Country : India
Assignment Task -                 
 

As a country, India has been resolute in its commitment towards creating an equitable society based on the ideals of social justice and human rights, and education is widely recognized as a means of achieving this goal. Yet, even to a cursory observer, the near-complete absence of children with disabilities in regular classrooms across schools in  India is starkly evident. It is important to examine this confounding reality in order to understand why children with disabilities are excluded from this national agenda.

I explore the issue of the education of children with disabilities from the standpoint of inclusive education, an elusive concept that occupies only a peripheral position in the education discourse in India and remains largely misunderstood and misinterpreted by academics and practitioners alike.  

The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section, I examine the concept of inclusive education, tracing its origins and analyzing its complex nature in the Indian context. In the second section of the paper, sources of knowledge that inform inclusive education and the nature of research in the field are explicated. The final section of the paper deals with inclusive practice.

Issues in inclusive practice are discussed and some broad submissions are made for realizing inclusive education in the context of schools in India. For the purpose of this paper, I make a deliberate distinction between the concept of inclusive education and its implementation, recognizing the tension that exists between the theoretical concept of inclusion and the pragmatic considerations of realizing it in practice.  

 

The Nature of Inclusive Education  

Education is widely viewed as an endeavor that contributes to human flourishing and attaining social justice. Drawing interlinkages between education, law and rights, Rioux  (2014, 132-147) laments about how little attention has been paid to putting a human rights lens on education despite its obvious importance in ensuring equitable access.  Invoking Sen (2000), Rioux (ibid.) points out that there is a need for social action in emoving deprivation, gender inequality, illiteracy, and barriers to schooling.

 

specific reference to the education of children with disabilities, Rioux makes several pointed observations about the extent to which children with disabilities are denied access to school in developing countries and about the impact that such a missed opportunity has on their access to resources throughout their life cycle. The rise of inclusive education in the late 1980s and early ’90s was the result of a powerful emerging critique of several such issues in education in the West.  

The rationale for inclusive education is broadly based on the belief that segregation of children with disabilities at the school level leads to social isolation and vulnerability and deprives them of their social, cultural, and economic rights. According to Armstrong,  Armstrong, and Spandagou (2010, 26-36), parents, teachers, and advocates of students with disabilities promoted inclusion as a way of challenging the restrictions to access and participation imposed by existing models of integration and mainstreaming.

The development of the social definitions of disability influenced the critique of the role of education, and special education in particular, in the oppression and exclusion of the disabled. Criticizing special education for creating a separate sub-system of education,  Barton (1995, 157) maintained that there cannot be any justification for special education in a perspective that promotes social justice and equal participation. The origins of inclusive education therefore may be traced to a movement against the existing education reforms and the paradigmatic shift in thinking about disability from the functional limitations about an individual with impairment onto the problems caused by disabling environments, barriers, and cultures-the development of the social model of disability. Its origins also lie in efforts towards ‘normalization’ and deinstitutionalization in the West, and strong resistance to the special education discourse. At a theoretical level, it is broadly agreed that inclusive education is concerned with all children.

 

Inclusive education in India  

Referring to the complex origins of inclusion, Armstrong, Armstrong, and Spandagou  (2010) wrote, ‘it is a common adage that inclusion means different things to different people’ (29). Perhaps the adage aptly sums up the nature of inclusive education in the  Indian context as well. Tracing the origins of inclusive education in India is an onerous task as several scholars have noted that inclusive education as a concept in India is fraught with multiple interpretations and has not been adequately engaged with.

Nidhi  Singal (2006, 351–369) contends that the term has been simply borrowed from the  West without any serious deliberation on what it implies for us. Alur (2007, 91-106)  refers to this “West is best” kind of sloganeering as a form of neo-colonialism wherein the romanticized, child-centered notion associated with inclusive education (Sharma  2010, 125-149) has led to its widespread usage and rhetorical references without any critical engagement with the concept per se.  

Lack of engagement with the concept is starkly evident in the way inclusive education finds representation in the different policy provisions and Government of India programs. While inclusive education was mentioned in several important policies and program initiatives since the early nineties (such as the DPEP, PIED, PWD (1995),  SSA, etc.) it is apparent that there was no real clarity of its purpose or concept even when the term was incorporated in these policy documents. For instance, in her  comprehensive review of inclusive education literature in India, Singal (2005, 331-350) 

It is seen as a transformative process to increase access (or presence) of all children into school systems, enhance acceptance of all children (not just those belonging to marginalized categories), maximize students participation in all domains of activity, and increase the achievement levels of all children (Artiles, et.al 2006, 65-108).  

 

found that the terms ‘integration’ and ‘inclusion’ often occurred interchangeably in several official documents as well as in commentaries by disability experts. While India  was a signatory to both the UNCRPD and the Salamanca statements, Indian policy provisions and program documents that brought inclusive education into prominence  had several discrepancies and incongruities.

The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA) for instance, prescribed several measures to accommodate children with different abilities into the mainstream. However, it continued to encourage the establishment and funding of special schools for children who could not be integrated into the mainstream. Likewise,  it adopted a ‘zero rejection policy’ and suggested multiple levels of intervention such as the Education Guarantee Scheme, Alternative and Innovation Education, and home-based education as available alternatives to achieve the ‘education for all’ goal (SSA  2000).

Hence, without any conceptual clarity and a sense of the larger purpose of what inclusive education was meant to achieve, it became just one among several other initiatives of the Government to achieve the education for all goal. More recently,  Bhattacharya (2010, 18-23.) expresses some measured optimism following the Right to  Education Act (RTE 2009) hoping that a careful deliberation of the RTE Act can provide a legal framework for implementation of inclusive education for children with disabilities in the country. He suggests several measures that can be taken at the level of inclusive practice to ensure access and meaningful participation for children in the regular education system. Rose (2017, 5-22) too sees the RTE as an important platform for achieving inclusion but warns against adopting a factionist approach to addressing the issue of exclusion. According to him, viewing inclusive education only from a disability perspective and excluding other equally disadvantaged groups, such as scheduled castes/tribes, girls, and other minority groups as fellow travelers on the road to inclusion,  will never achieve the ‘education for all’ goal. Gabel and Danforth (2008, 1-13) make a  similar appeal in the context of all developing countries.

 

 


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