Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
The present paper gives an insider's view into the field of Inclusive Schooling in India in the domain of Mental Disorder/ Disability Inclusion and exposes intricacies and exploitations currently in place and also attempts to delineate the theoretical structure of Inclusion, while concluding with pertinent recommendations in order to establish legitimate Inclusion in the Indian Schooling System from a grassroots and in-field perspective.
Key words: Inclusive Schooling, Mental Disability, Special Education
1.INTRODUCTION
One must firstly understand that the idea of Inclusion is a noble thing; it is not only a socialist defiance against natural selection itself, that stems from a humanitarian consideration of equality and a feeling of affiliation to every member of our society, but it also has rational and logical benefits such as individuals with disability having the preparation to live as a part of the community, improvement in the skills of the education provider, and enhanced social peace because of the choice of equality that is taken up by one and all (Karagiannis, Stainback, & Stainback, 1996). Then by definition of that choice of equality, Inclusion means that individuals can study together without any discrimination based on caste, race, learning ability, linguistic ability, family structure, sexual orientation, religion, financial background, gender, sex, socioeconomic status, culture or ethnicity (Salend, 2001, p. 6). The basis of this understanding of Inclusion is historically attributed to two movements: the Normalisation movement and the Deinstitutionalisation movement.
Normalisation owes its origin to Bank-Mikkelsen, the Head of the Danish Mental Retardation Service (1959), who put it as, "letting the mentally retarded having an existence as close to the normal as possible" (Wolfensberger, 1972), after which it was further developed by Nirje into: "making available to the mentally retarded patterns and conditions of everyday life which are as close as possible to the norms and patterns of mainstream society" (Nirje, 1969) and propagated widely as he was then the Director of the Swedish Association for Retarded Children (Wolfensberger, 1972). Nirje's work was quickly seen as being potentially applicable to not just individuals with mental retardation but to all kinds of "deviants" which referred to all individuals who were "unconventional" and thereby creating the need for culture specific methods and standards of measuring "deviance" (Wolfensberger, 1972) which would allow...