The Minister of Basic Education defended the idea before parliamentarians last December 02. The idea is to enable disabled children to develop better.
The Minister for Basic Education, Prof. Laurent Serge Etoundi Ngoa, was before the members of the Finance and Budget Committee of the National Assembly on Saturday 2nd December. At the end of the hearing, Prof. Laurent Etoundi Ngoaa announced that his ministry was considering closing special schools for disabled children. “We have problems with children with disabilities and so on, and we used to put them in special schools,” said the Minister. The member of the government explained “we can no longer put them (the disabled) in special schools, because medical experiments have shown that if we put them with normal children, they respond much better”. As a result, he adds , “we now have to create more schools where we can put all of them – those with motor disabilities, those with hearing disabilities, those with visual disabilities and so on. They need to be in the same classrooms because that solves and minimises the effects of these disabilities”.
According to Eyi-Francine Angue, director of the special school for hearing impaired children, who was interviewed by Solidarité laïque last January on the subject of inclusive schools, “there are 68 inclusive public schools in Cameroon, spread over the 10 regions of the country, which can accommodate children with disabilities”.
Although in theory schools should be able to accommodate children with disabilities, teachers do not have the training to do so. As a result, these children are poorly served. When a disabled child arrives in a class of 40 in a state school, how do you expect the teacher to accommodate his or her special needs without neglecting the other pupils?
For the time being, associations supporting children with disabilities recognise that the law provides adequate protection for this category of citizens. However, they deplore the fact that in practice children with disabilities remain marginalised.
