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4. INTEGRATION OR INCLUSION? The idea of placing students with special needs into regular classrooms, or in other words Integration, is a concept which began to emerge worldwide in the 1960s; the concept of inclusion two decades later. In the Czech Republic, these two concepts started to be more strongly promoted in the 1990s. Despite their relatively long history, there is still not a unanimous definition of them to date. Across Europe, we observe inconsistencies in terminology. Some countries continue to use the concept of integrated education (e.g. Germany), as it is customary in their environment and culture. The concept of inclusion is widely used in Scandinavian countries and in Great Britain. In recent years, it has also become one of the aims of educational policy in the Czech Republic. Integration and inclusion are understood by some as complementary concepts, whose contents overlap and whose use is therefore interchangeable. However, many experts (cf. Ainscow 2005, Vislie 2003) point to the fact that these concepts are based on different values and beliefs, laying out different key areas and that their impact on the educational process is different. For this reason, according to these authors they should not be interchangeable. When integration emerged abroad in the 1960s and 70s, it primarily sought to reform the current system. This reform focused on three core: 1. The rights to schooling and education for disabled children. Although "all children" officially had the right to education, in every country there was a certain percentage of children who, due to their disabilities, were educated in non-school facilities (medical, etc.) or were classified as uneducatable and were not obliged to attend school. Integration focused on changing the system; the centre of its interest was therefore not the school climate, skills and attitudes of teachers and the public, nor the process of teaching and the methods and forms used in the classroom. Inclusion is an inherently broader concept, incorporating more aspects. Some of them are not new and we would find them even in the concept of integration, but the core areas of their focus differ. Inclusion focuses mainly on the quality of education provided for pupils with special educational needs educated in mainstream schools. Inclusion can be seen in even wider sense, as a method which mainstream schools should apply to all their pupils. This means creating "inclusive school for all" without mentioning pupils with special educational needs. Ainscow (2005) contrasts inclusion with the social exclusion of vulnerable groups of people, which applies to all areas of life, not just education. Below we offer a comprehensive, visual comparison of the various concepts across the spectrum from special education, through integration to inclusion.
Table 1: Comparison of the concepts of special education, mainstream education, integrated and inclusive education according to Miles (2000) |