Schools of today — who are they for?

This brings us to the main question — how do we, as a society, be more inclusive? While the question is a small one, the answer requires us to look at several aspects, she says
Curious and engaged
Curious and engaged(Pic: Smriti P Rao)
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The Right to Education Act (RTE), 2009, the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 as well as the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPwD) Act, 2016 provide for inclusive education of disabled people.

However, in the two schools that I have taught in and the many students that I have encountered (I taught 200 students and interacted with more than 1,000), I met no students with physical disabilities or diagnosed mental and intellectual disabilities.

This got me to think about where these students were, and whether there was a fallacy in the policy or its administration.

While reading, I came across a very interesting distinction made by several scholars between “integration” and “inclusion” of disabled children in the education system. In simple words, the former tries to fit the student in the system while the latter tries to alter the system for the student.

While policies and laws state that “inclusion” needs to be prioritised, they do not explain how this must be done, leaving the administration to implement tokenistic programs that only integrate disabled students. Due to this, students prefer special schools which are more accessible to them as its designed keeping their needs in mind.

While this sounds like a solution, it’s only an addition to the problem. Siphoning off a segment of students to specific schools leads to segregation which translates into societal relations.

This works both ways — abled kids will not understand how to communicate with disabled kids and vice versa.

Additionally, it propagates the idea that there needs to be “more effort” that needs to be put into the education and work of disabled people and takes focus away from the fact that the society needs to be more inclusive to consider the needs of people who do not conform to the norm.

In the classroom
In the classroom(Pic: Smriti P Rao)

This brings us to the main question — how do we, as a society, be more inclusive? While the question is a small one, the answer requires us to look at several aspects:

  • Representation: children need to grow up looking at teachers and role models who fall on the disabled spectrum to ensure normalisation.

  • Teacher training: teachers need to be given sensitisation training for when they deal with disabled students since they also hold the same beliefs that the society propagates i.e., that abled people are superior while disabled ones need help and support to lead a “normal” life. Additionally, they should be taught how to interact with students with different forms of disability.

  • Modes of instruction: we need to diversify our methods of teaching from plain teacher instruction to inculcate audio visual elements, hands on activities and the like.

  • Infrastructural support: schools need to make sure that physical accessibility to education exists in the form of ramps, brailles, washroom facilities that make school a smooth experience for students.

  • Curriculum change: curriculum needs to represent more than the abled, heteronormative experience. Disabled characters need to be added to our literature in a way that does not romanticise them and science needs to account for inventions that are not spoken about, such as braille and voice recognition in GPS (Global Positioning System), which were done in furtherance of disabled people.

While this, in no way, is easy or enough, it is a start. We need a holistic effort from not only educators but also lawmakers and social workers to truly make education an inclusive space for all.

(Smriti P Rao holds a law degree from Symbiosis University, Hyderabad. In 2022, she joined Teach For India as a Fellow and taught over 120 students across a government school and a low-income private school. Currently, she works at Esther Foundation — an organisation that aims to enable and empower college-going women from Tier II cities. Views expressed are her own.)

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