This chapter highlights an African perspective of inclusive education issues, challenges, and how ubuntu philosophy could be used to address them. The chapter targets academics, researchers in inclusive education, inclusive education policymakers, school management teams, advocacy groups, adult and early childhood development practitioners, government officials, interested parties in education from NGOs, individuals with disabilities, parents, and guardians as its audience. One of the inclusive education challenges highlighted in this chapter is that South Africa is seriously grappling with the effectual capacity and material impact of her policies conceptualised and promulgated at the national level and other related transformative education policies. It will be important to pose the following interrogative question: To what extent does inclusive education policy actually shape practice in intended ways at the school and classroom level?
Top18.1 Introduction
This chapter aims at highlighting an African perspective of inclusive education issues, challenges, concerns and how ubuntu philosophy could be used to address those challenges, issues, and concerns. The chapter targets academics, researchers in inclusive education, inclusive education policy-makers, school management teams, advocacy groups, adult and early childhood development practitioners, government officials, interested parties in education from non-governmental organisations (NGOs), community based organisations (CBOs), faith based organisations (FBOs), individuals with disabilities, parents, and guardians as its audience. South Africa, a constitutional democracy, is a signatory to a plethora of international initiatives and developments in education systems aligned to the global developments regarding inclusive education. Such initiatives include, but are not limited to Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965), International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1976), Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1981), Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990), Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (2006) and the Sustainable Development Goals (2015). The excluvist nature and form of the South African education system that is still experienced today in one form or the other, could be attributed to apartheid (Johnstone & Chapman 2009-131, Walton, 2018).
As far as inclusive education is concerned, one is of the view that it is approached and addressed from the Eurocentric perspectives dealing with Eurocentric challenges, issues and concerns. Therefore, the solutions will also be tailormade to those Eurocentric challenges, issues and concerns. In most cases, education in general and inclusive education in particular is intricately intertwined with the rest of cultural and social traits of society. In a sense, this makes education part and parcel of development and behaviour of that society. It further makes individuals bound by the ever-changing expectations of the society as it evolves. Education also have to evolve to meet society’s ever-changing expectations. Where society is removed from its cultural make-up such as Ubuntu, then elements of dissatisfaction begin to rear their ugly heads and sometimes open defiance is soon displayed. Hence, one can make the claim that most education systems in the world are specific and where they fail to observe or acknowledge the requirements of specificity, then, they must sufficiently be adaptable to convey relevant practices and excellence to different people in different situations and countries. For indeed, each education system has a clear meaning and good intentions for the people amongst whom it is operative or intended for. These are perhaps some of the things that are never uppermost in the minds of people who crafted, advocated for and promoted inclusive education.