São Paulo, Brazil
The head of Brazil’s National Council of Christian Churches has described as “shocking” Minister of Education Milton Ribeiro’s comments that children with a high degree of disability disturb other children’s learning and that in some cases “co-existence [in class]” with some of them is impossible.
“Inclusive education is something new, a process that began in the 1980s in Brazil. We still lack schools to welcome all disabled children and teenagers. His comments are absurd,” Lutheran Pastor Romi Bencke, who heads Conic (the Portuguese acronym for the National Council Churches), told Sight.
Brazil’s Education Minister. Milton Ribeiro. PICTURE: Isac Nóbrega/Presidency of Brazil
President Jair Bolsonaro’s Minister of Education. Milton Ribeiro, first addressed that matter during an interview to the Brazilian public television network on 9th August. Ribeiro, who is also a Presbyterian pastor, was talking about what he called “inclusivism”, the policy of incorporating mentally disabled children in regular schools.
“In the past, nobody talked about the attention to the disabled. As simple as that…Then, the policy went to the other extreme, inclusivism…The disabled kid was put into a classroom with non-disabled students. The kid didn’t learn anything,” he said.
Ribeiro added that disabled children disturbed – “I use this term very carefully” – the other students’ learning because “the teacher didn’t have a [supporting] team, didn’t have the knowledge to give the kid a special attention.”
On 19th August, Ribeiro again mentioned the subject, saying that there are 1.3 million disabled children in public schools in the country. “Among them, 12 per cent have a disability degree that makes coexistence [in school] impossible,” he said.
The minister said that the current administration is creating special rooms for those children instead of “just throwing them into a classroom in the name of inclusivism”.
Ribeiro is a major figure of the main Presbyterian branch in the South American country, the Presbyterian Church of Brazil (known as IPB in Portuguese), which attracts an estimated 650,000 churchgoers. The IPB controls Mackenzie Presbyterian Institute, an education group that owns colleges, schools, and a traditional university, reaching more than 50,000 students.
Before assuming as Bolsonaro’s minister, Ribeiro was Mackenzie Presbyterian University’s acting president.
Anita Wright, a member of the Ecumenical Relations Secretariat of the United Presbyterian Church.PICTURE: Courtesy of Anita Wright
Presbyter Anita Wright, a member of the Ecumenical Relations Secretariat of the United Presbyterian Church – a church which split with the IPB in the 1970s, teachers and Christians in general should struggle for an inclusive perspective regarding disabled children.
“I worked for 25 years as an arts teacher in schools. Our struggle was always for inclusion, and we always worked to give children with all kinds of special needs the opportunity of experimenting and co-existing with the other children,” she told Sight.
Wright emphasised that not only the disabled children benefited from that process.
“All children end up learning to be sensible with the needs and the limitations of one another. It’s a humanising process, it incentivises solidarity,” she added.
Senator Romário Faria, a former international soccer player and the father of a girl with Down syndrome, affirmed on Twitter that “only a person deprived of intelligence, someone we call an imbecile, can say something like that”.
Other politicians and members of non-governmental organisations stressed that the Brazilian legislation concerning disabled people secures their right to an inclusive education and that the era of segregating them is over.
Presbyter Wright argued that the idea of segregating disabled children is not conceivable in a Christian dimension.
“As a Christian, I think of Jesus inviting the children to be with him,” she said. “All the children. That idea should guide the inclusive vision. Children, elders, and the disabled are all invited to take part in the Kingdom of God.”
