This particular lecture gave me a specific reaction that I think should be written about. While I wholly understand that after the Regular Education Initiative, the idea of blending children with special needs and children without them together became standard, I still think we're overlooking something important. The blending of the students benefitted the students with special needs academically and socially, but what I haven't read is whether it benefits the general education classroom. Truly, being exposed to others with different needs will certainly expand how the other children view the world (in that they'll know that children with special needs deserve the same respect they would give their peers), but I have a hard time believing it would develop them academically, and isn't that the real focus of education? Teachers need to know theirs and their students' weaknesses in education, and setting up a classroom so it only academically benefits one particular subset of student seems to be a weakness for the system.
That said. There are still students with very mild special needs that can, somewhat seamlessly, be blended into the classroom without really holding back the rest of the class(ADD/ADHD comes to mind immediately). It is with these students I don't see a need to separate them - but the others... well, I disagree with the current mindset.
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