Czech Govt Agency for Social Inclusion in Roma Localities director on defenders of "special" schools

The following commentary was published on 11 November 2011 in the Czech daily Lidové noviny.

Lidové noviny has published an interview with Jiří Pilař, a staffer with the Prague 9 education department (“Vládní koncepce je strašně nebezpečná”, LN 5. 11 – “Government’s Concept is Terribly Dangerous”). In that interview, Pilař is covering up what is the essence of this unresolved problem.

In 1996, Pilař occupied the crucial post of director of the Special Education and Institutional Care Department at the Czech Education Ministry. For 13 long years, until 2009, he prevented every single transformation activity deemed necessary in the fields of institutional care and special education, areas which swallow up dozens of billions of crowns every year. Czech schools (and not just “special” ones) have badly needed a transformational change from the rigid communist approach to education.

As a result of this neglected development, elementary schools are not prepared to educate children who need individual care (the ministry, with Pilař in that crucial position, never managed to design the conditions necessary). The gulf between mainstream education (ordinary elementary schools) and the “practical” schools is widening. There is de facto no interaction between the “practical” schools and mainstream ones. Some parents of children at the “practical” schools are unable to imagine that their children could attend an ordinary elementary school, receive individual support, and therefore not remain stuck on the margins without the possibility of succeeding on the labor market when their education is completed.

The “practical” schools are not to blame in this situation. The special needs educators who teach in them (often achieving great results), can serve as a model for inclusive education in ordinary elementary schools. The “practical” schools, if transformed into mainstream schools, could push through the changes needed, if necessary through “special needs” classes.

In this situation, Jiří Pilař – as a self-described expert – is daring to publicly warn against these changes, even though it was on his watch, 15 years ago, that the “special” schools system ran amok. In the interview, he proudly confesses how he and Marta Teplá, a longtime Education Ministry bureaucrat who has recently been dismissed, built an education system for the children he refers to as the “mentals”: “Special schools for the education of mentals had been the Cinderella of the system, fighting for their existence, only after the revolution did they start to bloom, to get new materials…”

It is not only Romani children (27 % of them) who have ended up in the “practical” schools, but hundreds of thousands of other children who have been diagnosed with “light mental disability”. In 25 % of cases, even children without any such diagnosis have been enrolled in these schools! Pilař goes on to regret that he was not able to fill the “practical” schools with all of the so-called “borderline” cases (i.e., those with IQs of around 70).

During Pilař’s juggling with IQ numbers and his defense of the approach taken by psychologists in school counseling centers – who often (not always!) are unable to distinguish between the influence of social environment and a child’s actual gifts and IQ – the basic mission of education has been lost: The education and rearing of all children so they can fulfill their educational potential and prepare for the successful development of their careers. Suddenly it is no longer of vital concern to Pilař that we provide vulnerable children with support so they can rise as far as possible from the situation in which they find themselves at the start of their education and, at the end of their educational career, be not only well-educated, but also active citizens, socially competent, and capable of solidarity with others. West of our borders they no longer discuss whether to include everyone in education or not. What they discussed is how to do include them.

This is what makes Jiří Pilař’s argumentation – his case against inclusion – so enormously tendentious. He wants to take revenge for having been dismissed from the ministry. He publicly bragged that he was irreplaceable and that he would “survive all ministers”. The association he has subsequently established is doing its best to present itself as an expert professional platform representing the interests of all special needs educators, which of course is not a valid claim. Experts from university education departments and special needs educators in the field have instead associated themselves in the Czech Professional Society for Inclusive Education (Česká odborná společnost pro inkluzivní vzdělávání) under the auspices of the special needs education department at Charles University in Prague. The Society works with data gleaned from practice and research in the Czech Republic and abroad.

Pilař is building up the position of “his” rival association to the Society by stirring up a permanent sense of threat among the public and special needs educators (see his interview, where he says, “If you force these children into elementary school, there are two possible outcomes: Either the child will become neurotic, perhaps even psychologically ill, schizophrenic, or he will find a release in aggression and start to beat up everyone around him.”).

Pilař argues tendentiously and wrongfully against inclusion because he wants parents and teachers to feel threatened by the idea that in one classroom “there would be a hearing-impaired pupil, two mentally disabled pupils, one in a wheelchair, children with various behavioral disorders.” This proves how out of touch with reality he is with respect to the actual distribution of persons living with serious disability in the population.

Pilař is also deceptively interpreting the Government’s Strategy for the Fight against Social Inclusion, doing his best to portray the experts who designed the Strategy as incompetent naifs. The Strategy was developed by more than 100 experts from ministries, municipalities, nonprofits, schools and universities. Several special needs educators were involved in the design, including the head of the Association of Educational Psychology Counseling Centers, (Asociace pedagogicko-psychologických poraden), PhDr. Věra Podhorná. These experts have scheduled the transformation (not the closure) of the “practical” schools to take place over a four-year period. The central focus of the transformation is to support mainstream elementary schools so they will be able to educate children who need an individual approach. This will all take place while preserving the segment of special needs schooling for children living with medium-to-severe congenital disabilities, for which a mainstream school is objectively not a good educational environment.