Why Is Important To Keep Autistic Children With Normal Students - Essay Example

Autistic children do suffer a great deal due to their disability to interact normally with others and find normal people around them as completely indigenous to their own kind. These children have puzzled psychologists, educationists, and policymakers for years in their struggle to come up with optimal plans for education and health. Besides being more capable than other children with disabilities are, autistic children show a tremendous capacity to learn through their surrounding at a greater speed than other mentally handicapped children surround.

Therefore, as this paper argues, it is important to not have separate schools for autistic children so that they can learn and adapt to the normal world more quickly than they would if kept in separate schools. The reason why it is important to keep autistic children with normal students is an important phenomenon that guides the learning mechanisms of all children and which, in autistic children, works a little differently. This mechanism is ‘imitation’. Imitation is the process through which small children take in information.

By assimilating the data from the environment and guiding their motor system to repeat what they saw, kids have this miraculous tendency to teach themselves by observing and repeating the tasks. What is strange or abnormal about the autistic children is their disability to imitate like typical children. Autistic children are unable to feel the need to experiment with objects like other children, which consequently disables them to extract meanings for different objects and processes that he sees around.

This lack of experimentation leads to a handicapped perception of the world where everything stands alien to them. In addition, autistic children also suffer from what doctors refer to as lack of affiliative orientation. A huge proportion of wanting to experiment and construct associations with the outside world comes from children’s desire to copy others. In autistic children, this ability is reduced largely which leads to diminished efforts to imitate and thus learn. Besides, autistic children also show a different attitude towards novel objects.

Where normal children are attracted to novel objects and new shapes, autistic children run away from them, hence blocking out the dimension that the novelty of these objects carries. As opposed to normal children, what attracts autistic children is the repetitiveness and monotony of objects rather than their differences (Furneaux & Elgar, 68). The abovementioned facts regarding how autistic children learn make one thing distinctly clear: autistic children cannot totally blend in with normal children.

Nevertheless, it is strongly a proposition that they should not be sent to separate schools. A strong reason why autistic children deserve to study with other kids has a lot to do with the role of a teacher. Thus, a teacher’s responsibility is to make sure all her students are keeping pace with the course and not lagging behind. It is largely agreed upon fact that not even all normal children are the same. Some of them learn fast while others learn slowly. Some are smart while others are weak.

Therefore, if the teacher does not discriminate against the slow-learning normal children, there is no reason why autistic children should be denied the privilege of going to a normal school. The opponents of this view may contend on the basis that since it is harder for autistic children to learn, their chances of succeeding in normal school are minimal.