Position Paper

Daisy L. Damian

SPED 200: Introduction to Special Education

Position Paper

Homeschooling or mainstreaming: School for children with special needs?

Sending your child to a conventional school is something very natural for us. Believing that schools are normally considered students second homes, we look at teachers as their parents inside the classroom. This is mainstream education which has been in Philippines for more than a hundred years. 

Mainstreaming is defined by understandingspecialeducation.com as a term to describe “the integration of children with special needs into regular classrooms for part of the school day”. (Michele Hancock, M.S., P.P.S, 2009) While the remainder of the day is in a special education classroom, it is an ideal situation and a placement of an exceptional student in the least restrictive environment as possible in a regular classroom setting. Children who have been diagnosed with visual or physical disabilities can attend mainstream schools as long as the school is equipped with the right facilities for easy access, with trained staff and teachers that can support and enable them to cope with the mainstream curriculum. There is also what we call special education classroom and often called, 'self-contained classroom' or 'resource room'. This is where students can have the ability to work one-on-one with their special education teachers popularly known as 'shadow teachers'. This is to address needs for remediation during school days.

In the past decade, an emerging interest group led by the Homeschooling Association of the Philippine Islands (HAPI) is now changing the background and setting of education. They are advocating homeschooling in the Philippines especially for children with special needs. But HAPI quickly clarifies and differentiate homeschooling from homestudy. Mr. Edric Mendoza, chairman of HAPI said, “Homeschool is different from home study. Home study is schooling supervised by a teacher...