From segregation to protagonism. The great lesson of young blind people in Italy

Special Pedagogy is a continuous composition of relations, actions and projects. Special Pedagogy should not have the presumption to consider worthy only those questions to which we already know the answer. It should learn to live with questions that do not have ready prepared answers. Its task is to seek answers without being sure of finding them. Special Pedagogy owes much of its knowledge and wealth of experience to the cultural presence of persons with disabilities: in this paper, thanks to the efforts of people with disabilities and their fight for civil rights in Italy, we present the historical and socio-cultural path from segregation (institutionalization) to the inclusion in the society of blind people, with a particular attention paid to the adolescenthood.