ABSTRACT
Special education is a product of modernity. Its origins lay within the transformation of European societies over the last five hundred years and its social role has developed in particular over the last one hundred years. To talk about special education outside of the context of historical change during this period would be to offer only very limited insight into the problems that special education was intended to address. The problems addressed by special education are modern problems; the needs that it identifies are modern needs. The fact that so much is made today of the child’s needs, as if these exist independently of a social context, speaks volumes for the way in which the norms and values of our daily experiences are constructed to rationalise and legitimate the world as it is. To understand special education is to unpack the social practices that construct it in one way rather than in some other way.
