How inclusive education can build a peaceful and tolerant world: A vision for the future of learning

The Hindu

13-05-2025

Today as the world faces terrorist attacks and strife that affects thousands of innocent lives, it is time to re-examine what is causing this global madness. It is obvious that humanity is divided on the basis of religion, race, ethnicity and ideologies, both regional and national. Well into the 21st century, mankind is on the precipice of self-destruction. If we can orchestrate terrorist attacks and pinpoint bombs halfway across the globe, surely we can figure out how to live together with values of respect, justice and liberty for all?
The only saviour for future reconstruction in order to build a better world community seems to rest on the child. Education today may be recreating and reproducing the status quo of present society, being designed specifically for the privileged few. However there is no discord regarding acceptance that education can play a major role in transforming and creating inclusive societies by shaping children, on whom the future depends.
Schools must be recognized as major arenas of social experience preparing young citizens of the world community. Inclusion seems to be the obvious solution for creating a more tolerant, civilized and plural world community. Concerted efforts must be made to provide students with learning experiences of how to live together with differences intact during the formative years spent within the schools.
Young people who will be part of 'schools for all' will undoubtedly be more likely to form part of a future society with a conscience. Thus schools adopting inclusive practices seems the only recourse to create an inclusive world, which will prove more tolerant and accepting of differences.. The vision of the child as the renewer of a new world order, of a new society, is enormous in its scope. Montessori herself, in trying to set forth her vision, admitted the vastness of its scope:
It is always very difficult for me to set forth my argument, because this argument is not a simple conception like a line, but is immense, if you will, like a desert or an ocean. This desert or ocean is not a creation of my mind, my soul, my knowledge, my evolution, but it is education—not the education that you know, but an unknown education that is new, that is efficient, that gives help and a new orientation, a new knowledge, a new wisdom to the world (Montessori, 1948).
Today's schools are faced more-than-ever to be accountable to respond to diversities especially with the focus on rights-based education and practically all countries are moving on to achieving universalisation of school education. In India, with new entrants into schools under the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 and National Education Policy, 2020, there is an urgent need for schools to counter the persistence of racial, religious, class, gender, language-based, social, regional, and ethnic discrimination in our society. In this light inclusion, of all marginalized groups of children, tribal children, girl children, minority ethnic groups, including children with disabilities seems to be the obvious solution for creating a more responsive education system.
The NEP, 2020 asserts that education must be able to promote values that foster peace, humanness and tolerance in a multicultural society. Within schools, one finds that competitiveness and intolerance for difference has taken root and students are constantly attempting to outscore his/her peers, with little effort towards sharing and cooperating – thereby leading to adults who continue to find it difficult to empathise and support others around them. Both peace education and inclusive education are therefore seen as vital not only to teach non-violence, but also create respect for diversity to combat the large-scale intolerance that is rampant in the current ethos.
Given that peace education and inclusive education both have to be caught not taught, schools must create a culture where respect for peace and inclusion are absorbed .
As a necessary first step it would be necessary to change the current teacher-centered classroom approach to child-centered learning. When there is active and participative learning in the classroom using interesting teaching and learning methods in a friendly and lively atmosphere marked by creative expressions of potentials and self-discipline, inclusion and high levels of participation will emerge naturally.
Outdated modes of instruction
The concern is that schools, operating on the notion of 'one pedagogy fits all students' continue to use traditional modes of instruction that create hostile and potentially harmful learning environments. The dominant paradigm in education involves the following premises:
• Teaching is equated with transmitting information to students.
• Learning is equated with acquiring that information, quite frequently by memorization.
• Assessment of learning is summative to determine students have been successful in acquiring the information
The high level of consistency in the pedagogical practices used by teachers has created a sense of what is 'normal' and what is 'other' in classrooms. Hegemonic pedagogy is thus the set of teaching practices that have become dominant over time and that perpetuates power/knowledge inequities and sustains the current regimes of truth in society, i.e. the pedagogy used by most of the world's teachers.
The hegemonic pedagogy draws on a model of learning that largely operates from the transmission mode of teaching, where students are perceived as acquiring or collecting knowledge and skills and are passive recipients of frequently didactic teaching. This results in excluding majority of the children from accessing the curriculum and engaging constructively within the teaching-learning process. In this scenario, peace and inclusive education obviously cannot be realized. It is vital to create an atmosphere of 'belongingness' of all students to lay the foundation on which peace and inclusive education can be built.
Teachers who look to the future, and to re-inventing pedagogy that is inclusive of all student needs, must choose to construct and offer their students a re/vision of the pedagogic contract - a new way of operating in their classrooms. For inclusion to move from mere rhetoric to actually responding to the disadvantaged and marginalized group, it is important that students must not only have access to opportunities and share the same spaces, but also like their peers must share the common wealth of the school and its culture. Inclusion means inviting those who have historically been locked out to be provided opportunity for full participation, not mere tokenisim by being giving admission and excluded thereafter.
Schools must become instruments to build a more caring world, by addressing barriers to learning that provides privileged participation for some and hinders participation of many others. Schools will also need to move away from being examination-driven, to emphasizing development of aesthetic, intellectual, creative and spiritual growth of children- not necessarily assessed through examinations. Thus we will be able to ensure that the next generation of students actually grows up internalizing Rabindranath Tagore's ideal of 'living together with differences intact', thereby building a better tomorrow.
(With over thirty years of experience in policy analysis, research and teaching both in India and abroad, Dr Renu Singh is a trained Montessorian, and an educational psychologist. She established the Young Lives Research to Policy Centre in 2018 and has led the Young Lives four country longitudinal research study on childhood poverty, University of Oxford, which has been running for over 23 years ,in India)