Considerations About the Terminology Pupils with Special Educational Needs

Abstract

This article focuses mainly on the analysis of terminology “pupils with special educational needs” and part of the target audience of public policy in special education, the people with disabilities, given that other groups of students were being added to it. In this sense, we tried to understand how the concepts of normality/abnormality were built over time and which economic, social and political order issues, have influenced the general education and special education, more specifically. The terminology “pupils with special educational needs”, by covering a variety of learners and being forged as neutral and abstract, contributed to conceal economic, political, social and cultural determinants that act on the characterization of the abnormality (which is not an abstraction, but a category historically constructed by society), disguising the real and poor educational opportunities offered to the masses of our country to continue receiving an arbitrary education in homeopathic doses, which is very convenient to the ruling classes.