Abstract:

Special education versus inclusive education — implications for the innovative dual studies discussed herein: “Education and Rehabilitation of Intellectually Disabled Persons with Psychomotricity.” Special education stems from the medical model of disability (Rayner, 2007). As such, for many years, it was placed between medical sciences (especially psychiatry) and psychology, where it focused on persons burdened with a deficiency or a dysfunction. It was the type of deficiency that determined the choice of type of special school the person attended. Revealing the deficiency entailed ‘labelling’, confirmation of a certain inability, disorder, being someone different. This resulted in the needs of the dysfunctional person being marginalised, and, ultimately, lead to social exclusion. Special education was offered in special kindergartens and schools where specially-trained educators ran special education programs. This pattern was followed in special education until mid-1980s. And it was impossible to continue any longer. The views of postmodern philosophers such as M. Foucault (1983), the studies of educators — P. Freire in his “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (Calves, 2009), the perception of a weaker man in the works of authors such as E. Levinas (Benaroyo 2016), all facilitated the creation of the social model of disability in the 1990s (Oliver, 2013).  The views of critical educators and philosophers demonstrate the value of an intellectually disabled person in confrontation of a healthy person with a less capable one. According to C. Levi-Strauss (1983), we are only two variants of the form of transformation of a common mind.  E. Levinas (1991) called to the man:  “To accept the Other means to give.” “Nothing is more important, noble and sacred than the responsibility for the Other.” Levinas stressed that there is only one way to discover oneself: by discovering the responsibility for another person as the path to yourself. Experiences related to the cruelties of war, Hitlerism, devaluation of humanity were all significant for the Europeans in the development of the social disability model (cf. Bettelheim, 1967; Levinas, 1997).