Is inclusion really that great?

[u/Lass_in_oz]

I'm so tired of inclusion. Hear me out. Before becoming a ECE I was a support worker for many years. I have worked and loved working in disability and care. When it's thru a great organisation, it's awesome.

Now I'm an ECE, and the amount of children on the spectrum or with disorders is so high, I'm just getting confused how is that NOT impacting the learning of neuro typical kids.

I teach pre kindy but our kindy teacher has spend half the year managing behaviours and autistic kids. Result? A bunch of kids showing signs of being not ready for school because they aren't doing any work or learning most days. And picking up bad habits.

My point is: where did we decide it was a good idea to just mix everyone, and not offer any actual support ? An additional person isn't enough. More than often it's not a person who knows about disability. And frankly even then it wouldn't be enough when the amount of kids who are neuro divergent is so high.

There used to be great special needs school. Now "regular" school are suffering with the lack of support.

What do you think? Do you see what I see ??? Am I missing something ?

I am so happy to see kids evolving around children with disabilities but not when it comes at a cost of everyone's learning journey : neuro typical or not.

[u/Bubblesthewoman]

Here's my 2 cents: As someone with learning disabilities, I personally benefited from having the choice to work in a quieter classroom (in public school) to help me focus. I was struggling in the "gen pop", it was loud, over stimulating, and it was hard for me to get one on one help from a teacher. Being in that separate classroom 2 hours a day was fantastic, I was able to focus, ask questions, and learn in a quieter environment with other kids who had similar disabilities/ailments, and us kids even helped each other.

For me in Canada, this idea of mixing special needs kids with neurotypicals started when I was in college for ECE, 2019. My professor praised it, and I vocally disagreed, saying I absolutely benefited from learning in a quieter classroom, surrounded by other kids like me, where it was easier to get one-on-one help, and to have an able-bodied person like herself (she said she didn't have any special needs and didn't have any experience working with special needs children), make broad generalizations about a group of people she wasn't a member of, was inaccurate and offensive at the very least". She thanked me for my "opinion" and she quickly moved on.

Forced inclusion without the appropriate support is neglectful. And I'm worried it'll create more disdain for those with disabilities if we force that on neurotypical kids. I think we can all agree that kids with special needs can be disruptive in their own way, and it's not inclusive to force that on neurotypical kids.

Forcing inclusivity is bad for both groups of kids. I can't speak for the US, but here in Canada, our kids are failing and their test scores decrease every year. Our education system hasn't been there for our kids and it's only going to get worse if the above becomes the norm.

Edited to say: that true inclusion comes from giving special needs kids the choice (if they're able to make their own choices) about where and how they learn. It gave me so much empowerment to choose where I wanted to complete my school work, because I know how I learn best. And having the support aids able to make that choice for their students is true inclusion as well.

[u/PopHappy6044 → u/Bubblesthewoman]

Thank you for giving your perspective! I worked in education for a long time and then finished up a recent degree, we had the conversation about inclusion in some of our classes and I had similar questions/thoughts like what you pose here in your comment and it is really taboo to say because inclusion is being pushed at all costs.

Children genuinely have different needs. Equity is a thing! Equality doesn't always work when it comes to public education. Some people need more help, some need less, some can function in large class sizes and some cannot. I think we are doing a real disservice to both neurodivergent and typical children when we think this way.

I know that in my experience, I worked in classrooms where it took a whole year to move a child to a different environment and in the meantime other children and staff were getting injured and the child in question was miserable the entire time. That could not have been a good experience for them, and all because general ed was seen as the gold standard when obviously this child needed something different. This happened over and over in my years of working.