Kochi: ‘Special schools not the right way’

KOCHI: Dr Johnson Chun Sing Cheung, a lecturer at the department of social work, University of Hong Kong, says sending students with special educational needs (SEN) to special care schools is not the right method to bring them to the mainstream.

Addressing social science students at the 10th International Summer University in Social Work (ISUSW 2019) being held at Rajagiri School of Social Sciences here, he said volunteer mentorship, which is a different service approach, has been adopted in Hong Kong as a way out from this peculiar situation.

“To accommodate students with special needs, mainstream schools should deploy people with expertise in social work as mentors after giving them ample training. The training emphasises that SEN students are not different from others.

We don’t ask the students to change, but mentors to change,” says Dr Johnson.
“This is different from the usual student-teacher relations. With the help of a friendly mentor and by leading a life among mainstream children, SEN students can recover without medication or therapies.”

He said that the same strategy could have experimented in India too if the country can take the initiative to train social workers as mentors and set the atmosphere for the same.

The volunteer mentorship program is also effective in erasing the social stigma attached to mental illnesses which developed countries have already implemented.

“The society has fixed a definition of what is ‘normal’ without even caring for the subjectivity of the term. We must understand that we all become normal only if we all are special. The difference a person has must be accepted as normal. I would like to advocate a total perspective change. Inclusive education demands the current perspective to change,” he said.

He had implemented the program among students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and the outcomes of the program were presented at ISUSW.