Ideal of special education

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32873, 23 March 1972, Page 14

Ideal of special education

The ideal of special education in New Zealand was to educate all children in ordinary schools, the Minister of Education (Mr Pickering) told the Christchurch North Lions Chib last evening. Mr Pickering said he was not happy with the term “special education,” because it implied a segregation and setting apart of those children needing it, and because it also implied that there was a great difference between special education and that which was given to children who lived normal lives and went to normal schools.

“All of us keep that ideal of educating children together so that the handicapped child is not made to feel his or her handicap—to be as little aware of it as possible,” he said.

"We must be careful to ensure that he is helped unobtrusively, and continually, and continually feels that he or she is part, a complete part, of the great human family and not a special case of object of pity. This is not an aim that anyone in special education ever expects to see realised, but it is a noble ideal at which to aim.”

Mr Pickering said it was a well-proven fact that nothing was better for a child bom with a handicap than to go to a normal school and, so far as was possible, to participate in the normal life of the school. “Of course, many children who are being helped by our special education service do go to normal schools and participate in the normal, every-day life of these schools,” he said. There were about 11,000 children in special-education classes in New Zealand, said Mr Pickering, and about 1050 teachers for those classes. “This shows the concentrated care and attention which these children receive, since the normal primary-school staffing ratio is now officially one to 35.” • -

Nineteen years ago, there were 25 speech clinics in New Zealand, Mr Pickering said; now there were more than 100. In 1949, there were

two psychologists in the Department of Education; now there were 60, based in 20 centres throughout the country.

“We now have residential schools and special classes in ordinary schools for maladjusted children, a hearingassessment and guidance service for deaf children, a special unit for the education of deaf and blind children, schools for children in welfare institutions, and the prison education service,” Mr Pickering said. “These figures might seem to show a nation in which, unhappily, the percentage of children needing help is rising swiftly— must too swiftly. In fact, the increase in such services simply means that we are now beginning to cope with the true number of the handicapped in our community," he said. "The number of the severely afflicted appears to be rising. But this is only because medical science, in working its wonders, is ensuring that babies who used to die now live, even though afflicted, and we are taking better care of them,” said Mr Pickering. "Science, which is saving more children from death ana so providing new problems in special education, is, to-

gether with technology, providing us with new methods of coping, new audio-visual aids, and techniques, that give the teacher more tools with which to work.”