This roundtable will explore the thesis that despite the idealism that has characterized the inclusive education movement it is in theory, policy and practice mostly an illusion. The social justice underpinnings of inclusive education have failed for the most part to be translated into effective policies and practices. While educational systems continue struggling with managing diverse student populations, inclusive education tends to be reduced to a new name for ‘special education’. Even in cases where inclusive education is perceived as an opportunity for change, embedded assumptions about normality and the normalization role of schools are not questioned and challenged. The failure of inclusive education to become a central force for education reform reflects in part the theoretical vacuum within which ideas of ‘inclusive education’ have been situated: the great expectations of the early 1990s have been replaced by a lack of critical engagement with the realities of education and schools. This theoretical vacuum is either hidden in the escapism of much of the postmodern writings on inclusion or in the pragmatic watering-down of the underlying idealism of inclusion. Where positive changes in school practices have drawn on the ideas and policies of inclusive education a range of competing educational drivers have independently limited the possibilities for realizing inclusive educational goals in school practice. For example, in the developing world there has been an upsurge of interventions at the school and classroom level designed to create more inclusive environments yet the meaning of ‘inclusion’ in the developing world is highly contested and often critically influenced by perspectives from the developed world. These are easily translated into proselytizing interventions that are insensitive to local cultural, social and economic contexts and which can lead to inclusive education as a technical ‘fix’ for wider inequalities arising within a postcolonial environment. Homi Bhabha has argued that a view of global cosmopolitanism has emerged founded on ideas of progress that are complicit with neo-liberal forms of governance and free-market forces of competition. It is a cosmopolitanism that celebrates a world of plural cultures as it moves swiftly and selectively from one island of prosperity to another, ‘paying conspicuously less attention to the persistent inequality and immiseration produced by such unequal and uneven development’. This ‘one-nation’ globalization is premised upon the assimilation of difference by an over-riding imperative of technologically driven ‘modernization’. This imperative, which has political and moral as well as economic dimensions, crosses boundaries that are both geographic and cultural.

We will examine the growth and development of inclusive education as a reaction to the rapid expansion of largely segregated systems of special education in both the developed and developing world in the 20th century. We will consider the international, historical and social contexts of inclusive education policies and practices together with the major theoretical developments that have underpinned new ways of thinking about inclusion. These include a wide range of influences from disability politics to the social inclusion agendas characteristic of globalized economies, advanced through new political formations (such as the European Union) and intergovernmental agencies such as the World Bank and UNESCO. Our discussion uses a range of methods which include documentary analysis of policy and theoretical perspectives on inclusion as well as case study approaches.

The roundtable discussion will explore the ways in which inclusion is contested within the framework of wider processes of social, educational and economic transformation aiming to answer the following questions: What are the implications of understanding the rhetoric of inclusion within the broader dynamics of postcolonial globalization? Does the idea of inclusive education in practice merely reflect and legitimize the modernization project of neoliberalism in which education systems both in the developed and developing world are incorporated into the globalized world of free-trade and institutional homogeneity?