Our public schools are discriminatory
Correspondent | Friday March 17, 2017 16:31
For a country that prides itself with 'education for all', we expect that the national public schools, in particular, must be deliberately inclusive of the disadvantaged members of our societies. Our public schools are not accommodative and friendly to different people living with disabilities, despite the fact that they are admitted in them.
The poor teachers, who are still haunted by overpopulated classes, face a mammoth task of dealing with mixed ability students and worse still the students living with various disabilities.
The infrastructure in our public schools, especially the ‘old’, does not cater for the various people with disabilities. For instance a teacher or a parent, who uses a wheelchair cannot easily move in a majority of our public schools.
Majority of the students, who happen to have been lucky to go to these ‘unfriendly’ schools, just go there for the sake of it. There is no learning for them. There is absolutely nothing the ‘untrained’ teachers in the field of special education can do for them.
Nothing! So it is worrying to realise how this scenario continue to be ignored. It is clear that if it is not even pronounced in the national Budget Speech, there is no hope that anything tangible can be done in our public schools in the near future. It is an open secret that we have quite a good number of both teachers and students living with disabilities in our country.
Very few schools (two to be precise), that the country has, which unfortunately are both located in the southern part of the country ,re by far too few to address the prevailing situation particularly for our children.
A little more of these schools are needed in other parts of the country. We need more fully-trained teachers in the special education in order to be able to meaningfully impart education to the students living with all kinds of disabilities. It is therefore compelling to call upon Parliament, in its wisdom, to see to it that as a matter of urgency, it adequately address, the seemingly ignored situation, of people living with disabilities in all our schools in the country. Or put rightly, to make our schools to be accessible by all the people irrespective of their abilities either physical or otherwise.
The students with disabilities have a right to education too. Our dear teachers living with disabilities also need to be taken care of for they equally offer the exceptional services to our society that our country so much need.
As much as we preach 'Education for all', we need as a country to see to it that indeed all citizenry are well catered for in our education institutions across the spectrum.
As it is at the moment, most of our public schools are somehow very discriminatory and we cannot afford to have this kind of scenario in the 21st century. Honestly!
Solomon Batsietswe
sbatsietswe40@gmail.com