Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

An Obstacle Race: A Case Study of a Child's Schooling in Australia and England

1988; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02674648866780121

0267-4645

Jan Branson, Don Miller, Kylie Branson,

Education Systems and Policy

ABSTRACT This account of the struggle by a 'disabled' child to experience a normal education, to lead a normal life, is the basis for a critique of science and the professions, for her struggle has been against those specialists who shape our ideologies, the high priests of the religion of science. Her story reveals the deep-seated prejudices of our society, prejudices which derive from the increasing domination, since the sixteenth century, of a mechanistic, phallogocentric scientism which, in the name of reason, denies individuality, creativity, spirituality, variability, defining and thus condemning those suffering physical or perceptual disabilities beyond the pale. They are deemed 'unnatural', 'negative', 'abnormal' through recourse to a narrow, mechanistic and artificial view of nature. A disabled child sets out on the race through life weighed down by ruthless handicappers but in her triumph shows how ignorant the medical model is of humanity and how restrictive our schools are of creativity. Her success questions our most deeply-rooted assumptions.