Inclusion: theory and practice

This paper is adapted and updated from one that first appeared in the International Journal of Special Education Vol. 6 (1991) No.2, pp. 201-212.

Mobilising Skills for Children with Learning Difficulties in Pakistan: A Personal Cross-cultural Experience

Christine Miles (formerly School Principal, Mental Health Centre, Peshawar, Pakistan)

Synopsis
Many countries are attempting to develop educational responses to children with learning difficulties, whether in special schools, units or ordinary classrooms, from baseline cultural heritages that differ substantially from the dominant modern Western, urban, middle-class cultures. The British author of this paper spent 11 years in Pakistan developing staff and parent skills for educating children with learning difficulties or multiple disabilities, and encountered many educational and conceptual differences. Outside the islands of urban affluence, mainstream schools in Pakistan are mostly crowded and poorly equipped. The pedagogical method is largely copying and memorisation, enforced with physical punishment. Trainee teachers expected special needs education to be similar, and wished to acquire the necessary techniques by memorising a textbook. Parents expected the special school to be like the mainstream school. Transplant of Western special needs education to Pakistan required the expatriate to try to reconceive her experience, to relearn and communicate it in ways conceptually familiar to Pakistani staff. Local concepts of 'learning' and of 'the child' seemed so different as to make it hard to build a Western model based on a child-centred approach and individual planning towards independence and autonomy.

Introduction
The 1980s and 1990s have seen an increase in the number of Western special educators making links with countries having less developed special education systems, in order to share their skills and resources and to gain new perspectives from the cross-cultural experience. The present account is based on experiences in Peshawar, Pakistan from 1978 to 1989. Since 1990 I have worked in England, mainly with families of Asian origin, the majority being from Pakistan - this has given me further opportunity to reflect on the interfaces between cultures and the responses of different societies to people with learning difficulties. At Peshawar, in the North West Frontier Province, I was running a special school as part of the Mental Health Centre (MHC), and developing staff skills for work with children with learning difficulties and multiple disabilities. In the early years this was on a local basis. Later, I was involved in inservice training on a national basis.

I shall describe the cross-cultural differences and difficulties I met, since this may be of interest to others contemplating a similar exchange of country and experience. However, before describing 'difficulties', it is important to make several provisos:

1. Despite some problems, I believe a great deal of very useful work was done by my Pakistani colleagues, trainees and family members. Like most development agents, I came to see that the important thing was not what I myself did or taught but what my local colleagues and families achieved, what they learnt for themselves and developed in their own ways.

2. If I found some 'obvious' Western concepts hard to communicate, at the same time my Pakistani hosts undoubtedly found me a 'slow learner' when it came to some 'obvious' aspects of their customs, cultures and ways of communicating. I became aware of this slowly and indirectly, as my hosts were mostly too polite to point it out to my face.

3. Current Western approaches to special needs education are certainly not the only viable methods; they are not necessarily the ones that should be adopted in Pakistan; and my presentation of them was not necessarily representative of the whole range, nor ideally performed! I was invited by Pakistanis to do, and to share, what I knew rather than to demonstrate the entire range of modern knowledge.

4. Some features of Pakistani cultures or types of behaviour might be disapproved in some Western middle-class societies, and the converse is certainly true; but in the present account such value judgements are beside the point. Every culture has its own logic and self-consistency. My interest was to find out how Pakistanis could best help children with special needs to learn and grow into appropriate roles in their own society, rather than to impose my own ideas about how humans in general should behave.

Further, it must be noted that few of the people with whom I was involved were from the Westernised elite who normally represent Pakistan at conferences abroad or who are chosen for studies in Europe or the USA. Much of my experience might not apply to them, but I believe it is relevant to the other 98% of Pakistanis engaged in the front line of special needs education, whether as parents or teaching staff. By 'Pakistanis' I refer to people living in Pakistan during the last 20 years, whose numbers grew from about 80 million in 1978 to 140 million in 1998. The several million people of Pakistani ethnicity living in Europe and North America are also sometimes known as 'Pakistanis', and may indeed have dual nationality; but many of these people have developed or acquired inter-cultural outlooks that differ to some extent from those I encountered in Pakistan itself.

My first task was to train staff of the MHC day school where I was employed by the Diocese of Peshawar, Church of Pakistan. From 1978 to about 1982, our teachers were young people with school leaving certificates, and some female classroom assistants with little or no formal education. I worked in the classrooms, at first with three staff and ten children, then with four or five staff and some twenty children as the school began to develop. We studied together the needs of our pupils and aimed to develop appropriate programs for them. We also had study sessions using books from Britain. Most of the MHC staff could understand a little English, and I learnt to speak mostly Urdu with them and also Pushto, Hindko or Punjabi with families who came for counselling.

Until about 1987, there were no formal, government-recognized training courses for teachers of children with learning difficulties, neither initial nor inservice. In 1978, the MHC school was one of only six in Pakistan for such children (M.Miles, 1980). Later, it developed into a resource centre (M.Miles, 1990) to which other agencies and local government sent staff for experience and training, some with postgraduate qualifications, some qualified teachers, some school leavers, some with no formal schooling. Students of social work, psychology and medicine came for visits, placements and experience. Many parents came for short periods daily to learn how to help their own children. As our MHC staff gained in experience and competence, they accompanied me to other cities to give short inservice courses and we assisted with government workshops and short courses, some with participation by short term foreign consultants.

My aim throughout my time in Pakistan was to promote a developmental child-centred approach, to enable teachers to assess children and develop appropriate teaching programs, to develop teachers' confidence and to encourage partnership with parents. I had anticipated the need for some 'cultural adaptation' in developing special needs education in another country, but before going to Pakistan I had thought of this in terms of adapting the list of specific skills taught in school, so that it should be more culturally relevant, while remaining within the same broad agenda of aims and curriculum that I had practised in Britain. For example, I had expected to look for different pre-vocational skills, different social and daily living skills, and to find little emphasis on literacy in a country where the majority of adults have not learnt to read.

During one's early period in a new country there is some culture shock, but after a few years one expects to become familiar with the general culture. Yet I found that throughout my years in Pakistan I was grappling with new perceptions of cultural differences relating to education, children and disability, in an effort to communicate in conceptual terms that would be easily understood by my colleagues or course participants. After 11 years, for example, at a Diocesan education conference I outlined, in Urdu, some basic and non-controversial ideas of modern Western educational practice (which were then published in a leading national newspaper, C.Miles, 1989). It still came as a surprise when these ideas were promptly and publicly dismissed by a middle-aged participant, one of the more educated among the Diocesan clergymen, who asserted simply and confidently that "children don't learn like that". His statement closed off any discussion, with a century of Western educational psychology in the rubbish bin.

The Educational Background
In the first half of my stay, I was mostly aware of cultural factors resulting from the profoundly different education system: differences in experience of school, ideas of what school and education consist of, and what 'learning' means. This affected not only what I was training people to do and how they were to conduct themselves in schools, but also what they expected from a course of training, i.e. how they themselves would expect to learn.

Trainees had their own concepts of education and learning, based on their earlier personal experiences. It was difficult, but vital, to try to build on their concepts and experiences, however much they were at variance with my own. It would have been all too easy to dismiss their traditional view of education and to regard them as 'empty vessels' to fill with modern knowledge about children and education. To do so would, of course, merely have perpetuated the didactic-receptive approach that I was aiming to replace.

The mainstream Pakistani education system, in common with that of many developing countries (and Britain not so long back) expects children to devote themselves to rote learning. Pupils sit passively in rows and chant or copy or just sit and memorise their 'lessons', i.e. the pages of their government-prescribed textbooks. The teacher is to be obeyed, never questioned. 'Knowledge' consists of the words to be repeated back, not concepts to be understood. The only skills required are silent obedience and memorisation, from primary to college level (Quddus, 1990, 167-171; Jaffer, Wellestrand & Jaffer, 1990, 46-47; Planning Commission, 1988, 243). The teachers get little encouragement from their working environment.

"Primary schools in rural areas are generally housed in make-shift Kucha structures totally unfit as schools. They are usually composed of small dark rooms with little ventilation. In summer the children have the choice either to face suffocation or move outside in bright hot sun. During winter they shiver with cold on the damp floor. There are no toilet facilities and no boundary walls." (Pakistan Commission, 1989, 71).

There are school places for about 60% of the nation's children, with primary teachers managing classes of up to 80 pupils. Of those who start, half drop out before completing primary school, a situation practically unchanged from the 1980s to the present (Pakistan Statistical, 1988, 9 & 375ff.; UNICEF, 1998, 108.) Competitive exams start at the end of the first year in government schools, but some children repeat years; they usually drop out after the second failure. Private schools have competitive admission exams for 4-year-olds (Parviz, 1988). The general absence of birth certificates allows some flexibility, but ambitious parents sometimes boost their child's age in order to 'get him ahead'. Within this system, it is hard to find a place for considering special needs. However, some schools permit children with evident disabilities to enrol, and a small number encourage this and even make concessions for their difficulties. Many schools have children with unnoticed mild to moderate impairments (M.Miles, 1985). As long as the child passes the annual exams, she is likely to be allowed to continue - provided the family is also willing.

Ideas that I had expected to communicate easily often needed to be reconstructed and rebuilt in what seemed to be a much more roundabout way if they were to be grasped by adults who had been through the local schooling system. This could be tiresome, but overall it was stimulating to discover how deeply incomprehensible are many fundamentals of Western education, which I had taken for granted. Examples of ideas that sometimes met with disbelief, relating to mainstream school experiences:

1. That it is possible to be relaxed and friendly to children without losing respect. Professor Ajmal (1986, 27), a senior Pakistani psychologist, noted that

"Friendship with children is possible only for a dedicated teacher, especially when he is ready to cast off his 'persona' and become a playmate, at times, with a child or many children. Such a friendship is again conspicuous by its absence in our cultural activities."

2. That children can benefit from being allowed to draw freely, rather than copying a teacher's drawing from the blackboard.

3. That addition is an easier skill to learn than multiplication. The Pakistani maths curriculum teaches multiplication tables before addition. Piagetian studies at the National Institute of Psychology indicate that the cognitive demands of most of the maths textbooks are much above the cognitive levels of the pupils from whom they are prescribed (Israr, 1985).

4. That a child will learn to read more quickly in a language she understands. Among Pakistani children who learn to read, most do so in a second language. It is commonly believed that it is easier for a child to learn to read English than Urdu. Urdu is the mother tongue of some 10% of the population but also the language of most broadcasting. Children have far more exposure to hearing Urdu than they do to English.

Trainees gaining experience at the MHC school could see in daily practice the principles I was advocating. When I visited other schools in a training role, if some children were present it was possible to demonstrate that my ideas worked, but when involved in a course with no children present there could be difficulties in overcoming scepticism. Videos, though useful in many situations, were of less use in overcoming conceptual barriers. Viewers tended to believe that the children were specially selected and rehearsed, and were not really disabled. In the case of videos from European sources, a major difference is that the children shown have usually been attending school since the age of five, often with some earlier nursery provision or other support. By contrast, Pakistani children with special needs often start school at a much later age, when difficult behaviour patterns may have become established and emotional disturbances have arisen because of unfortunate home situations or undiagnosed sensory deficits.

Even in the expensive, fashionable, private nursery schools, three year olds sit at rows of desks to chant and write English and Urdu alphabets and the numbers. They chant English nursery rhymes, some Urdu poetry and copy the teacher's drawings from the blackboard. 'Innovative' modern schools may have children sitting at tables instead of desks, but with no change in curricular content. Children soon learn to sit passively and only speak when spoken to. There is often no outdoor space for play. I spent a little time advising at a new so-called 'Montessori' school functioning as described above. Some of the staff were interested to hear what Maria Montessori might have done with their pupils, but this interest was soon neutralised by a newly appointed head teacher with traditional views.

In many special schools the teachers and administrators expect to follow a similarly formal curriculum. Several purpose-designed special schools have been built with no play area. There are also a few models of a different kind of special school, one that would be recognisable in the West, as described, for example, by Jaffer and Jaffer (1990, 289-292); but often those teachers who have had the experience of spending some time in such a school are not permitted to change their approach on returning to their own schools.

An issue often raised by trainees, when they have gained the confidence to ask questions (not a culturally normal habit), is whether beating is permitted in school. As Shakil (1990) noted "In our educational institutions the rod still reigns supreme." Children may be severely beaten for errors that include giving incorrect answers to questions or producing a piece of work deemed unsatisfactory. In her first month working in a local church school, one British volunteer was traumatised when she took a small boy to the headmistress to be reprimanded for misbehaviour. Before she had finished stating the case, the powerfully built headmistress gave the boy a smack on the ear that knocked him across the room. However much I showed disapproval of the use of corporal punishment, most teachers were very reluctant to give up this option. Teachers coming into special education after mainstream experience saw little need to change their usual practice. At the MHC school, our male teachers of older boys were unwilling to accept a total ban on hitting, though they used it only as a last resort, and then only on hands and bottoms (unlike mainstream schools where blows are commonly across face or head), and they agreed not to use sticks. Female teachers, working with girls and small boys, were quite prepared to give up this sanction. We banned new teachers from using any form of physical sanction for their first two years with us, so that they were obliged to learn other methods of control.

A management problem from our early days in Peshawar concerned conflicting cultural views of safety and responsibility. The local feeling was that a teacher would be held responsible if she were actually present when an accident took place. But if she were out of the room, how could she be held responsible for what the children might get up to? This was one issue over which I imposed my cultural view, in British colonial style, and the staff got used to it. As a result, our teachers were often shocked on visiting other schools, where teachers might send all the children into the courtyard to play unsupervised while they themselves had tea and gossip.

Ideas about education affect not only what trainees expect pupils to do in school, but also their expectation from any course of study. Trainees coming for a course of three or four months expected to be given a quantity of knowledge to be learned by rote and certain techniques for teaching the children. Even at degree level, Pakistani students seldom acquire information retrieval skills (Hanif, 1986, 127). This does not reflect any incapacity on their part, but simply that they are not expected by their University teachers to acquire these skills (Usmani, 1986). The MHC library was well stocked and regularly updated by British Council grants and our biennial summer visit to Britain, yet I was regularly told "But we need a textbook" - a book to be memorised.

The notes I worked through with most of the trainees who came to our centre were eventually turned into a book, revised (C.Miles, 1990), and translated into Urdu, which was further revised. Other translations were produced by various organisations in Arabic, Bengali, Dari, Marathi, Sinhala, Spanish (in Mexico), Swahili, and Vietnamese. My rationale for getting this book together was that books are needed in Urdu for the majority of teachers who do not read English. Most books produced in the West are too Western in content, containing much irrelevant material and omitting much that needs to be spelled out in Pakistan where it does not form part of the general (or at least middle-class) culture. For example, in a text for Western teachers it is hardly necessary to state that teachers should relate in a friendly way to kids (nor did I find it necessary during several training weeks with special teachers from various schools in Syria in 1997); or that children learn through activity rather than passive repetition. Conversely, discussion intended for Western trainees on the teaching of some social and relational skills might be less needed, since Pakistan's extended family culture generally affords children much richer experiences in these respects.

By a joint staff effort, we also produced and published an Urdu skills checklist, now in its third revision, which has been used in schools all over Pakistan, serving as a sort of curriculum guideline. The latter use may be unfashionable in Western Europe, but we considered that it is better for schools to have at least one tool for progressive assessment and ongoing targets, rather than muddling along with none, and with neither a curriculum statement nor any idea of what such a statement might be.

To Learn and to Play
Eventually I realised that, to my Pakistani trainees and colleagues, the word 'learn' does not have the implications of developmental acquisition of skills and understanding that I had assumed. Sometimes my use of the word had caused puzzlement and misunderstanding. To 'learn' can mean either 'to memorise a book by rote' as children do in school, or to acquire a skill by copying and obeying a master, as an apprentice would do. Skill acquisition through being motivated, learning as an enjoyable process, are unfamiliar ideas to most Pakistanis - though other modern teacher training efforts report that these notions can be appreciated quite quickly (Henevald and Hasan, 1989, 13-14; Bude, 1990, 44). These concepts can best be understood by experiencing them personally and repeatedly. If asked to give a short course in Pakistan, I would be more inclined to spend it trying to convey an alternative meaning of 'learning', than in giving a course of lectures which the trainees would be able to learn and quote, but would not have the personal, experiential basis for putting into practice.

The word 'play', other than when used in competitive sport, is a pejorative term that implies timewasting activities of children, or an unpleasant sort of teasing. Research psychologist Israr (1989, 193) noted that "In our culture, play and education are considered two mutually exclusive things." Yet with some encouragement, trainee teachers at the MHC school played with toys, were fascinated by Lego and other construction toys, and entered into competition as to who could complete a new jigsaw in the shortest time. They threw themselves enthusiastically into imaginative dramatic play activities. They needed to go through these experiences for themselves - which they did not seem to have done during their own childhood - before they were ready to allow the pupils to play without repeatedly interfering and over-directing them.

Given the rigidity of ordinary schools, I found it easier to train staff who had spent less time in the education system and who were willing to adopt an 'elder sister' or 'elder brother' role towards their pupils. In the traditional Pakistani family structure there is a strict hierarchy by birth order, which is maintained for life. A younger brother must obey and respect his elder, but it is normal in most families for siblings to play and have fun together (Pervez, 1984, 35). This relationship is a better model for special education than are the usual adult-child relationships. However, most special schools are expected to conform closely to the behaviour models of ordinary schools.

Concepts of the Child
During my last five years in Pakistan I became more aware of the different perceptions of childhood and the place of the child in the family and society, some of which undergird the philosophy of the education system. I became aware of these perceptions through listening to and talking with hundreds of parents, discussing their child and how best to manage their difficulties at home. Many of these points had already been told to me by the MHC staff, but it had taken me some years to be ready to hear them. Later still, I found some detailed and some shorter reports of studies in anthropology and educational psychology (e.g. Minturn, 1963; Haider, 1971; Ghuman, 1975; Lindholm, 1982; Pervez, 1989; Shah & Pervez, 1994) which largely confirmed my own experiences and observations.

Parental control over the child is practised differently, and for different ends. In Western Europe, at least in the dominant middle-class culture, parents control the young child, concerned about toilet training, independent feeding, hygiene, bedtimes etc. As the child grows older, parents dictate less. The purpose of discipline is to lead the child to a self-controlled, independent life. By contrast, in the average Pakistani family the infant is not considered to be ready for parental 'control'. The infant eats, sleeps etc, when, where and as he wants. Parental control increases as he or she grows older. Up to the age of about five infants do more or less as they wish, but as they grow up they will expect their father to make all important decisions, e.g. education, career, marriage - though this is now becoming less absolute among urban families (Kalwar & Ahmed, 1990, 92). In traditional families, the father, when elderly, will hand over responsibility to his eldest son, who will continue to make decisions for his younger brothers and their families. (A traditional woman never has responsibility for making these sorts of major life decisions, though she may well find ways of making her views known).

The infant lives within the domain of the mother, who shows her love by feeding him, often with her own hand even when the child has already reached school age - and here I am referring to the child of normal ability - dressing him, and so on. From the age of five or six, the boy comes into the world of his father, where he must now begin to obey. Learning is seen as a consequence of obedience. Other explanations do not easily make sense. The usual complaint of fathers about their child with learning difficulties is that he or she is 'stubborn'. She is stubborn, she won't talk. He is stubborn, he won't learn to read. Conflicts may arise if mother wants to maintain the child in the protective environment while father feels that harsher treatment will overcome the child's 'stubbornness'. Or they may both feel protective towards the child and thus will be wary of schools, which are perceived as harsh environments - the ordinary ones often are.

Self care skills such as feeding and dressing are not given a high priority by parents; but walking, talking and then literacy are the recognised and desired skills. Walking and talking are generally assumed to arise automatically at the right age. They are not perceived as 'learned skills', and most parents are unaware of learning sequences. Walking and talking are considered to be the skills essential for social acceptance. When a child can do these, even if language is limited, parents' next concern is often literacy, as that is 'what schools are for'.

There are perhaps many less-educated and rural families in European countries whose notions about child-rearing and educational goals are fairly similar to those of the families I was involved with in Pakistan. They do not, however, form the dominant Western culture. The dominant Western ideas on child rearing and education (which are of course continually evolving) are propagated by the educated, urban middle classes through the mass media, and are made effective by a small army of community nurses, teachers, social workers and more specialised professionals, who have various methods and sanctions for overcoming any dissidence or lethargy on the part of less educated, unpowerful families. (These and other points are examined in greater depth in Miles and Miles, 1993).

There is no such army of enforcers in Pakistan, so it is the traditional ideas that form the dominant culture, against which a small, urban, modernising elite chips away. However, a subsequent short experience in rural towns and villages of Mexico showed me that the traditional patterns of child-rearing in the Indo-Pak subcontinent are by no means a universal norm where there are large rural families with low income and non-literate mothers. During two months in an economically backward part of Mexico I talked with many mothers of developmentally delayed children, and sensed that they understood quite easily my child-centred, incremental, learning-targeted suggestions. After the Pakistan experiences I half expected my ideas to be incomprehensible to Mexican village mothers, but this was not so (despite the fact that the Spanish I could speak with them was much poorer than the Urdu and Pushto that I used in Pakistan). The Mexican mothers had not themselves thought of doing, or needed encouragement in doing, the relevant activities with their child - but they clearly found my suggestions sensible within their own understanding of their child, so there was a much greater likelihood that they would implement them, and might then continue along similar lines by thinking for themselves of the next step.

In the average Pakistani family, a child's achievements are seldom judged as of value in themselves, taking into consideration the child's developmental stage. Work produced by a child - whether art work, written work etc - tends to be approved only if it meets adult standards. Parents are unlikely to praise their child for his or her first efforts, or be enthusiastic about things their child has made. As already stated, parents do not normally play with their children, and children beyond infancy are encouraged to work 'seriously' and not to 'waste time'. It is widely believed that if parents play with their child they will not be respected (Jaffer & Jafri, 1989).

The Pakistani child is expected to grow up to be an extension or replica of his father, or her mother. Ghuman (1973, 63) goes so far as to state that in the Punjab (Indian side) any form of individuality is actively discouraged, with ridicule and sarcasm. In Western Europe, by contrast, the dominant view now is that the child will grow into an individual person, and should be helped to develop towards autonomy. The average Pakistani child, on the other hand, will be trained to think and act like his father or her mother, doing the same jobs as the parents, or some work that parents would have liked to have done if they had had the opportunity.

There is little public perception of a 'range of abilities'. Normal children are assumed to go as far in education as their parents want them to, the only factor in their control being the amount of work put in to memorisation and the willingness to obey. Children without the ability to achieve highly are considered by educated families as stubborn, possibly to the extent of being regarded as 'juvenile delinquents', unless as an alternative they can be labelled mentally retarded. When people do not have much concept of a range of abilities, the label 'mentally retarded' becomes a much more absolute category than it was when the term was in popular use in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s.

Finally, extended family ties have their effect on the special child and his or her future - even when the parents may not physically live with the grandparents and other close relatives. The child in Pakistan is regarded as the property of the father's family. In most European countries now, children 'partly belong' to their family, and partly to society as a whole, in a kind of joint custodianship until the child is old enough to be deemed legally independent; but in Pakistan outsiders have no rights over the family unit. Decision making is not the prerogative of the parents, but of the senior members of the family, grandfather or senior uncle. This makes change within the family situation more difficult to achieve. If the grandfather pronounces that a particular child must do this or that, it would be unacceptable for the child's parents to contradict this, e.g. with the information that the child has a learning disability and the teacher recommends that something else be tried.

The differences described above have serious implications if the curriculum of the special school intends to satisfy the perceived priorities of parents. Teachers also share these priorities, unless they have adopted Western norms. Western special education now emphasises partnership with parents. I sometimes asked myself to what extent should I demonstrate and teach modern concepts of childhood and learning to my trainees and colleagues, which might then make them unable or unwilling to identify with parental priorities. Because of this sort of conflict, it is even more important that teachers develop skills within the context of their own conceptual framework, rather than 'learning a package' especially a western package. They need to be able to help parents along the same path, as well as understanding and sympathising with what parents feel and want.

At a UNESCO-sponsored national workshop for special teachers (Report, 1987) the implications of cultural norms were discussed with the overseas participants (pp. 41-42), but local teachers lacked the confidence to assert the priority of their own cultures over western approaches.

The cultural views of learning, play etc, outlined above cannot be ascribed to the teachings of Islam - any more than they could be ascribed to Christianity during the centuries when similar views were common in Europe. The great majority of our school pupils, half of our staff, and most of our trainees, visitors, and families coming for counselling, were Muslims; but the historical heritage of the Qur'an and the practices of the Prophet Muhammad are not incompatible with western educational psychology. Some 'modern European' ideas about childhood can in fact be traced back to Arabic origins. But this heritage has been received differently and understood differently, or even forgotten, in various parts of the Muslim world - especially those where centuries of socio-economic stagnation under foreign rule has stifled the will to modernise and innovate.

Special Needs: Created or Met?
The ordinary school system has no idea of coming to grips with the individual needs of children, but rather it takes them in by the million, discards half of them along the way, and knocks the remainder into a uniform shape. (If this verdict seems harsh, it is a great deal less so than the published criticisms of the Government of Pakistan's own Planning Commission). Against this background, a special education service is less likely to provide for those with true special needs, than to look for children who can fill up the places in a way that officials will find satisfying.

At one time I knew of over 20 children with cerebral palsy who wanted places in a special school. We were not able to take them, being already heavily over-subscribed. Meanwhile, two schools for 'children with physical and mental handicap' filled their places by approaching mainstream schools and getting lists of children with slight impairments, all of whom could move independently. Free uniforms and transport were promised, thereby persuading the parents to transfer their children, who up to then had been making progress in the neighbourhood mainstream school. The children with substantial disabilities for whom the ordinary schools made no provision were thus no better off by the opening of special schools, which were filled with children who hardly needed any special measures. A parent whose child had severe learning difficulties was told by the director of one 'special school for mentally handicapped children' that he was not running a 'pagalkhana' (madhouse), and the family should keep that child at home. This school was concentrating on teaching the children to memorise the standard textbooks used in the first years of mainstream schools. (Recently I was given similar reports of the practice of several Pakistani special schools in the late 1990s, though there are certainly some other special schools doing good work).

However, these are still comparatively early days for special education in Pakistan in the public sector. Although there was recorded experience of teaching children with special needs in South Asia two thousand years ago (M.Miles, 1997), and there have been efforts by pioneering individuals during the past 120 years in the Punjab and Sind, it is only quite recently that the Federal and Provincial governments have seriously taken up this field. The vast bulk of children with severe disabilities still get no schooling at all, and the ordinary school system is totally unprepared and inadequate to provide for their education. The contribution that these children can make, and are making in a few places, is to require a different approach, a child-centred, learning-oriented approach, and to confront their teachers with the inadequacies of the traditional methods. In a sense it is these children who are creating special education, and thereby forcing open some doors and windows of opportunity, through which a little more light may eventually reach the ordinary school system.

Christine Miles . 4 Princethorpe Road . Birmingham . B29 5PX . UK

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Inclusion: theory and practice

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