runners with cleft sticks. It is rather a function of purely local struggles for power; from school district to school district, from state or province to state or province, from nation to nation in sophisticated Europe, the differences in practice are often extreme. Tyerman's survey of the state of special education across the European community is a revelation of scale: not only of geographical distance and attitudinal distance from one end of a continent to the other; but also of the range of organizations and activities entailed when a polity makes the commitment to extend the full rights of education to all the casualties of each generation. This survey may remind us also, not overtly, but in the intimacy with detail and the candour of comment in the author's approach, of the prevailing differences in style of action between two continents: the vision and drive that compels from above the unanimity of a great step forward by all together, and the patient pragmatism of care and humanity at the grass roots that may vary enormously in results, but - politics being what it is - may yet go further quicker.