Addressing Ableism in Schooling and Society? The Capabilities Approach and Students with Disabilities

Abstract

The capabilities approach (CA) is celebrated as offering a framework for educational equality that is aimed at responding to existing social injustices. It is in the spirit of this corrective that CA promises to inform philosophical and policy discussions on the education of students with disabilities. Recent work in this area emphasizes the normalcy of disability in human life and the need to include disability in any consideration of overall well-being and equality. However, the view of disability as a natural part of human diversity stands in stark contrast to the prevailing negative social and cultural regard for disability as an abnormal or atypical condition. In this essay, I ask whether the attempt to normalize disability may overlook the way that disability is actually viewed: Does the effort to normalize disability underestimate the force of cultural constructions of normalcy and normal ability? I discuss the role of education in preparing young people for political participation in order to show how the unjust social context of this participation complicates how we attend to the “atypical” functionings of children with disabilities. I argue that a CA-informed framework of educational justice for such children would need to balance the aim of normalizing disability with a sensitivity to the existing conditions of disability exclusion. This balance is necessary if we are to honor the aim of CA to truly respond to existing injustices.