Invisible Children: the Face and Reverse of Special Education in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1958–1990

Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) was one of the republics of the former Yugoslavia (SFRJ), a state with an established totalitarian regime that kept its subjects under control and imposed a recognized ideology on them. Although it tried to present itself as a country with equal rights for all people, that was not the case. Namely, the example of people with disabilities reveals the double face of the regime. While other republics developed already inherited institutions for the care of children with disabilities, BiH did not even have a higher education institution for the education of specialists for working with children and adults with disabilities until the mid-1990s. Special elementary schools were also rare. In some elementary schools, there were auxiliary departments for children with disabilities. Segregation was highly emphasized and parents often hid their children because of shame and public condemnation. In this paper, I will try to show how the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina treated special education within the state of Yugoslavia. It is obvious that, despite the needs, special education in BiH was underdeveloped. At the higher education institutions that trained future teachers, there was no mention of working with children with disabilities. For the most part, schools solved this issue according to their priorities and possibilities. Although they talked about the importance of health and inclusion in the education of all, the example of this republic shows the opposite. So, it is evident that the ideology of a totalitarian regime in the 20th century misuses the concept of child health. In doing so, such regimes use childcare to publicly promote their ideological intentions and social awareness while the situation in practice testifies otherwise. From the data obtained by researching three pedagogical journals in the period from 1958–1990, it is clear that special education remained somewhere in the corner and that schools or teachers decided by themselves whether or not they would accept these children into their environment. Therefore, the situation in education in BiH, a society that called itself socialistic, often had results that showed the opposite, and this was exactly what was reflected in the field of special education.