Martin Buber's concept of inclusion as a critique of special education

Martin Buber offers an account of a tendency towards polarisation in responses to the perplexing question of inclusion in education. On the one hand, the educator can be identified as one who includes what is present and becoming within individual young people in isolation from the world. On the other hand, the educator can be recognised as one whose life is dedicated to including young people into the world who have been moulded to conform to established ideals. The influence of these two, divergent but equally flawed, ways of viewing the educator’s responsibility to include the young into education is detectable in much current policy and theory that promotes the case for special education. In his rejection of both these views of the educator, Buber envisions a relationship in education that is established neither solely for the sake of the newness of child nor entirely for the preservation of the world. Instead, Buber addresses the living responsibility of an educator who attends to the young and responds to the vastness of creation they represent. The depths of Buber’s concept of inclusion are examined and presented as a corrective to the technicalism of special education policy and theory, in which relationships between educators and the young are demarcated by the scope of pre-established and categorised needs.