Session Information
Session 9, Mapping History of Education
Papers
Time:
2005-09-09
13:00-14:30
Room:
ENG
Chair:
Ian Grosvenor
Contribution
The French philosopher Michel Foucault is particularly known for his complex and theoretical analyses of the concept power. To many scholars Foucault's theories offered an opportunity for historical research. Especially the history of psychiatry has undergone some major changes through works as Console and Classify of Jan Goldstein and Robert Castel's Histoire de la Psychiatrie. In this presentation we would like to demonstrate the practical usefulness of Foucault's conceptual framework for the history of the care for handicapped people, in particular the history of special education. It seems to us that Foucault was one of the few scholars who could answer the question why disability became in the nineteenth century an important object of the increasing scientific system. In the partial substitution of Foucault's different forms of power - sovereign power, disciplinary power and bio-power - disability appears as one of the many foci on which individualising as well as totalitarian strategies act on. The new pouvoir-savoir-complex (visible = verifiable) that settled down during the nineteenth century, visualised disability in a scientific way as both individual deformity and national threat.We will try to illustrate this with the help of Ovide Decroly (1871-1932), a world-famous Belgian reform pedagogue (or new educationalist), who in particular in his capacity of psycho-pedagogue (medico-pedagogue as well as pedotechnician, or in his case both physician and pedagogue) produced a series of strategies to define, classify, and, thus to visualise disability. In order to realise an educational system that was adapted to the individuality of each child, included the so-called abnormal children, Decroly was an advocate of special education, in itself already a way to visualise disability. But, the effectiveness of this differentiated system depended on a scientific well-considered definition of abnormality and on a rigorous and consistent classification of abnormal children. By doing this he also defined the borders between abnormality and normality (cf. Alfred Binet's frontières anthropométriques). The strategies he used to accomplish this task were: (a) case studies (cf. clinical methodology, observations); (b) (mental) tests; (c) medico-pedagogical records and inquiries (questionnaires); (d) biometrical/ anthropometrical research; and (e) cinematography. In our contribution we will on the one hand introduce these strategies by making use of illustrations of forms, inquiries, tables, and fragments of films, and on the other hand try to connect these strategies explicitly to the theoretical framework as mentioned above.
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