EDUCATION OF HANDICAPPED CHILDREN

THE HANDICAPPED CHILDREN

                The term handicap refers to physical or mental disabilities that result in partial or total inability to perform social, occupational or other normal everyday activities of an individual.

                A handicapped child is one having a physical or mental impairment, expected to be of long or indefinite duration that substantially limits one or more major life activities of the individual so that the person is unable to live independently.

PHYSICALLY HANDICAPPED CHILDREN

                A physically handicapped child is one who possesses a physical defect which reduces his efficiency in performing his personal and social obligations according to a socially determined standard.

                According to WHO, an individual who is afflicted with a physical impairment that, in any way limits or inhibits his/her participation in normal activities may be referred to as physically handicapped.

Types of physically handicapped individuals

The physically handicapped persons generally divided as four:

1. The visually handicapped or Blind

2. Acoustically handicapped or Deaf

3. Speech handicapped or Mute

4. Orthographically handicapped or crippled

A. VISUALLY HANDICAPPED CHILDREN

                A visually handicapped individual is one who suffers from total or partial visual impairment. Blindness is regarded as the most severe and traumatic physical handicaps. Visual difficulties may influence the life of the individual in the physical, mental, social, educational and vocational aspects.

                The important problems experienced by visually handicapped children are the following:

1.            Poor intelligence: Since visually handicapped children have impairments in the exploration of the environments, they have deficiency in the concept formation resulting in their poor performance in intelligence tests.

2.            Academic retardation: Visual impairment results in slower acquisition of information by observation. They also possess a slower reading rate and lack concreteness in instructional procedures.

3.            Personality disorder: One’s life experiences play a vital role in personality development. For congenitally blind children life experiences are totally different from that of a normal individual.

4.            Problems in social adjustment: Inferiority due to the handicap, ridicule of normal children, etc. failure in school subjects lead to maladjustment of blind and partially sighted children.