CANADIAN LEGISLATIVE PROCESSES: SPECIAL EDUCATION

Abstract

What are the prospects in Canada for legislative action to ensure the right of children to an education devised according to individual needs, and especially of those with extreme needs? The authors trace the history of special education from its beginnings in the separation (and exclusion) of those children identified medically as different, through the educational testing movement that enabled the identification of further groups that could he segregated, to the civil rights movement that led finally through parental agitation and court cases in the United States to statutory regulation by the federal government. Canada has neither institutions at federal level nor the American tradition of corrective action through the courts to make sense or justice out of the present mixture of fragmentary and uncoordinated legislation; but the way ahead lies principally through strong parental action aimed at legislators. "The models for mandatory legislation are everywhere."