Educational inclusion at the science festival in Spain

Abstract

Special education, today inclusive, has occupied for centuries a tangential part of education systems around the world to this day, including that of Spain. It was a marginal sector that was outside the normal circuit of schoolchildren and students, who at best began to find special attention, but segregated. The integrated school approaches that prevail in many parts have opted for a more socially enriching concept such as inclusive education. If we look at the problem from the university, the new categories to explain the special education have taken is to be accepted by the scientific community at the teaching and research levels, although here there has been a spectacular leap in the social and scientific consideration of the special education, at least in Spain. In this paper we address from the university, and from a hermeneutic reading, the meaning and visibility of the inaugural lessons in the so-called Feast of Science, which are pronounced cyclically, year after year, in each Spanish university. They represent an excellent symbolic framework, a privileged space to observe the growing presence of the scientific paradigm of educational inclusion in the Spanish university map. The small number of inaugural lessons delivered in the last eighty years with content close to inclusive education express the weakness of the subject in contrast to the major fields of science, but they are also a reason for hope given that in recent years there has been an express emergence of the new paradigm of inclusive education, at least several of the inaugural lectures given at universities.