Till the 1990s ninety percent of India’s estimated 40 million children in the age-group four-sixteen years with physical and mental disabilities are being excluded from mainstream education.
The overwhelming majority of them are vagabonds not out of volition but because of callous school managements and overanxious parents of abled children in a travesty of humanity and social justice. They have consistently discouraged children with disabilities from entering the nation’s classrooms.
Social justice and equity which are dominant sentiments of the Constitution of India demand that India’s 35 million physically challenged, if not the 5 million mentally challenged, children should be given preferential access into primary and secondary schools. Fewer than five percent of children who have a disability are in schools. Remaining nine-tenths of them are excluded. Against this backdrop of continuous neglect, there is an urgent need to find ways for developing potential of this large proportion of challenged children.
The National Policy on Education, 1986 (NPE, 1986) and the Programme of Action (1992) stresses the need for integrating children with special needs with other groups. The objective to be achieved as stated in the NPE, 1986 is "to integrate the physically and mentally handicapped with general community as equal partners, to prepare them for normal growth and to enable them to face life with courage and confidence.
India is one of the few countries where the education of children with special needs doesn’t fall within the purview of human resource development ministry. It is generally the burden of the omnibus ministry of social justice and empowerment, the prime focus of which is rehabilitation, not education. In fact, till today it does not have education as part of its agenda and the issue of education of children with disabilities remains imperceptible, hidden from the public domain, a private problem for families and NGOs to deal with.
It’s time that governmental agencies as well as mainstream institutions woke up to the reality that segregation of children with challenging needs is morally unjustifiable and a violation of human rights. Indeed there is no other way to provide education to 36 million disabled children. Seventy-eight percent of Indian population lives in rural areas without provision for special schools. Therefore, inclusive schools have to address the needs of all children in every community and the central and state governments have to train their teachers to manage inclusive classrooms.
Mode of Special Education in Schools of India
Children with disabilities are educated in India through special schools. There exist a few schools exclusively for blind and deaf under government sector. But there is not any special provision in mainstream government schools for education other disabled children like low vision, leprosy cured, hearing impaired, locomotory disabled, mentally retarded, mentally ill, autism affected, cerebral palsy affected and multiple-disabled. These children with disabilities are nurtured to some extent through the special schools of non-government sector.
Fighting Educational Exclusion:
Inclusion is a complex issue. The curriculum is a powerful tool (Swann, 1988) and may be part of the problem. On inclusion, Reuven Feuerstein viewed that “Chromosomes do not have the last word”. However, his view on inclusion are challenging for everywhere. He argues there are three pre-requisites:
Inclusive education is a new approach towards educating children with disabilities and learning difficulties with that of normal ones within the same roof. It seeks to address the learning needs of all children with a specific focus on those who are vulnerable to marginalization and exclusion.
It implies all learners, with or without disabilities being able to learn together through access to common pre-school provisions, schools and community educational setting with an appropriate network of support services. This is possible only in flexible education system that assimilates the needs of diverse range of learners and adapts itself to meet these needs.
The school and classroom operate on the premise that students with disabilities are as fundamentally competent as students without disabilities. Therefore, all students can be full participants in their classrooms.
Successful implementation of inclusive education occurs primarily through accepting, understanding, and attending to student differences and diversity, which can include physical, cognitive, academic, social, and emotional.
Such students have to learn how to operate with regular students while being less focused on by teachers due to a higher student to teacher ratio. Inclusion has two subtypes, the first is sometimes called regular inclusion or partial inclusion, and the other is full inclusion.
Implementation of inclusive education practices varies considerably. Schools most frequently use the inclusion model for selected students with mild to moderate special needs. Fully inclusive schools are rare and do not separate ‘general education and ‘special education’ programs; instead, the school is restructured so that all students learn together.
Inclusive education is not an experiment to be tested but a value to be followed. All the children whether they are disabled or not have the right to education as they are the future citizens of the country.
In the prevailing Indian situation, resources are insufficient to provide quality mainstream schools for common children. Hence, it is unethical and impracticable to put children with special needs to test or to prove anything in a research study to live and learn in the mainstream of school and community.
Inclusive Education aims at integrated development of children with special needs and normal children through mainstream schooling. To develop curriculum for special education and its inclusion in general teacher preparation programmes, the Rehabilitation Council of India (RCI) made a historic collaboration with National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) on January 19, 2005. In India, teacher training in special education is imparted through both face-to-face and distance mode.
Inclusive Education (IE) is not only the alternative measures for CWSN for want of separate special schools for these children but it is a scientific well thought strategy for their overall development; of course it is cost effective and doubly suitable for a developing country like India. Various initiatives for teaching of CWSN along with normal children in mainstream schools popularly known as IE are being taken at different levels but still 95 percent of CWSN are out of mainstream schools.
Even the schools where IE is in operation, infrastructural facilities required for inclusive teaching-learning processes are poor. Capability of teachers required to deal CWSN along with normal children also appear to be poor reflecting the poor quality of training for IE. The only point of satisfaction is that importance of IE has been recognized and government is working hard to provide universal education to CWSN under IE.