It truly depends on the severity on the student’s disability.

If you were to excluded all disabled students from regular education classrooms, like so many people that visit Yahoo Answers would like to see happen, the education system is not doing the students who have a mild to moderate disability justice at all. The mild and moderate disabled students can not only interact with their peers and learn how to get along with others but many mild to moderate disabled people do live successful lives. To deny these students the right to an education is denying them a right to a future.

Here is just a very small list of disabled people that lived very productive: Physicist Albert Einstein, light bulb inventor Thomas Edison, motor car inventor Henry Ford, President George Washington, telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, President Woodrow Wilson, actor Tom Cruise, and cartoonist Walt Disney all had a mild to moderate learning disability. Yet, they all managed to succeed in life despite their learning disability. That list just comprise of successful people that are learning disabled, this list does not include people with other forms of disabilities, such as deafness, wheelchair-bound, blindness, or people with other disabilities that I did not list.

However; to place a student with a severe disability in a regular class, the education system is not only being unfair to the disabled student because they are unable to get the attention they deserve nor are they are being unfair to the remaining students or the teacher. The reason being is because a student with a severe disability can at times be disruptive.

The cons are teachers will be forced to divert a disproportionate amount of their attention to disabled students. The result will be an inferior education for the rest of the students. Laws protect the disabled by giving them an appropriate education. It should be the same to the regular people which it is clearly not! All disabled people should be placed in self-contained classes, not simply the ones who are struggling with regular classes. That way general education students would get the appropriate education that they deserve! I understand that general education students would learn a lot from the disabled but placing them in academic classes is going a little too far. General education students can learn with the disabled in other classes that are less demanding like electives, lunch, etc.

The pros are that disabled students can learn with non-disabled students and for some reason the advocates say that it helps disabled students as well as non-disabled students. I don’t understand how it helps because it’s not up to their academic or emotional ability. Wouldn’t it be better for them to be with other students with similar disabilities rather being in a class with non-disabled students?

It depends on the type of disability. Were you refering to physical or mental? Physical…not really many cons. They are able to do most things that others do, and the kids in the class learn about differences among people.

Mental is a different story. It’s great if the student has the help he/she requires, but often times there are not enough assistants to go around. If this is the case, the classroom teacher must spend disporportionate amount of time with that student making sure that they understand, adapting all of the assignments to them, or creating completely different assignments. I think when there is not an EA in the class, the other kids in the class suffer because the teacher must spend so much time with that student.

HOWEVER, the disabled child gets to be around his/her peers, and will benefit socially, and the other students in the class learn about tolerance and differences among students.

Some of the students will take it upon themselves to help those students, but unfortunately, not all students are able to tolerate/accept them. One of my disabled students was being badly bullied this year, and his mother actually pulled him out of school because the problem had gotten so bad. It was students in another class that were doing the bullying, and unfortunately it was very difficult to protect him when he was out on the school ground. We tried teaching him the skills he needed to protect himself, but he doesn’t really have the abiltiy to use them. The administration was not being as supportive as they could have been, and it took a long time for them to come down hard on the bullies. Those bullies are out of the school now, and so hopefully next year my student will come back to school.