L'ÉDUCATION SPÉCIALE AU QUÉBEC: HIER ET AUJOURD'HUI

Abstract

The history of special education in Quebec is marked by special features. Thibert takes us through it in three stages from the 1920s, finding in the earliest of these the necessary seeds of the developments of today. He does not, as some have done, despise or regret the devoted efforts of those who, working in a period of institutions in which were conflned large numbers of "individus marginalisés," boldly established ahead of their time the basis on which integration would inevitably be brought about. As a civil servant in the thick of the flght, his account of the series of administrative jolts to progress since the 1960s caused by the periodic restructurings of the apparatus of provincial government is particularly interesting, and may remind the reader of the drastic pace with which Quebec has aimed in two decades to take its place in the vanguard of modern systems.