1st EBU International Conference on Education, 19-23 July 2000, Montegrotto Terme (Padua) - Italy
I can, without doubt, share the opinion of our coordinator, Enzo Tioli, that our meeting is part of an international conference and is therefore, of necessity, formal. However, as we are here to discuss matters of mutual interest, we can give our meeting as informal a tone as possible.
I begin by apologising to the interpreters for not having provided them with the text of the address that I shall give here this morning about educating the blind in Italy. To make the interpreters' job easier, I will speak slowly and use language that is as least specialised as possible.
I would like to make it clear that my address will not be technical, but decidedly political.
This means that I will not be discussing the history of the blind in Italy, which would be too long and perhaps a bit boring. Nor will I discuss Italian laws that deal with educating the blind (which are numerous, confirming the fact that our country has produced the most regulations in Europe), or the troubles that there have been, even in Italy, between supporters of state and specialised schools. There is so much paperwork regarding this that a summary would be impossible.
Instead, I will talk about the current state of education for blind children in Italy. I will try to give you a complete but essential picture, which, I hope, will be easily understood. The elements of this picture are:
Numerically speaking, there are about 2,000 blind children in Italy who go to primary school, about 500 who go to secondary school and about 200-250 who go to university. Vague as they may be, these figures are sufficiently indicative.
It is well known in Europe, and maybe worldwide, that Italy was very quick (too quick, according to our Union) in adopting the principle of mainstreaming blind pupils and students. It has now been nearly 25 years that people in Italy have determinedly and strongly advocated that the blind should be educated in mainstream schools. For some time the law allowed parents to choose between special schools and mainstream schools. Now, both the Ministry of Education, which deals with educating the blind, and Parliament believe that special schools should be shut completely and that our children should go to mainstream schools. This goes not only for blind children of normal intelligence, but also those with additional disabilities, physical, sensory or even mental, whether serious or not. According to the current regulations laid down by law, all children with visual impairments must go to mainstream schools. The current school of thought is that special schools are marginalizing students, who are not being allowed to socialise normally.
The Italian Union of the Blind has debated this question for a long time, and after many heated discussions, has chosen the path of mainstreaming. There are still doubts about whether blind children with additional disabilities can profit from going to mainstream schools. In the opinion of our Union, a different system needs to be devised for these children. The fact is that, as we see it, mainstream schools, which are already poorly equipped to deal with blind people of average intelligence, are even less equipped to deal properly with children who have other disabilities in addition to blindness. For multi-handicapped children, attending a mainstream school is very difficult.
According to the governing regulations, children who go to mainstream schools have the right to a support teacher. The ratio of support teacher to pupils if one to four; in other words, each teacher is assigned four students. Nevertheless, it is possible to repeal this rule. In fact, in most cases, the support teacher has one, at most two, pupils. The support teachers should operate on the basis of functional diagnosis, provided by a psycho-medical-pedagogic team, and an individualised education plan. In actual fact, the functional diagnosis and the individualised education plan are not adequately formulated or are missing altogether. Consequently, the Italian Union of the Blind has been fighting for twenty years to make mainstreaming of the blind a real process, rather than just the basis of an idea, that allows blind children to take an active role in mainstream schools. Naturally, the conditions for this to happen need to be created.
Reading the official documents, the Ministry of Education reports and above all those produced abroad, we are led to believe that mainstreaming of the blind in Italy has produced excellent results and that our children have no difficulties and are perfectly integrated. Our Union, though, has a direct relationship with the blind children who go to mainstream schools and their families, and we know that there are still numerous problems. Firstly, it must be said that the quality of the integration process varies in different parts of the country. The regional councils and local bodies support mainstreaming of the blind in accordance with the budget they have. Consequently, the situation cannot be said to be good; there are some bright spots but a lot of dark areas. Among the difficulties and malfunctions of the Italian system for educating the blind, the foremost is the lack of any form of assistance and advice for the families of these children.
You all know how parents feel to suddenly find themselves with a blind child. This is seen as a sort of bereavement, and coming to terms with blindness is a long and complex process for the child. Therefore, it is very serious that the family is not helped in any way and is not informed of the methods available for educating the blind child, such as orientation, mobility and basic rehabilitation techniques and the Braille system. Another negative note is the absence of assistance and advice for the support teachers. As opposed to the past, it is thought that the training of support teachers should be generic, so that they can take care of educating the sensory, physically and mentally handicapped. But, as the training process of support teachers widens, it loses depth and the teachers often find themselves having to deal with situations they are not prepared for. We often meet support teachers who do not know reading and writing techniques for the blind. In these cases, paradoxically, the roles are reversed, and it is the pupils who teach the teachers to read and write in Braille. Our children's education is also impeded by delays in supplying books in Braille, the difficulty of reproducing the pictures which form the basis of text books, especially those used in primary schools, by the fact that in some cases the special didactic materials are missing and by the fact that often, too often, our children are not taught manual activities, are not involved in games played by their companions who can see and are not allowed to participate in physical education lessons.
As I anticipated, this discussion would be very long, and I must limit myself to the essential. What I have said is enough to understand that the system for educating blind children in Italy has a lot of serious shortcomings. Forced to forego fundamental disciplines and activities, our children only receive a partial, incomplete education, which affects their scholastic and social integration.
The fact is that the change from special schools to mainstream schools has not been adequately prepared here in Italy. Mainstream schools, created for "normal" children, have suddenly found themselves having to cope with children who are not "normal" and have found themselves in difficulty. For fifty years, the visually impaired in Italy were educated in special schools, set up at institutes for the blind, which are present in all regions. The system in special schools was tried and tested. All pupils had the same book, took part in manual and physical activities and played amongst themselves. Often their teachers and head masters were blind.
When it was decided to close the special schools, driven by the cultural revolution that started in 1968, their extraordinary experience was not transferred to mainstream schools. As with asylums, the special schools were shut without planning alternatives. The advice of Ren� Descartes and Renato Cartesio, to buy a new house before selling the old one, went unheard. The old home was destroyed without a new one being built, and this produced the malfunctions and deficiencies that I have briefly illustrated.
How have we, the Italian Union of the Blind, reacted to this state of affairs? Firstly, we have tried to give the Government and the Ministry of Education a precise description. To this end, we have produced a white paper on an investigation carried out on a group of blind children and their parents, support teachers and curricular advisers. The 2,000 plus interviews carried out, by questionnaire, highlighted the difficulties that I listed previously: the total absence of counselling for families and support teachers and the delays in supplying textbooks and didactic materials, etc. Our efforts have, however, produced the desired results with the government authorities. Thus, in order to document the problems our children encounter in mainstream schools in a more scientific manner, we asked a company specialised in opinion polls to carry out a second investigation, which produced exactly the same results as before.
Naturally, we did not limit ourselves to outlining the difficulties within the system, we also formulated some proposals. In particular, we upheld that regional centres to support integration, capable of providing those specialised interventions that are missing, need to be set up to help to realise the principle of mainstreaming for the blind in our country. We fought hard, and when the necessary finances had been found and Parliament was about to approve the laws for the centres, opposition from some disabled and invalid associations and political parties blocked this measure. As an alternative, we tried to contact the various institutions that work for the blind so that each of these could, within their competence, support the mainstreaming of our children.
For example, we made it possible for the "Regina Margherita" Italian Library for the Blind in Monza, which produces books in Braille for adults, to start producing textbooks in Braille. Thanks to additional financing, the library has been able to put its lengthy experience in producing Braille texts, which as you know requires technical, didactic and pedagogic skill, to the service of our children. They have also been able to start new initiatives, such as the reproduction of textbooks on computer disk and making guides available for support teachers and parents. We have also made it possible for the body which worked on the education of the blind in Italy when there was no integration in mainstream schools (the National Federation of Institutions for the Blind) to specialise, thanks to state financing, in the production of special didactic material such as maps, globes, models of geometric figures, aids for learning arithmetic, games and so on.
We have also established I.Ri.Fo.R., the Institute for Research, Vocational Training and Rehabilitation. It has been able to start organising courses in basic rehabilitation, orientation and mobility and computer courses for our children, thanks to special financing. They also provide updating courses for support teachers, curricular advisers and blind teachers and other courses aimed at training, research and rehabilitation. We have also involved the Italian Committee of the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness in activities to support our children's mainstreaming. Thus, we have tried, through our actions, to attain what we would have liked to have been done by the legislative measures of the regional centres in supporting the mainstreaming of the blind, and to eliminate those deficiencies that are disadvantageous for our children from the Italian education system.
Bearing this important aim in mind, we have continued to insist for state funding of the regional centres project and finally, last year, we realised this ambition. Now, it is a matter of obtaining laws governing this. The Union is working energetically in this direction, but, as in the past, is encountering obstacles in its path. It is forced, for example, to deal with the idea that blindness is not so serious as to require special interventions for those who suffer from it. This idea finds agreement amongst both our members, especially the younger ones who have difficulty accepting their disability, and politicians who always want to reduce public expenditure. This, which is clearly damaging to the interests of the visually impaired, is keeping the Union busy on two fronts. Another preconceived idea against which the Union is currently battling is that all disabilities are the same, that blindness is the same as physical and mental handicaps. In this light, as we said before, we believe that support teachers should have general character training to enable them to deal with all disabilities.
An eminent Italian educator said that there is no greater injustice than making equal those who are not equal, and surely a blind person is not the same as a paraplegic or a person suffering from Down's syndrome. Another idea that the Union is trying to combat is that new technology is such an effective aid for the blind that parents and support teachers become marginal figures in the education process and most of the psychological problems that a blind person has to resolve every day are simply banal. Now, those of you who are visually impaired know full well that this is a serious disability that affects the blind person from dawn to sunset, from childhood to old age. Certainly, blindness can be overcome, but until it is, specialist interventions are required.
There is no doubt that new technology constitutes an extraordinary resource for the human race, breaking barriers and reducing distances between people. But, for us who are blind, this technology is becoming a new source of marginalisation and exclusion if it is not fully accessible. In Italy, 97% of public Internet sites are not fully accessible to the blind. For this reason, the Italian Union of the Blind has started a new battle, the importance of which I think all blind people in Europe and the world are well aware of.
I hope I have been successful in providing an essential picture of the Italian system for educating the blind and partially sighted.
In conclusion, I believe that this conference may contribute towards clarifying the terms of the problems that I have outlined. A Chinese proverb, which I think you all know, says that even a thousand-mile walk is made up of small steps. It is my opinion that this conference will represent another small step towards full integration for us blind people in Europe. I would like to repeat what I heard a few months ago during a seminar in Finland. The speaker, quoting one of the Kennedy's (possibly John, but I can't remember), said that there are two categories of people: those who observe the world and, at most, wonder why and how come they exist and those who dream of things that are still not invented and which would be necessary for the progress of mankind. Personally, I place myself in the second category and I ask myself if it is legitimate to hope that our children might some day have proper books, well prepared support teachers and good mainstreaming. My answer to these questions is "why not?"
Thank you very much.
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