Education of Persons with Special Health Needs: Assistance or a Discriminatory Refusal

The aim of the article is to consider the features of education of persons with special health needs (SHN) in modern Russia having analyzed the norms of international and national law and their actual observance in practice. The article uses data collected by the author from various sources that do not have a systematic nature of their presentation. In studies of education of persons with SHN, many Russian authors present advantages and shortcomings of the comparison of two systems: education at specialized schools and inclusive education. Inclusive education in Russia, unlike in many developed countries, has started developing, as emphasized in the article, rather recently. In Russian educational organizations, many officials without special training mistakenly treat inclusive education as careless inclusion of persons with SHN in groups of students rather than as hard work with them, so that they progress in training, taking into account features of their health and mentality (sluggishness, absent-mindedness, limited physical activity, weak immune system and others). Without state and public control over the observance of the current standards of the rule of law, persons with SHN were systematically refused in the realization of the right of to a high-quality education. At the same time, the lack of assistance in education to persons with SHN is shown against the background of the global crisis of education in the countries with low and average income. At present, there is no integrated approach to carrying out the quantitative assessment of the realization by persons with SHN of their rights to high-quality education at all levels; there is little competent international comparison. In this regard, more attention must be paid to the monitoring of the realization by persons with SHN of their right to education. The adoption of legal documents in the field of regulation of medical recommendations in education and the opportunity for persons with SHN to enter higher education institutions on disabled people quotas for the second, third and fourth courses of study are also significant. The author comes to the following conclusions. It is necessary to overcome the lack of standardization of the rights of disabled persons and people with SHN when they receive an education. The significance of the study of the actual practice of implementing the laws on the education of disabled persons, taking into account all its specificity is underestimated. There are no diverse quantitative indicators of the quality of support for disabled persons in educational activities for its continuous monitoring. The education process of disabled persons in Russia has a closed nature, with a low level of officials' social responsibility for violations of the rights of disabled persons in the field of education, factual discrimination of the situation of many people with SHN and a number of other problems in the field of education of people with SHN.

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