The Other Side
Educating the special child Anuradha C
I
mparting formal education to little ones is among the foremost challenges of adult human society. Simply because we are trying to play God. Deciding what’s good for them and what they should know, when they are not able to decide that for themselves. Knowing fully well that each child is unique in its acumen, interests, natural talents, financial position, social standing and so on. The best system we have come up with is formal school education – a collective learning method that classes all children in more or less the same mould. This is sub-optimal, surely. But alternate methods of personalized learning are tough to implement and involve massive investment of time and effort from the adult world. Our responsibility becomes increasingly grave when it comes to the matter of special children. Because it becomes impossible to slot these children into common moulds. Just like the vividity of God’s creation, the ‘special’ part of these children is simply too unique in every child! We may try to apply some terms like “Autism”, “Asperger Syndrome”, “Down Syndrome”, “Dyslexia”, “Cerebral Palsy” or “Motor Skills Disorder”. But these are just for our own convenience, because it helps to define the indefinable, at least to some extent. It gives us something concrete to work on. The tricky part of this category of children is that they are equal in innate intelligence to normal children, in most cases. What they lack is dexterity in movement, ability to communicate and comfort among crowds. More than these limitations, there is an even bigger problem they face – their fear of the unfamiliar. The existing education framework for these special children is pathetically sparse, prohibitively expensive and limited to the big cities. The first dilemma for an affected parent begins with acceptance. The natural urge is to try and coax the child into the ‘normal’ school system and hope that he or she will cope eventually, with a little extra support and guidance. This method might seemingly work in a few outlier cases. But predominantly, 52 TEACHER PLUS, AUGUST 2020
the rigorous schooling system only manages to break the child’s fragile confidence and dim their interest in learning. This is the stage where a parent’s acceptance that ‘my child is different’ is vital. With this acceptance begins their search for viable alternatives. Government guidelines and accreditations When it comes to offering formal educational courses to special children, there cannot be a fixed rigid format, due to the diverse nature of their deficiencies. The Government of India, under the auspices of the HRD Ministry and Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment offers an open schooling curriculum for this purpose. NIOS (National Institute of Open Schooling) prides itself on being the world’s largest open schooling system. The idea is to offer a wide variety of basic subjects, vocational training content, home schooling aids and format-free evaluation methods. Students can appear up to the class 12 examinations in this format. However, there is no formal education prescribed beyond this level. Alternative schools for special needs Inclusive schools – These institutions try to maintain a balance in their class strength with a mix of
