Altering the model: the challenge of achieving inclusion

Abstract

Besides “inclusion” meaning incorporation within the education system, there is also “inclusion” signifying the incorporation of knowledge, two distinct processes which went hand-in-hand to start with but which, as education systems expanded, have begun to drift apart. While the population as a whole, including the more deprived sectors, has improved its educational level over past decades, in more recent times there has been little to show for the considerable efforts made. It is as if the process had reached a ceiling, owing to practices of educational marginalization that are so embedded that they perpetually recreate themselves. The education system has lost its bearings because a new approach is needed with the emergence of the information and communication society, which implies a new definition of knowledge, cut off from its origins. The idea of “including” must also be a key notion in relation to the search for a fairer, more democratic society. This implies developing a number of viewpoints or fundamental attitudes when we consider inclusive education. There is the ideological/political point of view—which means developing the ideal of justice and democracy within the framework of education as a right; the epistemological aspect—which entails supporting the new educational approach in the very latest developments of the theory of complexity; the pedagogical aspect—which entails adopting the advances made in the new learning sciences in order to develop a new “technology of educational production” (didactics) that will guarantee the entire population’s ability to reason; and the institutional point of view—which requires reviewing the notion of a “school system” and incorporating other institutional spaces by considering the whole of society as offering potential “learning environments”.