Forgetting Inclusive Education: Memory, Policy and Ethics in School Education in Europe

The novelty of the proposed text lays in its application of poststructuralist theorising around memory, and particularly collective remembering and forgetting, to the discourse of ‘inclusive education’. Various European inclusion-related education policies prompted by UNESCO’s now memorialised Salamanca Statement of 1994 will be explored as melancholic responses, indicating that such policies could never, and will never, be wholly compatible with the European economic and social model of governance. The concept of memorialisation implies the remembering of something that was never entirely present, thereby focusing attention on the ongoing tensions between prevailing policy rhetoric around inclusive education or educational inclusivity and the material and discursive realities of exclusionary practices found in different national contexts. These contexts are conceptualised as economies of difference, sustained by economies of interest, permitting the exclusionary import of present educational discourse, policy and practice to be illustrated through empirical examples from across Europe (including the UK).