Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of Archives and Used Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Politics of Disability: Structure and Agency in Nation Building in Czechoslovakia
- Part 1 Building the Czechoslovak Nation and Sacralizing Peoples’ Health: The Vicissitudes of Disability Discourse during the Interwar Period
- Part 2 Postwar Institutionalization of Care for the Disabled: Toward a Universalized Discourse of “Defective Gypsies”
- Conclusions: Going from Knowledge about the Violent Past to Acknowledging It
- Abstracts in German and French
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Special Education in Czechoslovakia between 1939 and 1989: Toward Multilevel Hierarchy of Defectivity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of Archives and Used Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Politics of Disability: Structure and Agency in Nation Building in Czechoslovakia
- Part 1 Building the Czechoslovak Nation and Sacralizing Peoples’ Health: The Vicissitudes of Disability Discourse during the Interwar Period
- Part 2 Postwar Institutionalization of Care for the Disabled: Toward a Universalized Discourse of “Defective Gypsies”
- Conclusions: Going from Knowledge about the Violent Past to Acknowledging It
- Abstracts in German and French
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter focuses on the interdisciplinarity of postwar applied scientific approaches to “defective” children and its direct influence on the practices of education and political rhetoric about those who were labeled as defective. Victoria Shmidt introduces the role of intensive institutionalization of special education in Nazi Germany in the vicissitudes of the Czech approach to the children with disabilities during the Protectorate and explores the fixing of some institutional and discursive German patterns in the politics of disability during the Third Republic period, between 1945 and 1948. Frank Henschel then explains the rupture between the first decade of socialist policy and the composition of driving forces that later made the eugenic turn possible and desirable by various interest groups.
Keywords: special education, surveillance, defectology, intersectionality of ethnicity and disability
The politics of disability during the Protectorate: Toward institutionalizing special education
The task of highlighting the impact of the national socialist policy concerning persons with disabilities, generally, and the Nazi reform of special education, particularly, on Czech politics concerning disability requires redefining the role of special education in the German public policy between 1933 and 1945. The utilitarian approach to human capacities and selectiveness as the main principles of the state's approach to persons with disabilities went to the extreme when special education was institutionalized during national socialism. Historians refer to three stages of institutionalizing German special education between 1933 and 1945:
– 1935-1938: primary institutionalization and the obligation of special schools to segregate persons with disabilities into useful and useless;
– 1938-1942: professionalization of selection and vocational training, the two main tasks of special education;
– 1942-1945/1960s: centralization and unification of special education as part of surveillance of unfit groups.
The misery of special schools finally turned for the better after two years the national socialists came to power in 1933 in the form of increased number of such institutions and allocation of further resources. According to Sengstock, Magerhans-Hurley and Sprotte, between 1935 and 1939 the number of students placed in these institutions increased as well. Obviously, this veering of the official attitude toward special education reflected two mutually interrelated trends – to exploit the education system by incorporating it into the mission of population surveillance and centralizing the process of data collection about unfit groups within the population.
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- The Politics of Disability in Interwar and Socialist CzechoslovakiaSegregating in the Name of the Nation, pp. 109 - 144Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019