Persons with Disabilities Facing the Mirage of the Right to Education: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Abstract

This article collects the educational path derived from the significant changes that have taken place throughout the recent history of education in Spain and, specifically, in relation to people with disabilities. As a starting point, an analysis is carried out of the transformations that have occurred in the discourse on the education of people with lower functional performance, until a historical approach is reached by virtue of which the different stages and binding educational regulations are revealed (with national and international character), highlighting‒exclusively–those that have a direct impact on the quality of life of people in a situation of disabilities. As can be imagined, the history of education in Spain has evolved as policies have changed their purposes around the diversity of students and their universality in the classroom. In this sense, the need to make visible this new paradigm of human rights derived from the International Convention on the Rights of Persons in a situation of Disabilities (UN, 2006) and, in contrast, the continuity of a national corpus juris that reveals the ineffectiveness of the State and other institutions to extinguish situations of discrimination on the grounds of low functional performance.

The Right to Inclusive Quality Education: Primary School Teachers’ Perceptions Based on the EPREPADI-1 Scale

“…If this were the case, no child would be left out of the mainstream education system, because the implementation of all mainstream measures means that they would be able to participate successfully in the development of planned activities. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this fact is that the educational centres do not establish (within their plans for attention to diversity, (PAD)) the possibility for their teachers to develop the twenty-five existing ordinary measures [4,32]. This confirms that, although teachers claim to know the ordinary measures, the truth is that what they really know are those that their schools offer, within the catalogue set out in their PAD, and the results confirm their difficulty in differentiating some ordinary measures from specific ones.…”

“…In the same way, the lack of training in this awareness is a determining factor in the creation of exclusionary situations in schools. Likewise, the use of inclusive semantics is another aspect to consider in the construction of discriminatory situations, which is fully related to the perception and training that teachers have of students with low functional performance [4,32]. In this sense, despite the fact that a high percentage of teachers point out the relevance of using inclusive language to achieve true inclusion, they continue to refer these students in a paternalistic or condescending way, as well as claiming not to use the term disability with their students in order to avoid making them feel bad.…”