On the History of the Education and Upbringing System for Children with Special Educational Needs in Uzbekistan

O‘rinboy Toshmuhammad o‘g‘li Fayziyev

doi:10.58905/athena.v4i4.812

Authors

O‘rinboy Toshmuhammad o‘g‘li Fayziyev Nizami National Pedagogical University of Uzbekistan, Tashkent, Uzbekistan

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.58905/athena.v4i4.812

Keywords:

Boarding Schools, Gorikhona, Special Educational Needs, Society of the Blind of Uzbekistan, Visual Impairment

Abstract

This study traces the history of the education and upbringing of children with special educational needs in Uzbekistan, focusing on visual impairment, from the second half of the nineteenth century to 1990. It combines historical-chronological and comparative-historical analysis of normative acts, contemporary ethnographic accounts, scholarly literature, and periodicals with a tabulation of the quantitative data these sources contain. Before the Soviet period, the main institutions that educated visually impaired people in Turkestan were waqf-funded qorikhonas; in 1875, Fergana Province had 235 of them with 1,700 students, an average of 7.2 per institution. Late nineteenth-century charity was limited to small eye hospitals with six to twelve beds. A state-supported system took shape after the decree of October 26, 1920: blind pupils in Tashkent were taught separately from 1929, the Society of the Blind of Uzbekistan was founded in 1932, and regional boarding schools were opened between 1953 and 1965. The religious-charitable model of the qorikhona was thus succeeded by a residential, state-managed model oriented toward literacy, vocational skills, and labor integration, while the residential principle itself persisted. Shortages of specialized textbooks and the isolation of some persons with disabilities remained unresolved.

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