ABSTRACT
Special education in Sweden may be said to have been started in connection with the introduction of general elementary education in 1842 (Hjörne and Säljö, 2008). Up to this year only children in the upper and middle classes could go to school, but when general elementary education was introduced in Sweden, all children were given an opportunity to go to school. This in turn contributed to a discussion about how to relate to pupils who were considered deviant and had difficulties in profiting by the teaching (the Swedish National Agency for Education, 2005; Ahlberg, 2007). In the policy document of education, the Elementary Education Ordinance, there was a mini-course for “the children who did not correspond to the concept of normality implicitly defined by the Elementary Education Ordinance, the children whose parents were worst off financially and children described as maladjusted” (the Swedish National Agency for Education, 2005:18). These children were not given any special support in the teaching, and the measures that were taken were that lower knowledge demands were placed on them than on the other pupils. Blind, Deaf and intellectually disabled children were in practice completely outside the school system (Ahlberg, 2007).
