Let’s talk about inclusion in the current education system. Let’s talk reality. Now, everyone is included in the same way in primary school. It’s a great value, inclusion. I love it, actually. But what about the reality of the situation, concretely, when children of the same age have such large disparities in the same class? Is it really positive for everyone?
In my daughter’s kindergarten class, there are children with great developmental disparities, some with issues that are not yet diagnosed or treated. Because if the child did not go to daycare, the problem remained invisible. And it is at school that it explodes.
It must be said that the pandemic has hit hard on the most vulnerable, and it is this year that we see it on the school benches. All the speakers will tell you: those who were doing quite well are doing well; those who were in a vulnerable situation are not doing well. The gap widened.
On the one hand, there are those children who come from a well-to-do background, who have been stimulated in every possible way, who have socialized in a daycare center where workers have ensured that they have no developmental problems which should be intervened. Children who have gone through the pandemic not too badly, their parents having had the opportunity to find a thousand and one tricks so that it does not affect them too much. Children with both parents working, who live in a quality house or apartment, with room to play outside, a playroom, lots of books and a well-stocked pantry.
On the other, there are those children who have it hard. Those who may have arrived from another country in the midst of a pandemic and who have spent quite a bit locked up in their little 4 and a half with parents, or even just an allophone mother, who, not having the social resources financially sufficient, did not send their child to daycare. A medium with less room to play, two, three books if the child is lucky, and maybe even a mediocre pantry.
My daughter’s teacher is “lucky” this year; it has “only” 16 students. But beware: 16 students whose disparities are so great that she simply does not provide the task. She is on her own to oversee behavioral issues, with whatever support the school can give her. Except that a special education technician (TES) from the school has left – they are therefore recruiting – and that a psychoeducator is on leave.
Meanwhile, we continue to want everyone to be included. I wonder how a single teacher can manage a child who has difficult behaviors, who is not yet able to have a bowel movement on his own and who has not learned to handle scissors at five years old, next to ‘another who has a vocabulary equivalent to that of a 3e year and begs her to teach him to read and do 100-piece puzzles.
It is now impossible to create “stronger” classes and classes with children with greater needs. Impossible to group children according to their strengths instead of their age.
The effectiveness of the old beautiful idea according to which the strong would pull up those who have more challenges to meet has simply never been demonstrated, neither by a study nor by an observation on the ground. On the contrary, the observation is that everyone experiences more distress in wanting to put everything in one basket.
In my school board, we have just removed the last bastion of an “enriched program” that remained, that is to say a class selected in an international program, because it was not inclusive.
Well yes, I understand. Except my daughter, what does she do? She gets bored at school and doesn’t always want to go. She is sometimes affected by the teacher’s mood. Every day she sits and waits to learn; every day, the teacher runs and gets out of breath.
So, I wonder: if we want leaders to lead society, who is going to train them? Who is going to push those who want to move faster, who is going to stimulate them?
Before my daughter started school, I strongly believed in public school. Unfortunately, I feel drawn to the private sector for the good of my daughter, who suffers from being left to her own devices with all her motivation and energy. And that saddens me, to be honest.
And I am also thinking of those children who are in dire need of more TES resources, psychoeducators, etc. My daughter doesn’t need it right now. Other children need it. By wanting to standardize resources, are we increasing disparities?
I really wonder who wins, with this square philosophy of inclusion at all costs.