Between text and life: a reading of special education policies

Abstract

On the sidelines of the State political agenda, special education has traditionally been organized as the specialized educational catering that substitutes regular teaching in special classes and schools. In the last decades, Brazil, in tune with international movements, has established a series of laws, policies and programs to tackle inequalities and social exclusion. In such movement, subjects with global learning difficulties (GLD), traditionally excluded from schooling processes, are accepted in the classroom, and in the old school yard. What rationalities give support to the forms of naming and identifying who are these pupils? How do we understand the relation between the diagnostics, the policies, and the inscription of the school (im) possibilities? To what extent inclusive policies of special education deconstruct the meanings that associate GLDs with ineducability or, still, difference with abnormality and inferiority? This essay discusses the implementation of guidelines of inclusion considering the political text and its effects on the context of the practice. Philosophical hermeneutics offers the times and focus for this reading. The argument is woven with and from the speeches of a pupil and of teachers in different fields of research. From text to life, the increase in enrolments; the proliferation of the meanings about these pupils and the school possibilities; the re-enactment of old impasses faced with the new, the different. Although within the sphere of principles equality and differences are both recognized, in the concrete life in schools the notion of the different as unequal still endures. From inclusion to belonging, we put our hopes here in the dialogue as valuation of alterity and requirement of belonging.