On November 4, 2016 the Singapore government announced that we’d be charged in court if we didn’t send Amos to get educated by the time he turns seven.
And that’s a wonderful thing.
Extending Singapore’s famous Compulsory Education Act to children with special needs shouldn’t give you a picture of corralling children into pens and force-feeding them stuff that wouldn’t help them. I am confident that the education ministry, with its years of grooming top-notch students, would do well to cook something up for the special-needs community.
This means putting the right kind of education in the right places that would get them the right jobs when they graduate. It means assessing their abilities and educating them at a suitable pace that optimises their learning potential and innate abilities.
So what else could we look forward to?
Social readiness, in our opinion as parents, would be priority.
We are talking about more kids with special needs hitting the streets, the malls, in public places—to put it bluntly, more of them would be coming out of closets and mingling and interacting.
Society needs to prepare itself to receive them.
Children with special needs have lovely, brittle hearts. If discrimination in society upsets you it could well devastate them. Don’t think they don’t feel just because they don’t show it. It could take as little as a stare, a sneer, a snort to turn their world into a living hell. Do this often enough and it could break someone.
For the higher-functioning ones who enter mainstream schools, bullying is as much an issue to them as it is to us. Perhaps even greater. The school-going community must make the effort to integrate them, teachers must develop the faculty to mediate and intervene appropriately when things turn rough for children with special needs.
If we’re sending them out then we have to leave them a place in our hearts. Society must learn to embrace them or the Act might end up doing them more harm than good.
So apart from rolling out more school places, retrofitting schools and training teachers, we should be expecting more qualified educators and para-professionals who are not only equipped with the technical know-how, but also hearts of love, patience and compassion.
These traits currently reside in the hearts of many special education teachers we know, and we are heartened that this Act would also serve to bring their profession into prominence and recognise the beautiful work they do.
They would become role models and mentors to the regular educators who must now assume a larger role in society. The social spectrum now broadens and the teaching profession is going to get a lot tougher than it is today.
And if you hadn’t noticed, scarcely would we find a child with special needs getting all grand and ambitious over fortune and fame. In fact we’ve never found one. For those who could articulate themselves they speak often of humble things, of wanting a job, of wanting to dance, sing, live and love.
A gracious, caring and cohesive society is all that a child with special needs would ask for. Work out the Act well and we can all look forward to that.
This amendment to the Compulsory Education Act is a milestone in our journey towards inclusiveness. And as the motto of a well-known school puts it ever so eloquently:
The best is yet to be.
PS: Thank you all passionate mummies out there for your invaluable feedback. This reflects the voices of many.
Photo credit: Herkie via Foter.com