Looking for Parallel Themes

I remember Chomsky, when he was visiting India in November 2001 – a few weeks after I had returned to India to take up the teaching position in the University of Delhi that was offered to me long-distance while I was still in Germany/ UK – he was looking for a rather dull and dispassionate parallelism between the imperialist aggression of earlier centuries and the then current one; as if, all this was but expected. Those of us who grew up with almost the last vestiges of socialism, consider such positioning nothing but cynical.

However, over the years, I have come to appreciate this semi-journalistic, semi-academic strategy of seeking out such minimal parallel pairs. Apart from the obvious -- and much needed – in particular for issues that are almost universally neglected, populism that such a highlighting brings about, it provides you a pathway to follow your activism on; as long as there is decisive activism at the end of such a semi-academic tunnel, it cannot be cynical.

Here, I am interested in looking at a particular parallel that is more or less well-known in the context in which it is embedded – the context of oppression of women and of disabled persons. In the first stage, women were simply “added-in” to the male-dominated view of the world. However, it is only the so-called second wave of feminism that brought about an epistemological change in the perspective – it became a methodology, a decidedly feminist perspective of knowledge in general.

This has partly been the story of disability as a category as well. Disability has simply been an “add-on” category, especially so, in fact in early feminist literature, the following comment is therefore not a
surprise:

‘There are startling parallels between what feminists find disappointing and insulting in Western philosophical thought and what many women have found troubling in much of Western feminism’ (Spelman, 1990:6)

This parallel within a parallel is now a well recognised theme in the disability studies literature after Morris (1993). I will therefore move away from this well trodden path and look at in fact yet another parallel between, not oppression, but so-called “liberation” of women and of disabled persons. My area of focus will be education.

Sixty years ago, the earliest education commission, the University Education Commission report of 1948-49 of newly independent India, had a whole chapter devoted to Women’s Education which clearly stated that “There cannot be an educated people without educated women. If general education had to be limited to men or to women, that opportunity should be given to women, for then it would most surely be passed on to the next generation”. A humanistic statement like this by civil servants and bureaucrats is heart warming. However, the chapter also contains a section on what is called “Special Education” which lists and justifies home economics, nursing, teaching (primary and secondary schools), and the fine arts as the desirable vocations for women. It justifies this “desirable” alternative by the strange reasoning that to train a person who will not practise is a social loss, assuming (and therefore implying) that ‘to not practice’ is by choice; strange because the document does not bother to find out why women trained, for example, in medical sciences, do not take up medical practice. In addition, in its section on “Future of Women’s Education” it re-emphasises the need for, what it calls, “redirection of interest” through advocacy and counselling for women and people in general to remove social taboos against these vocations.

Furthermore, in the section on ‘Preparation of Home and Family Life’, the document advises that women’s education should include practical “laboratory” experience in the care of a home and family. It further includes the following as ‘equipment’ in women’s education:
(i) A baby home.
(ii) A nursery school, which incidentally would relieve nearby mothers during a part of the day.
(iii) A club for school children and adolescents.
(iv) A little home for convalescents.
(v) A small home for old people.
(vi) A home setting where students may have experience home Maintenance and operation, and where they may act as hostesses.

It’s interesting to see that out of these 6 equipments, 4 of them contain the word ‘home’ (underlined here), and the two which don’t contain the word home, imply women’s location as indoors. So, although the document stars with a visionary statement, it clearly locates the women firmly inside the home.

These three themes, (i) devalued social roles through special education, (ii) “redirection of interest”, and (iii) confinement in homes, are some of the very clear parallels found in how disabled persons have been treated and are continued to be treated.

Special schools for disabled children has been right from the National Policy of Education (NPE) 1986 to the very current Right to Education, 2009 aggressively pushed as the alternative for education/ training for disabled children. This is very clearly stated in the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act, 1995, the main disability act of India, and also in related documents like Comprehensive Action Plan on the Inclusion in Education of Children and Youth with Disabilities (IECYD); the latter containing the largest section on “Education in Special Schools”. Thus the concept of special schools,
as a modern-day version of the eugenics’ notion of segregation, continue to develop as a small-scale industry in the country.

A theme similar to the above “redirection of interest” is seen in the current practice in Indian schools of not allowing especially blind students to opt for mathematics as a subject at school level – the excuse being Braille not able to create special symbols and diagrams. As a result, blind students can never take up any science subject or Economics at the graduate level, and are forced take ‘softer’ subjects instead.

Similarly, the IEYCD lists among its goals the following:

• To provide for home based learning for persons with severe, multiple and intellectual disability
• To promote distance education for those who require an individualised pace of learning
  

It also talks about setting up resource centres which are envisioned to support non-formal education as also home-based learning activities. Clearly, home-based education is nothing but another form of segregation albeit in their own homes.

Although as far as the polices, documents and acts are concerned, equality in women’s education has been successfully programmed over the years, no such development has taken place in the case of disabled persons,whose education continues to be haunted by the modern-day segregationists’instrument of special schools.