ABSTRACT
Universal educational inclusion is an ideological project. Being ‘included’ is a normative metanarrative of development (du Toit 2005), embedded in particular sets of normative assumptions about the organisation of social life (Hickey and du Toit 2007). Education policy discourses in the Education For All era, have articulated an increasing concern over those who remain ‘excluded’, and reflect the tendency of public policy to represent inclusion and exclusion as polarised, fixed states (du Toit 2004). Exclusion is understood as an undesirable state and amenable to correction (i.e. ‘inclusion’) by appropriate policy intervention – ‘towards social inclusion’ is the subtitle of India’s 2011 Human Development Report (IHDR 2011), for example – and inclusion in primary schooling has tended to serve as a policy proxy for social inclusion more generally (Unterhalter et al. 2012).
