Policy of Inclusion:
A policy of inclusion needs to be implemented in all
schools and throughout our education system. The
participation of all children needs to be ensured in all
spheres of their life in and outside the school. Schools
need to become centres that prepare children for life
and ensure that all children, especially the differently
abled, children from marginalised sections, and children
in difficult circumstances get the maximum benefit of
this critical area of education. Opportunities to display
talents and share these with peers are powerful tools in
nurturing motivation and involvement among children.
In our schools we tend to select some children over
and over again. While this small group benefits from
these opportunities, becoming more self - confident
and visible in the school, other children experience
repeated disappointment and progress through school
with a constant longing for recognition and peer
approval. Excellence and ability may be singled out for
appreciation, but at the same time opportunities need
to be given to all children and their specific abilities
need to be recognised and appreciated.
This includes children with disabilities, who may
need assistance or more time to complete their assigned
tasks. It would be even better if, while planning for
such activities, the teacher discusses them with all the
children in the class, and ensures that each child is given
an opportunity to contribute. When planning, therefore,
teachers must pay special attention to ensuring the
participation of all. This would become a marker of
their effectiveness as teachers.
Excessive emphasis on competitiveness and
individual achievement is beginning to mark many
of our schools, especially private schools catering
to the urban middle classes. Very often, as soon as
children join, houses are allocated to them.
Thereafter, almost every activity in the school is counted for marks that go into house points,
adding up to an end-of-the-year prize. Such ‘house
loyalties’ seem to have the superficial effect of
getting all children involved and excited about
winning points for their houses, but also distorts
educational aims, where excessive competitiveness
promotes doing better than someone else as an
aim, rather than excelling on one’s own terms and
for the satisfaction of doing something well. Often
placed under the monitoring eye of other children,
this system distorts social relations within schools,
adversely affecting peer relations and undermining
values such as cooperation and sensitivity to others.
Teachers need to reflect on the extent to which
they want the spirit of competition to enter into
and permeate every aspect of school life—
performing more of a function in regulating and
disciplining than in nurturing learning and interest.
Schools also undermine the diverse capabilities
and talents of children by categorising them very early,
on narrow cognitive criteria. Instead of relating to each
child as an individual, early in their lives children are
placed on cognitive berths in the classroom: the ‘stars’,
the average, the below - average, and the ‘failures’. Most
often they never have a chance to get off their berth
by themselves. The demonising effect of such labelling
is devastating on children. Schools go to absurd lengths
to make children internalise these labels, through verbal
name calling such as ‘dullard’, segregating them in seating
arrangements, and even creating markers that visually
divide children into achievers and those who are unable
to perform. The fear of not having the right answer
keeps many children silent in the classroom, thus denying
them an equal opportunity to participate and learn.
Equally paralysed by the fear of failure are the socalled
achievers, who lose their capacity to try out new
things arising from the fear of failure, doing less well
in examinations, and of losing their ranks. It is important
to allow making errors and mistakes to remain an
integral part of the learning process and remove the
fear of not achieving ‘full marks’. The school needs to
send out a strong signal to the community, parents who
pressurise children from an early age to be perfectionists.
Instead of spending time in tuitions or at home
learning the ‘perfect answers’, parents need to encourage
their children to spend their time reading storybooks,
playing and doing a reasonable amount of homework
and revision. Instead of looking for courses on stress
management for their pupils, school heads and school
managements need to de-stress their curricula, and
advise parents to de-stress children’s life outside the
school.
Schools that emphasise intense competitiveness
must not be treated as examples by others, including
state-run schools. The ideal of common schooling
advocated by the Kothari Commission four decades
ago continues to be valid as it reflects the values
enshrined in our Constitution. Schools will succeed in
inculcating these values only if they create an ethos in
which every child feels happy and relaxed. This ideal is
even more relevant now because education has become
a fundamental right, which implies that millions of
first-generation learners are being enrolled in schools .
To retain them, the system — including its private
sector — must recognise that there are many children
that no single norm of capacity, personality or
aspiration can serve in the emerging scenario. School
administrators and teachers should also realise that
when boys and girls from different socio-economic
and cultural backgrounds and different levels of ability
study together, the classroom ethos is enriched and
becomes more inspiring.
