Special education in Mexico during late XIX - early XX century: ideas, projects, and experiences

Abstract

This text analyses the transition from institutions of social control to institutions of a disciplinary-pedagogical nature. In this process, diverse transformations contributed to the establishment of an educational modality labeled as special education, which later became an essential component of modern educational systems —as parallel sub-systems to regular education—. Its main objective was to assist groups of infants who required peculiar and specific pedagogical methods and strategies, and who were therefore conceived and defined as abnormal infants. The definition of its objectives and goals, as well as its specific practices, was inspired by a social and pedagogical thinking that explained the importance of incorporating such groups to a process of formal schooling, by justifying at the same time the marginalization and exclusion from ordinary schools.