Current policies aimed at children with disabilities in Ladakh, India, focus on the delivery of educational services to the individual child. Ethnographic research conducted with children with cognitive disabilities and their families in this rural Himalayan region reveals why this approach is problematic, given the local cultural context. Critique centers on the mismatch between inclusive education’s emphasis on the individual child and the cultural context in which the family is crucial to a child’s well-being and inclusion. In Ladakh, families – not children alone – experience and navigate the social, biological, and financial repercussions of disability and should thus be the focus of “inclusive” interventions.
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