Page 62 - Magazine Department of B.Ed. 2015

llenges for Equity in Education
Education plays a key role in determining
and shaping a person’s life. Higher level of
education means higher earnings, better health
and longer life. By the same token, the long-
term social and financial costs of educational
failure are high. Those without the skills to
participate socially and economically generate
higher costs for health, income support, child
welfare and social security systems.
So a fair and inclusive system that makes the
advantages of education available to all is one
of the most powerful levers to make society
more equitable. Education has expanded
significantly in the past half-century, but hopes
that this would automatically bring about a
fairer society have been only partly realized.
What is inclusive education? Equity and
inclusion are closely intertwined. Equity is
fundamentally about fairness and means that
personal and social circumstances should
not be an obstacle in achieving educational
potential. Inclusion is ensuring that all students the Indian Government has been striving to
not only access education but also participate
and learn together effectively, in ways that
promote human rights and critical thinking.
The issue of inclusive education involves the
area of the social model of disability, which
proposes systemic barriers, negative attitudes
and exclusion by society as the ultimate factors
defining disability. This shift in the idea came
when it was realized that children in special
schools were seen as geographically and
socially segregated from their peers and failure
of meaningfully integrating these students in
mainstream schools. Inclusive education is
not only limited to mainstreaming the learners
with special needs but also concerned with
identifying and overcoming all barriers to
effective, continuous and quality participation
Without dreams we have no focus, no drive, like a sailboat with no wind.
45
Divya Minz
in education.
The barriers in the implementation of inclusive
education are identified in the form of
inappropriate curriculum, untrained teachers
and the flaws in the organization of the education
system. Barriers are also seen in attitudes
of others concerned and physical facilities
provided which do not conform to the needs
of differently abled. The Right to Education
Act was included in the Constitution in the
year 2009 as a fundamental right. According
to this, the state should provide free and
compulsory education to all children in the
age group of six to fourteen years. Policy
in India has always leaned towards inclusion.
From the recommendations of the Kothari
Commission in the early days of the republic
to the Action Plan for Children and Youth with
Disabilities (2005) and the National Policy
for People with Disabilities (2006) recently,
write inclusive policies on education. However,
these policies often are not perfectly inclusive.
Many of them tend to discriminate against
people with “severe” disabilities or people with
intellectual disabilities, especially in terms of
mainstream versus special schooling. Though
the policies governing the education system are
inclusive, the problem with implementation
still remains. While the policy states that all
children should go to school and governments
are enforcing the Right to Education Act but
in many cases quality learning is not taking
place which is contradictory to the ethos of
inclusive education.
The internal barriers remain mostly
psychological barriers like inadequately
developed self-concept, lack of confidence of
the learner which is sometimes imposed by