- Review article
- Abstract
- Introduction
- For A (Very Brief) Re-Signification of The Concepts of (A)Normality, Citizen and Citizenship in The Framework of the Social Exclusion- Inclusion Dialectic
- Social Exclusion and Inclusion Inquired Beyond Education: A Holistic View in Line with Current Social Planning
- The Paradox of an Excluding Society that (Through Education) Seeks to Include
- Final Notes
- References
People with Special Health Needs on the Horizon of Current Social Planning and Education as an Inclusion Project
Henrique Ramalho*
Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, Higher School of Education, Portugal
Submission: January 04, 2022; Published: February 21, 2022
*Corresponding author: Henrique Ramalho, Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, Higher School of Education, CI&DEI, Portugal
How to cite this article:Henrique Ramalho. People with Special Health Needs on the Horizon of Current Social Planning and Education as an Inclusion Project. Glob J Intellect Dev Disabil, 2022; 9(4): 555769. DOI:10.19080/GJIDD.2022.09.555769
- Review article
- Abstract
- Introduction
- For A (Very Brief) Re-Signification of The Concepts of (A)Normality, Citizen and Citizenship in The Framework of the Social Exclusion- Inclusion Dialectic
- Social Exclusion and Inclusion Inquired Beyond Education: A Holistic View in Line with Current Social Planning
- The Paradox of an Excluding Society that (Through Education) Seeks to Include
- Final Notes
- References
Abstract
The essay presented here introduces a critical analysis and understanding of the contradictions and (dis)connections that may occur between social planning and education within the movement of inclusion of people with special health needs. To this end, we mobilize arguments and theoretical and conceptual intersections that allow us to discuss the dialectics between social exclusion and inclusion, with their respective association to public education policies. We develop our analysis based on the hermeneutic circle methodology. To this end, our approach to the confrontation of the notions of social planning, which tends to exclude or promote the processes of social exoexclusion, and inclusive education, too limited to its own field of action, intercessor of endoinclusion processes, is relevant.
Keywords: Exclusion-inclusion dialect; Social planning; Citizen; Person with special health needs; Inclusive education
- Review article
- Abstract
- Introduction
- For A (Very Brief) Re-Signification of The Concepts of (A)Normality, Citizen and Citizenship in The Framework of the Social Exclusion- Inclusion Dialectic
- Social Exclusion and Inclusion Inquired Beyond Education: A Holistic View in Line with Current Social Planning
- The Paradox of an Excluding Society that (Through Education) Seeks to Include
- Final Notes
- References
Introduction
Assumed to be an eminent social, cultural and political problem of our age, the debate developed around the social exclusion and inclusion of people with, in general, special health needs has given rise to different incursions in the exploration of its senses and meanings, as well as of the areas and domains in which they should, in a more privileged way, be summoned and put into effect. To this starting point we associate a critical point that, we believe, has not been given due importance. That is, the speeches and political measures that seek to counteract the phenomena of social exclusion, evolving into forms of integration and, more recently, social inclusion, suffer from an evident structural separatism when it comes to planning their effective resolution, precisely occurring between the broader social spectrum and the instrumentalization of education for the resolution of problems that have been raised in the framework of an excluding society, in the form of inclusive education, recently designed to respond to people with any psychomotor, socio-affective, and cognitive disability, along the lines that we currently refer to the broader framework of special health needs. As our main goal is to develop a critical hermeneutic exercise about the dialectic between social exclusion and inclusion of people with special health needs, we do it by mobilizing and intersecting the systemic concepts of social planning, citizen, citizenship, excluding society and inclusive education. In this sense, we are in line with the Special Educational Needs movement, resulting from the Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1978). Under the chairmanship of Mrs. Hellen Mary Warnock, the same report became known as the Warnock Report, in order to re-evaluate the care of students with disabilities. The conceptions that resulted from it definitely changed the way of thinking about public education policies for students with any special need, difficulty, or characteristic, particularly in terms of educational responses considered socially and culturally inclusive and in opposition to exclusionary educational policies. This triggered a shift in primacy from the medical-psychological paradigm to the socio-educational paradigm [1].
- Review article
- Abstract
- Introduction
- For A (Very Brief) Re-Signification of The Concepts of (A)Normality, Citizen and Citizenship in The Framework of the Social Exclusion- Inclusion Dialectic
- Social Exclusion and Inclusion Inquired Beyond Education: A Holistic View in Line with Current Social Planning
- The Paradox of an Excluding Society that (Through Education) Seeks to Include
- Final Notes
- References
For A (Very Brief) Re-Signification of The Concepts of (A)Normality, Citizen and Citizenship in The Framework of the Social Exclusion- Inclusion Dialectic
The senses and meanings we give to the phenomena of social exclusion depend, to a large extent, on the concept we have of society, of its (re)structuring, of the roles and possibilities of action taken by social actors. Moreover, it is important to consider that such senses and meanings are not homogeneous as to the parameters of normality and abnormality with which the actors coexist in the different social and cultural spheres. This means that the debate on social exclusion versus social inclusion is extraordinarily conditioned by the conceptions of social normality and abnormality and the respective argumentative bases that support such conceptions, which range from the so-called normal or average (most frequent) social facts to pathological, maladjusted, or deviant phenomena. For example, in a positivist conception, and because we consider it more influential in the current stage of the intersections susceptible of being questioned in this essay, the question is put to us like this:
We shall call the facts which present the most general forms normal, and we shall give to the others the designation of morbid or pathological. If we consider that the average type is the schematic being which would result from the reunion in the same being, in a sort of abstract individuality, of the most frequent characteristics of the species and the most frequent forms of these characteristics, we may say that the normal type is confused with the average type. and that any deviation from this standard of health is a morbid phenomenon. [...]. Now, it would be inexplicable if the most frequent forms of organization were not also, at least on the whole, the most advantageous. [...]. And if the others are rarer, it is because, on average, the subjects that present them have more difficulty in surviving. The greater frequency of the former is, therefore, the proof of their superiority [2].
In a shorter idea, the positivist-biologist approach approaches the problem of social exclusion as a condition that stems from an individual pathology translated into a deviation from the social norm or the expected social action. In other words,
First of all, we observe how positivism does not take into consideration society and the processes caused by it and that explain the origin of deviance; every social system is considered a given, grounded and justified by the current consensus of majorities. Its main goal is to socialize people through processes of adaptation and conformation, understood in a deterministic sense. The deviant is then defined as an unsocialized one, who does not deserve to be punished, but only recovered by an opportune reconduction to the consensus [3], it can be deduced that the positivists (particularly those of the biologist current) consider the deviant to be an individual who is not responsible and, therefore, cannot be legally punished. The judge is replaced by the specialist (sociologist, physician, biologist, etc.) who seeks to identify the factors that caused the deviation, prescribing the appropriate therapy. The positivist scientist clearly takes on the defense of the non-deviant majority, implicitly accepts the value system of this majority, and begins to function as an organ of social control of the majority. In the positivist scientist’s particular view, this situation of effective servility ends up being amply justified by repeated appeals to the neutrality of science, incapable of judging the appropriateness of ends, but called upon to restore or create the best possible relations between means and ends [3].
Also, for the same reasons, the debate developed around social exclusion and inclusion has led to different incursions in the exploration of its senses and meanings, as well as of the spheres and domains in which they should, in a more privileged way, be called upon and made effective in social discourses and practices [4-7]. Social exclusion, per se, being a sociological concept originally introduced by René Lenoir, in 1974 [4,5,7-13] refers to a situation of lack of inclusion of the individual or the social group to which he or she belongs, and this circumstance determines the impossibility of enjoying rights available to the majority, from civil and political rights to social and economic rights. It is, in fact, in this way that the idea of social exclusion is antagonized with the most widely accepted ideas about citizenship and citizenship. In other words, the debate on social exclusion versus inclusion cannot be fought in the absence of arguments that allow us to understand the degree or intensity with which citizens, depending on their physical, biological, cognitive, social, and cultural circumstances, exercise their citizenship.
It will be pertinent, then, to envision and mobilize the category of citizen, especially in the condition of having special health needs, in order to investigate him as a practitioner of citizenship and as a factor of his own social inclusion, precisely on the basis of a model of social regency that seeks to ensure that all citizens, being vested with their civil, political, economic and social rights, maintain a strong connection and a collective cognoscibility about the government of the public thing - with special emphasis on public education policies - of which they are part. And this occurs in line with the prerogative of social action, in which the actor moves, more or less, by the interest in defining rules that sustain and legitimize this action, towards certain individual and collective ends, through social and political opportunities that allow it [14,15].
- Review article
- Abstract
- Introduction
- For A (Very Brief) Re-Signification of The Concepts of (A)Normality, Citizen and Citizenship in The Framework of the Social Exclusion- Inclusion Dialectic
- Social Exclusion and Inclusion Inquired Beyond Education: A Holistic View in Line with Current Social Planning
- The Paradox of an Excluding Society that (Through Education) Seeks to Include
- Final Notes
- References
Social Exclusion and Inclusion Inquired Beyond Education: A Holistic View in Line with Current Social Planning
We begin this axis of analysis with a critical point which, we believe, has not been given due importance: the discourses and policy measures that address the phenomena of social exclusion, occurring in all social spheres (and not only at the educational level) and evolving into forms of integration and, more recently, into the paradigmatic meaning of social inclusion, suffer from an evident structural separatism when it comes to the planning of their effective resolution, precisely occurring between the broader social spectrum and the various social domains, such as politics, culture, economics, and education. In the latter case, contemporary society has operated with an exercise in constricting the social inclusion agenda almost exclusively devoted to planning the operation of the magic box in which all hopes for solving the problems of social exclusion have been placed, which we commonly call a school.
Congruently, we are concerned with the problem of social planning as a field that tends to privilege incursions that are more or less inhibiting to the inclusion practices of actors with special health needs. Therefore, social planning, weighed between a more comprehensive conception as a general process of structuring societies and a conception more restricted to the educational field, emerges, in this essay, as the main category of analysis of social policies and practices (including the educational ones), specifically allocated in the dialectic between exclusion and inclusion with which those actors are (dis)mobilized in the contemporary social structure.
To this end, we will begin by saying that a general approach to the concept of social planning will always be insufficient to situate it from a theoretical and empirical point of view, since it appears codified according to orientations that are often contradictory to each other. Nevertheless, it deals with - This is a concept whose assumption tends to involve matters of different natures. In this regard, we call attention to the exercise developed by Maria Manuela da Silva [16], where the author discusses the “discourses of social planning and the exclusion systems that demarcate them”, in which she concretizes meanings from different latitudes of understanding of what it means to talk about social planning, referring to different meanings, which we can frame in the more concrete spectrum of the concept:
i) “That which does not have an economic character, that is, what escapes the laws of the market and the game of profitability [...];
ii) “What refers to collective functions-justice, defense, preservation of the environment, etc.-
The actions or situations that concern certain groups of the population, considered, for some reason, in a marginal position (for example, the poor, the sensorial, intellectual or motor handicapped, emigrants or immigrants, minority ethnic groups, etc.).
iii) “The actions or situations related to certain problems with repercussions in society (delinquency, pollution, prostitution, alcoholism, strikes, are so-called ‘social’ problems) and for being recognized as a threat to its integration.” Associated with this is the idea of a definition endowed with an always partial signification of social reality, from the planning of the so-called social policies (education, health, housing, where we can also include, more narrowly, the planning of social assistance, the planning of the political participation of the population, the planning of the development of human resources, economic planning, and also, for what interests us, public education policies).
The purpose of the analytical and comprehensive incursions we make in this axis of analysis is to critically articulate the arguments developed around the dialectics between social exclusion and inclusion, with the interference, more or less favorable, of education, in light of the agendas that have been defined to determine the current project of social (re)structuring.
Something that forces us also to make incursions on the definition of social exclusion, which we present, before anything else, as the result of a consistent exhaustion of the classic model of social integration of people, through the maximum productivist mobilization and, consequently, through the ample participation in the role of active consumers. We do not limit, therefore, the ideas of social exclusion and inclusion, even if circumscribed to the level of educational structures, to the normalized spectrum of the group of people with special health needs, much less to the restricted sphere of education.
Having as a reference the opposition of the idea of inclusion of the other [17] with the systemic notion of excluding society [18], we also refer to the challenge posed to education as a process that aims at the inclusion of the special person in a society that we consider excluding. However, it is not simply a matter of reconciling the vision of an inclusive education, admitting that it is not excluding, with the perspective of a society structured on the basis of an agenda that tends to be organized around processes that enhance social, cultural and economic asymmetries of exclusionary nature.
Therefore, in this scenario, the great challenge facing inclusive education will be its capacity to go beyond itself, operating as a process of social inclusion in a broad spectrum and not just in school. We are referring, explicitly, to the role of education in enhancing levels of autonomy and emancipation of people with special health needs, which may go beyond their permanence in educational processes, allowing them to actively access the realization of their fundamental rights, such as, for example, the right to political participation to influence legislative processes that, per se, are crucial for social, cultural and economic inclusion to occur, exactly in the terms enunciated by the United Nations:
[...] the principle of equal rights for disabled and non-disabled alike implies that the needs of each individual are of equal importance, that these needs should form the basis of societies planning, and that all resources should be employed in such a way as to guarantee every individual equal opportunity for participation. Policies for the disabled should ensure their access to all community services [19].
We therefore follow the line of argument that the participation of social actors in the deliberative process should, on the one hand, belong to everyone and, on the other hand, occur in all spheres of society, whether in education, through education, or beyond education, ensuring full
Valuing people and groups regardless of religion, ethnicity, gender, or age difference; structures that enable possibilities for choices; involvement in decisions that affect you on any scale; availability of opportunities and resources necessary for everyone to participate fully in society [11].
This is the great challenge for inclusive education: to create conditions for the actors, independently of the cognitive, socioaffective, psycho-motor condition in which they find themselves, to participate adaptively and freely in the communicativedeliberative game, collaborating in the creation of a legislative legal system built in a democratic manner, egalitarian, respectful and recognizing differences, appealing, therefore, to the discourse promoting an inclusion in the authentically communicative community [20], in which the
[...] acceptance and appreciation of diversity, cooperation among different people and learning from multiplicity are, therefore, values that guide social inclusion, understood as the process by which society adapts in order to be able to include, in all its systems, people with special needs and, at the same time, these people prepare themselves to assume their role in society [21],
On the opposite side, we find the sense of the excluding and alienating communication of the marketing and productivist social planning, translated thus in its connection to the phenomenon of social exclusion: “Social exclusion is not a concept, it is a new social question. It is being produced by the conjunction of transformations in the productive process, with neoliberal policies, and with globalization” [5].
Deeply influenced by the Declaration of Salamanca [22], approved by representatives from several countries and international organizations in 1994, the inclusive education paradigm is self-determined by the mandate to establish a regular school that
[...] should be appropriate for all children regardless of their physical, social, linguistic or other conditions, i.e. children with disabilities or giftedness, street or working children, children from migrant or nomadic populations, children belonging to linguistic, ethnic or cultural minorities and children from disadvantaged or marginal areas or groups [22].
From this stems the tendency to couple the idea of inclusion (social and, more specifically, school) to theories of differentiated association, carrying interactionist elements, even if here we attribute to it a hermeneutic utility inverse to that which Edwin Sutherland, Donald Cressey, and David Luckenbill [23] gave it to explain the origin of deviant behavior.
Nonetheless, what we have seen in this discussion is that inclusive education cannot be an end in itself, or it will become a political farce based on functionalist theories:
We recall the four functions that, according to functionalist theory, assure to a social system the preconditions for its existence and progressive integration:
(i) pattern maintenance: the ability to preserve the normative framework and to legitimize it continuously;
(ii) adaptation: the ability to face possible imbalances and to manage them in the sense of order
(iii) and integration;
(iv) goal attainment: the ability to motivate people to apply themselves to the pursuit of socially elaborated and prescribed goals, thus facilitating the expansion of the system;
(v) integration: the ability to ensure at each moment a meaningful relationship, in the sense of a convergent collaboration of all the elements that make up the system [3].
precisely in the wake of an anchoring to the general theory of social control, referring to the:
[...] concept of “affective attachment,” a framework that allows discussion of the emotional basis of relationships with others and with groups. Affective attachment theory studies the emotional relationships between an individual and another person, group, or institution that provides and promotes a sense of psychological security. [...].
Affective attachments comprise four elements:
a) affective attachment, or sensitivity toward others, especially toward family members;
b) commitment to a life project finalized to the school and professional career;
c) involvement or amount of time spent on conventional activities at school, on family commitments, on extracurricular activities, on religious activities.
d) belief or acceptance of a particular moral orientation, or a conformist set of values and the validity of social norms.
The confluence of these elements listed above becomes a strong social bond and thus social conformity [3].
It can be seen, therefore, that the intersections we investigate between the inclusion agenda, the excluded actor, and education are, above all, of the meso and microsocial kind, observing in these places the social process of formatting the self-concept, of socialization (primary and secondary), and of more or less effective social interaction.
In this vein, there is a risk of operating with an inclusive education that is closed in on itself, as a mechanism that legitimizes the social inequalities and injustices perpetuated in the form of a legitimately exclusionary society. In other words, there is a risk of using inclusive education as a bargaining chip for the “welloff” to negotiate the terms of their relations with the excluded, transforming it into an endoinclusive structure, but not escaping the circumstance that it remains an instrument of exoexclusion.
By the way, we can’t leave out of this debate the neoliberal assumption that tends to legitimize the current order of social exclusion based on the argument that resources, being scarce, don’t reach everyone:
A man who is born into a world already possessed by others, when he cannot obtain the means of subsistence from his parents over which he may have just claims, and if society does not want his labor, he can claim no right to the smallest portion of food and has no reason to be where he is. He is left only with social exclusion and the eventual pity of those who have a seat at the banquet [24].
Seen in another way, the complex social system is structured on the basis of subsystems, more or less articulated among themselves, which underlie a polymorphic social planning, depending very much on the interests and power games that condition the intersections operated among those interests. Following, by the way, the line of critical social theories [25], we have been warned about the dangers that the current model of social planning presents us, particularly in the form of a social fascism [26] rooted in a social apartheid that can be understood as:
[...] the social segregation of the excluded through the division of cities into savage zones and civilized zones. The savage zones are the zones of the Hobbesian natural state. The civilized zones are the zones of the social contract, under permanent threat from the savage zones [27].
In this case, we could call inclusive education a civilized zone, constantly threatened by the wild zones that are exogenous to it, such as the economic and financial sphere, as an explicit and lawful obstacle to broader social inclusion. This is to say that
[...] in civilized zones, the State acts democratically, as a protective State, although often ineffective or unreliable. In savage zones, the state acts fascistically, as a predator state, without any vein of observance, even apparent, of the law [26].
And this, to the point that, as Repolês [28] says, a crisis of effectiveness is also generated: “[...] because the center - without maintaining a connection with the periphery - makes decisions that fail to respond to the problems of its target audience, which is the periphery”, turning the inclusive school into a mechanism of temporary spatial isolation of the endoincluded, but potentially the exoexcluded.
- Review article
- Abstract
- Introduction
- For A (Very Brief) Re-Signification of The Concepts of (A)Normality, Citizen and Citizenship in The Framework of the Social Exclusion- Inclusion Dialectic
- Social Exclusion and Inclusion Inquired Beyond Education: A Holistic View in Line with Current Social Planning
- The Paradox of an Excluding Society that (Through Education) Seeks to Include
- Final Notes
- References
The Paradox of an Excluding Society that (Through Education) Seeks to Include
Based on the previous arguments, we would say, then, that economic processes, exclusionary in nature, enabling the market and financial agenda of the current social planning, have a structural ascendancy over inclusive educational processes. In fact, we believe that there is no guarantee that the inclusive education agenda will prevent the structural growth of social exclusion and the continuous rise of the risk society [29], in the form of social risk [30].
[...] a set of phenomena that are configured in the broad field of contemporary social relations: structural unemployment, labor precarization, social disqualification, identity disintegration, dehumanization of the other, the annulment of otherness, the street population, hunger, violence, lack of access to goods and services, security, justice and citizenship, among others [12],
and to be translated into the designation of a good part of the people protected by the shield of inclusive education as failed, useless and redundant producers and consumers [31]. Therefore, the hermeneutic possibilities of the interpretive model of social risk align themselves, in a more privileged way, to raise understandings of social exclusion on the basis of cultural deprivations [3].
Thus, the problem of the excluded is then reframed as a matter of non-adherence (voluntary or involuntary) to a dominant default culture. This dominant standard takes on a constitutional and legislative (normative and, therefore, lawful) nature, leading, for example, to social funds, the uses of which are often referred to as highly progressive policies, such as education, being poured into the modernization of a school that is closed in on itself with regard, in particular, to the development of people with NSE or other so-called abnormal characteristics vis-à-vis the surreptitiously instituted standard of social normality. We would say, therefore, that this seems to happen with people with cognitive and socio-cultural characteristics and typifications that are too abstracted and misaligned with the social planning, where that dominant cultural pattern subsists. Something that seems to occur with the removal of neo capitalist social institutions from the ideological political proposals of the common good and general welfare, placing some social actors and groups in situations of vulnerability and social exclusion [12,32].
We are faced with the paradox of social inclusion-exclusion, endowed with an ambiguity of senses and meanings, whose understanding can only occur within the framework of the historical, social, and cultural processes in which the inclusionexclusion dialectic takes place. In this way, social exclusion processes remain in line with the institutionalization of a globally structured agenda for the mobilization of people with certain sociocultural and cognitive insights, emerging as a geosystem of social control, excluding the disabled, the misaligned, the irreducible, the socially disqualified, the outsiders, or simply the unfit for social progress [33,34]. In this case, social exclusion emerges as a multidimensional social phenomenon and category of analysis, whose operationality will depend on the loci and foci to which it is circumstanced [35,36].
Congruently, the anthropological assumption will be the one that, perhaps, will be in better conditions to give us a complete understanding of the consequences that social exclusion phenomena have for people, namely the loss of the condition of subject [12], in which, historically, the notion of race has gained special ascendancy over the diversity of cognitive, biological and cultural conditions in which social actors are circumstanced [37]. In fact, the social planning of neo-liberal nature has provided the institutionalization of strategies of hegemonization of the actor, keeping him hostage to his own globalized condition [12],contradicting the social experience of each one of these actors as an act of freedom and protagonism of his own history, in the sense that this “[...] resides precisely in the opportunity it gives citizens to debate about values in the choice of priorities and to participate in the selection of these values [...]. Individual freedom is essentially a social product” [6], in which the person has the possibility to practice freedom, subjectivation and, simultaneously, negation filled with social, cultural, and political content.
Likewise, the educational systems and processes to which these actors are being subjected must necessarily result from cultural and ideological tensions, from the inevitable (although often openly hidden by the paradigms of social hegemony) sociocultural contradictions [12]. In particular, the multidimensionality of the phenomena of social exclusion allows for an analysis that goes beyond community or local limits, in which it is common to carry out initiatives to recognize or denounce the social deprivation experienced by the actors who are less aligned with neo-liberal planning, leading to the assumption of the need to struggle against this social exclusion being too fragmented, losing its more structural meaning at the level of the macro social system [31,38].
The situation is aggravated to the extent that social policies, with particular emphasis on the so- called inclusive education policies, enter into an equivocal spiral, by giving priority to the institutionalization of programs or measures excessively closed in on their own spheres, legitimizing themselves through a process of endorot labeling commonly normalized as “social inclusion”, in which the excluded actors are being subjected to a normalization effect of their action and condition in order to transmute them into a constructed hetero profile of “included”.
There has been a growing interest in transforming the educational sphere into a kind of housing, for some, transitional, for others, definitive, increasingly normalized as a residential trajectory and loci; instituted, also, with purposes of re-adaptation and normalization according to the procedures of an endinclusive education, strategically planned at the margin of the exclusionary agenda of neoliberal globalization. Thus, on the one hand, a sectarian inclusion is provided, through a process of gregarious normalization and institutionalization confined and constrained to a smaller social sphere and, on the other hand, a global exclusion of the social actor that configures, beyond all, a zone of macrosocial disaffiliation [34], exactly in the terms in which the actor emerges as “The supernumerary or the useless [who] is in society without really having a position and a social role within it” [39].
Behold, education emerges as a powerful means and even social planning based on the normalization effect:
To normalize, in the family, in education, in vocational training, in work and in social security, thus, consisted in recognizing people with disabilities the same rights as the other citizens of the same age group, in accepting them according to their own specificity, providing them with community services that would contribute to develop their possibilities, so that their behaviors would approach the models considered as “normal”. [...] “normalize” the individual, at the physical, functional and social level, presupposing physical proximity, interaction, assimilation and acceptance [21].
In this vein, the paradigm of the inclusive school is substantially supported by the argument that education should include the different, also organizing itself under the illusionary argument that it is a process of disciplinarization [40] and alignment of the excluded to the instituted social planning.
- Review article
- Abstract
- Introduction
- For A (Very Brief) Re-Signification of The Concepts of (A)Normality, Citizen and Citizenship in The Framework of the Social Exclusion- Inclusion Dialectic
- Social Exclusion and Inclusion Inquired Beyond Education: A Holistic View in Line with Current Social Planning
- The Paradox of an Excluding Society that (Through Education) Seeks to Include
- Final Notes
- References
Final Notes
The critical hermeneutic exercise developed here began by delimiting a field of analysis and understanding of the antinomical phenomena of social exclusion and inclusion through two theoretical hypotheses that, integrating contradictory interpretative meanings, served to confront us with two possibilities of understanding how the phenomena of social exclusion and inclusion intersect and what kind of influences one exerts on the other.
This means that it is now possible to point to some key conclusions. Contemporary society has been operating with an exercise of instrumentalizing education as an exclusive instance when it comes to planning social processes that tend to counteract the advance of social exclusion phenomena. Something that we associate with the risk of operating with an inclusive education that is closed in on itself, as a mechanism that legitimizes the social inequalities and injustices perpetuated in the form of a society that is legally excluding. In other words, we run the risk of using inclusive education as a bargaining chip for the “wellestablished” to negotiate the terms of their relations with the excluded, becoming an endoinclusive structure, but not escaping the circumstance of remaining an instrument of exoexclusion [41- 46].
In this concluding frame, we resume the paradoxical scenario of an excluding society that, through the most exalted role of education, claims to be making efforts, also, to promote social inclusion. Nevertheless, we have seen those economic processes of exclusionary nature, which enable the market and financial agenda of the current social planning, have a structural and instrumental ascendancy over inclusive educational processes.
So, we are faced with a social planning that takes over educational planning processes in which the problem of the excluded tends to be reframed as a matter of (voluntary or involuntary) non-adherence to a dominant standard culture. This is to say that the planning of education is assigned two important, albeit contradictory, social functions: on the one hand, it is instrumentalized as a mechanism for institutionalizing a globally structured agenda to thoroughly prepare and elicit the mobilization of people with certain socio-cultural and cognitive insights convenient to the mercantile processes of neoliberal society. On the other hand, and in view of the inevitability of coexistence with phenomena of socio-market exclusion, it is asked to welcome the misaligned, the irreducible, the socially disqualified, the outsiders or, simply, the unfit for mercantilist progress [47-49].
In this pursuit, social policies, with particular emphasis on educational policies for inclusion, enter into an equivocal spiral, by giving priority to the institutionalization of programs or measures excessively closed in on their own spheres, legitimizing themselves through a process of endorot labeling vulgarly normalized as “social inclusion”, in which the excluded actors are being subjected to an effect of normalization of their action and condition in order to transmute them into a constructed hetero profile of “included”.
There is, therefore, a growing interest in transforming education with a double valence with a tinge of alternative: i) the school is asked to fulfill the function of readaptation, domestication, and normalization of deviant but “recoverable” actors so that they can take their place in the framework of neoliberal social planning. In this case, the school functions as a kind of transitional housing of excluded people on their way to their social inclusion accordingly; ii) it is required to organize itself around strategically planned processes at the margins of the neoliberal globalization agenda, in order to welcome the “chronically excluded”, becoming a kind of definitive residence, increasingly normalized for that purpose, according to the procedures of an endoinclusive education, but far from the probability of solving the problems of exoexclusion.
- Review article
- Abstract
- Introduction
- For A (Very Brief) Re-Signification of The Concepts of (A)Normality, Citizen and Citizenship in The Framework of the Social Exclusion- Inclusion Dialectic
- Social Exclusion and Inclusion Inquired Beyond Education: A Holistic View in Line with Current Social Planning
- The Paradox of an Excluding Society that (Through Education) Seeks to Include
- Final Notes
- References
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