Ten Reasons For Inclusion
Inclusive education is a human right its good education and it makes good social sense.

Human Rights

1. All children have the right to learn together.

2. Children should not be devalued or discriminated against by being excluded or sent away because of their disability or learning difficulty.

3. Disabled adults, describing themselves as special school survivors, are demanding an end to segregation.

4. There are no legitimate reasons to separate children for their education. Children belong together - with advantages and benefits for everyone. They do not need to be protected from each other.

Good Education

5. Research shows children do better, academically and socially in integrated settings.

6. There is no teaching or care in a segregated school, which cannot take place in an ordinary school.

7. Given commitment and support, inclusive education is a more efficient use of educational resources.

Good Social Sense

8. Segregation teaches children to be fearful, ignorant and breeds prejudice.

9. All children need an education that will help them develop relationships and prepare them for life in the mainstream.

10. Only inclusion has the potential to reduce fear and build friendship, respect and understanding

Centre for Studies on Inclusive Education (CSIE)
Bristol, United Kingdom

Inclusive Education:
Request to deliberate on the needs of the profoundly disabled

This request, appeal, plea would like to focus the attention of the readers on some of the challenges and dilemmas faced by students with profound disabilities.

These students are marginalized within the disability sector as well, as they most often, cannot access the rights given to them under the People with Disabilities Act or the Education Policy stemming from the conferences which proclaimed Education for all and the 93rd Amendment of the Indian Constitution.

Firstly, we need to look at what actually is meant by severe and profound disability. No clear-cut definitions or classifications exist. In India, every disabled person must have a disability certificate, certifying a percentage of disability, by a doctor.

Disability Certificate

Anyone who has more than one disability (most people with neurological impairments do) actually cannot be classified. Classifications exist for people with disabilities in the areas of:

• Locomotor
• Vision
• Hearing
• Intellectual Functioning

Therefore, a person with cerebral palsy, with motor dysfunction (locomotor) and perhaps some associated sensory impairment (low vision, hearing) or a communication or intellectual special need falls under two disability categories.

There is a lot of confusion as to what the percentage of disability should be. For example, a person who is a quadriplegic (all four limbs involved) will have 80-90% disability. Then, if there is an added low vision problem the disability may be 60%. Such a person will actually have more than 100% disability and will of course, be termed profoundly disabled.

Actually, with motor dysfunction alone, the former label will apply. This person could be cognitively high functioning but that will not matter!

Neurological Impairments with Multiple Disabilities

There is a huge problem of students with for e.g., classic cerebral palsy - an intelligent mind trapped in a disobedient body getting left out of the entire Education for All campaign.

This is specially true at present under the SSA inclusive Education Module, where severely disabled children are being kept out and being sent to special schools in the district headquarters presumably to live in a residential place. And where are these special schools?

Twenty years ago we began our campaign against residential homes and for more community based initiatives. Are we going in circles? And are we once again going to start addressing the problems that came about because disabled children were kept in these homes, isolated most passively and as beings of charity?

The entire construct of inclusive education is based on not learning from experience. The experts say that instead home based work will be done. Home-based work with disabled children is meant to enable and empower the family and the neighborhood. It is not an alternative to schooling and peer interactions.

Does it not become a human rights violation? In our work, we have included many students with cerebral palsy in mainstream schools. They have done extremely well, and have only needed a few adaptations of furniture, writing aids or mobility.

In fact we have one child Priya who was labeled Mentally Retarded (MR) but is now in college. Our experience also shows that students who are in resource rooms were following extremely unchallenging curricula because of the label of IQ scores.

When placed in a classroom, they start learning concepts and facts; we think they are not capable of. The argument that is often respected is that, "We dont want to dump our children in a classroom, where they will not benefit" and "How will the teacher manage?"

These are the two questions that we need to address to ourselves, if we believe in equity and inclusion, and in child rights. Lets take the first argument of dumping children. Research shows that children learn best from peer interactions. Why deprive the profoundly disabled of peers?

There is a fear, that they will be teased and bullied. Of course, they will be as long as they are kept apart and isolated, kept as students who are different and not capable of being part of the community. If we are committed to creating awareness and sensitivity to differences, then that is only possible when all children live, learn and play together and understand sharing and collaboration.

When adequately sensitized, children without disabilities can be extremely caring. In one school where we have included our students, when the lift was not working and the wheelchair users could not access the library on the third floor, the whole class decided to stay downstairs and work instead.

Dumping or inclusion will depend on the schools vision of education. Do they want to create a Darwinian Model where only the fittest survive? Where anybody who is different is isolated and there is a worship of uniformity?

Or do they want a school, where diversity is welcomed and each person regarded a valuable member. But, more importantly, to address the real big question… How will the teacher manage? My appeal to all comrades and colleagues is to reflect, because I think time is ripe for all of us in the field of education to take a long hard look at the system and advocate the much needed changes.

All of us are aware that research in education show that generally 18% of students in any classroom are not able to cope with the curriculum. It is ironic that when we meet many government school teachers we find that they have much training behind them. They know strategies of joyful learning and child centered pedagogy.

They are, however prisoners of the system and bound by curriculum and examination schedules. Whatever the system, let us attempt to define what the ultimate goal of ten years of schooling should be:

When children leave school, they should be excited about the world around them, and have a sense of curiosity

They should know where to access information from for whatever they want to pursue.

They should imbibe values like honesty, caring and sharing , being proactive and developing skill to work together in a team and thereby help in the building of a community, a nation , a world

Have high self-esteem.

If these be some of our goals, then a rat race to top an exam, jealousy among peers and obsession with cramming many facts for short term memory, do not really meet the needs.

Inclusive Education is not a medical prescription of injecting some disabled children into mainstream schools, but about WHOLE SCHOOL DEVELOPMENT and perhaps whole education system development - where each one can enrich the other.

The profoundly disabled student can participate in a classroom which has a flexible curriculum and examination system (which the law already provides) and child centered strategies for learning, based on understanding like peer tutoring and participatory and experiential learning.

There may not be many cases to site just yet, since the will has been lacking. Inclusion of all children into the education system is a human right. Profoundly disabled children must not so easily be marginalized in government meetings, intellectual forums and in the inclusive education programmes.

It is the right of all children including the severely and profoundly disabled, to be part of the mainstream education system. In the Indian context, I would like to quote a lawyer friend, whose work I respect very much: Human rights are not on the agenda of the Indian social and culture consciousness, except for a few people who have been lucky to escape the traditional conditioning.

I think, I agree with him. In India the focus is on the social space one occupies, which may be by birth or by having worked into the establishment. To restore humanity to ourselves, we must be willing to ask ourselves questions, which are hard and difficult.

We must be willing to create a space for children, who are labeled severe and profoundly disabled. I would like to end by a poem by Stephen Evin Tyrwhitt, who is a disabled person. We use this as a mantra in our work.

Inclusion is

• a philosophy built on the belief that all people are equal and should be respected and valued, as an issue of basic human rights.

• an "unending set of processes" in which children and adults with disabilities have the opportunity to participate fully in ALL community activities offered to people who do not have disabilities.

(UNESCO - at the UN-Committee on Rights of the Child, October 6, 1997 - Centre for Human Rights, Geneva)

Under PIED, there has been a significant increase in the number of not only mildly disabled, but also severely disabled children, with the number of orthopaedically handicapped children far outstripping other disabled children. All these perform at par with non - disabled children; in fact their retention rate is higher than that of non - disabled children and absenteeism is low. PIED has also had a positive impact on the attitudes of the teachers, the heads of schools, as well as parents and the community in general. Also, the interaction between the disabled and the non - disabled children is good.

Inclusive Education

Another important paradigm shift in this area was initiated with the thinking that any difficulty that a child exhibited in learning was to be attributed not to a problem within the child, but to the school system. The organisation and management of schools, and the various programmes of teaching and interventions could also be one of the causes of children’s learning difficulties.

The new whole school policy is also referred to as the social or environmental model and rests on the theory that the child is a product of his/her experiences and the interventions the child has with various environments that impinge upon him/her. Thus to a great extent a child’s growth and development depends upon this.

Inclusion means

• educating children with disabilities in the schools they would attend if they did not have disabilities
• providing services and support that parents and children with disabilities need in order to be in normal settings
• supporting regular education teachers and administrators
• having children with disabilities follow the same schedule as other children
• encouraging friendships between children with disabilities and their classmates/peers without disabilities
• teachers and administrators taking these concerns seriously
• teaching ALL children to understand and accept differences
(UNESCO - at the UN-Committee on Rights of the Child October 6, 1997 - Centre for Human Rights, Geneva)

Towards Inclusive Education

For over a century, the prevalent model for offering education to children with special needs has been the special school. This system had major drawbacks – it is expensive and has only limited reach. Moreover, segregating children based on disability was discriminatory and violation of the human rights. Subsequently, the philosophy of ‘integration’ emerged which advocated education of children with mild and moderate disabilities in general schools along with others with adequate resource support. But children under integration method were still treated separately in schools and integration or mainstreaming was only partial.

This led to the emergence of the new concept called Inclusive Education (IE) which argues that all children irrespective of the nature and degree of the disability should be educated in general schools with normal children. More and more experts in special needs education are now advocating inclusive education not only on educational grounds but also on social and moral grounds. Inclusive education is all about making classrooms responsive to the needs of the learner. It stresses on child centered pedagogy using peer tutoring, co-operative learning and group learning.

Inclusive education has been introduced in the schools in the project areas of DPEP on a limited scale. Success of IE depends on teachers and good classroom practices. A beginning has been made in this area, but a lot more has to be done. Inclusive education may be the mantra to provide education to all children with special needs in the country. Then only the country will be able to achieve the elusive goal of Universal Elementary Education (UEE).

*The feature is being released to coincide with World Disabled Day on December 03, 2000 .

What do you mean by inclusive education ?

Three types of school

1. Dont come to me, I am not for you.

2. Come, but you change, I wont.

3. Welcome! I change to respond to you all

Which one is an inclusive school?
Think...and, we meet again may be in your inclusive school !

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