Evolution Not Design

I was recently having a long conversation with one of my friends who is also teaching and is generally interested in education and related issues. We talked about Gandhi's Hind Swaraj and it that context he was wondering if by educating the children the way it is now, are we doing more damage. I was desperately trying to convince him that it is not so, that unlike Gandhi that I was fully embracing modernity (though I have to say I have not read Hind Swaraj but I have read a review of it by T.S.Ananthu). I was later wondering about why the essential messages to structure society has always failed throughout history. Messages from Sangam Literature like Purananooru (400 songs about how to live life with regards to the society) or Tirukkural, messages from Plato, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammad or later from Marx or Gandhi all seem to have fallen on deaf ears. I find it not surprising.

My thesis, is simple. Human society, like life, has evolved and has not been designed (well, if you are one of those crazies who subscribe to Intelligent Design you would not be reading this post in any case!). It would continue to evolve and cannot be designed. By that I mean that it will take small steps that would be advantageous to it in the short-term. Evolution does not know about the long-term. All these folks tried to prescribe a design and not surprisingly it has not been adopted. On the other hand, if you look at free-market capitalism, it is by nature evolutionary where choices of individual agents make a system. There is no overall design as such. You can see now why it has been readily adopted so widely!

Our cultural evolution has brought us to a stage where we actually employ some design to organize our societies. This might sound contradictory but if you think carefully we could have just blundered into constitutional democracy and found it beneficial. So the contemporary human society finds itself equipped with some possibilities for design.

That said, what are we to do now? Those who are interested in pushing the society in a specific direction can and should do it only in small steps. Evolution has never made radical changes and our societies would also never accept radical changes. Rather than having grand (grandiose?) goals of an utopia let us take small steps to make each individual a thinking and tolerant member of the society.

Coming to education, the focus on education should remain on the individual. If we have a grand design of a society and we build an education system to create such a society, it is bound to fail due to the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraphs. So, focus on the individual and hope for the best...

P.S. - I was actually tempted to keep the title as “It is not teleological” but my wife somehow hates that word, especially when I use it....

Wait is over!

The arch is standing! Here is the evidence

Murthy, standing proudly under the Arch he helped build. Guna is getting busy to start on the next one. We actually use only mud and bricks, no cement at all. All construction in Puvidham uses very little cement. Mainly at the foundation level to prevent termites crawling up. Otherwise it is mostly mud. Here you can see Mani and Selva mixing mud with their feet..



Turning to more mundane facts, I spent two blissful hours yesterday evening programming! Yes, now I do programming as a relaxing aside from my stressful day job of teaching. I created a small relational schema to hold information about my students assessments. I can now prepare report card for each student and get them signed from their parents! I used Open Office for this with their HSQL and the forms and reports! Yeah, I can hear some mumble that this ain't no programming... I know I should have used RubyOnRails but with Reliance Wireless Connect as my connectivity to Internet I don't have the bandwidth to download it!

So far this school year i have conducted 9 tests for the 8th class students (poor things!). I showed them the grim outcome today. Only 2 have cleared (35%) all the tests. hmm.... reflects poorly on the teacher, doesn't it?

Now to the real stuff

The class 8th students of Puvidham are now building real arches in their hostel building. I did not know it was so goddamn difficult to build a wall straight. We had to bring down the walls 3 times before we got it right. It is really a lot of skilled work. In any case there was slow progress (5 days) and we now are at the stage of building arches. Thrilling, I must say. But wait till we remove the scaffolding! The process
- Build side walls
- Use bricks as scaffolding
- Use string with radius length like a compass and create scaffolding with mud
- Arrange bricks on top of this platform with mud filling the gaps
- Those who have faith pray and others like me just worry and wait....


Murthy admiring his handiwork....

Ravi and Mani finish their first arch... you can see the scaffolding for the second one next to Ravi..

Arch

Was thrilled with my class in particular and education in general! The class 8th students built an arch with just bricks and stones. No mortar, not even mud!

It was a wholesome educational experience. Meenaksi, our school principal wanted the children to participate in the construction work that is going on for the hostel building. We thought they can build an arch for one of the verandahs, since it is a structurally interesting concept. I downloaded some reading material from wikipedia so that they were aware of the concepts like compression, tension and keystone. Last Saturday we did the initial work in the hostel, laying the founding with rocks and mud. The placing of the rocks to form the basement is a skilled work and it was done by Sabari (who is in class XI now in a government school but is an ex-Puvidham student). We less skilled folks helped in mixing mud, shifting stones and bricks and providing him those materials. But our students also observed how he placed the rocks and jammed them together. We have finished the basement.

I thought may be we should experiment building a small arch before getting to the real thing. I do not know enough about structures and was not sure if we could build one with just bricks. Meenakshi, who is an architect by training, said of course! So we embarked on building an arch. Actually I had no role to play other than explaining the wikipedia article to the children (and also suggesting we could use cycle tires for initial support). Most of them are construction workers children, unlike me who is a child of a college professor and a central government employee! So they knew more about that stuff than me and so I quietly let them do the job.

This arch is such a counter intuitive thing that almost all of them were quite sure that this whole thing will come tumbling down. But voila it didn't! All the students were absolutely thrilled and so was I. I thought I will share this joy with you all...(sorry about the picture quality, it was taken with Nokia 2500 phone camera!)

The amazing piece of architecture.. (the school dome which in itself is cool is in the background)..
And below are the proud architects (left to right Selva, Murthy, Ramesh, Mani, Prashanth, Kalimuthu, sitting under the arch Ravi)

Teacher Man

I am reading this very interesting book Teacher Man by Frank McCourt (author of Angela's Ashes). It is autobiographical about his teaching career. I am now in the section where he teaches English to teenagers in a "vocational and technical school" in New York City. The students from this school are working class children and are never meant to go to college. McCourt is hauled up by the guidance counsellor because he encouraged one of the girls to go to college. I quote the guidance counsellor from the book:

"A man's reach should exceed his grasp, but you better make sure they have something to grasp. Don't create impossible dreams..."

I pondered about this quote and found it profound even though I am unsure whether I should agree with it. Should teachers be responsible for creating impossible dreams? Should we really make sure they have something to grasp? Who is responsible for possibility? Doesn't impossible dreams create possibility?

As I struggle with a bunch of 8th standard boys (this is their last year in this school and we are trying our best to prepare them for the "mainstream"), the above questions are not academic but existential.

Your thoughts?
I posted this on my M.A.Education forum and one wise man replied to it..I am quoting his reply here
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Yes, the quote is profound. It reminds one of Tsar Nicholas stating that no man should be educated beyond his station or even of Manu when he puts a ban on shudras studying veda, though is couched in more humanitarian terms.

Education is about creating dreams and ability to make those dreams real. This business of creating dreams and requisite abilities is not always very neat, it is mostly messy--dreams running away alone or abilities remaining dormant, etc. Teachers should refrain from playing God and controllers of destiny. They should definitely try to fire imagination and have faith in the basic rationality of the students to create the balance between dreams and capabilities.

While writing all this I am aware the problems unrealisable dreams could cause in terms of the emotional upheavals and happiness of the student. But, we should remember that humans are much more than we can ever estimate them in their abilities and the world is much more unpredictable then we think it is. Therefore, to determine which dreams are realisable and which are not may not be possible for the teachers.

Also, even making "sure that they have something to grasp" involves dreams.

Tightening of screws

It has been more than a month since the new school year started and I am teaching 8th standard (the last class in our school). We in the school have decided this class is going to be the preparatory class for the children to get into 'mainstream' education and I have been given the hatchet job of executing it! This means more academic focus, homework and tests! Not so surprisingly it has been very unpopular at least with some kids (Though, strangely, several of them like competitive tests and are working distinctly harder to get better scores. Nothing so far has motivated them to work on their subjects as effectively as tests!). One kid though seems distinctly unhappy with this change. He was (almost) my star kid last year. His photo appears in an earlier post in my blog. Ravi, the smart(ass) one. He has not been coming since last Friday and I had really thought he was sick. Today I hear news floating around in the campus that he is actually quite ok. So I take my bike and head off to his village (around 3 kms from our school)....

Ravi was in the hostel last year. Both his mother and father were working in Bangalore. Before he was in the hostel, for one year, he used to cook for himself and his younger sister before coming to school. He was impressive last year. He is bright, no doubt and he used to put in reasonable effort. This year he insisted on staying back at home because he and his sister did not like the hostel food. So his mother is now forced to stay with him. Since then he has been very irreregular with his work. Last week at the beginning I had sat down with him to find out why this change. He said he was attending RSS shakas and that was taking up most of his time. I tried dissuading him from attending those shakas and enquired what transpired in them. Not surprisingly the kids were given some 'nippat and pori' (munchies) to eat and were also fed some anti-muslim rhetoric along with it. We had a discussion about how there are no differences between people as such and they are only good and bad (mostly bad :)) etc and he agreed he would not go to the shakas again. I was pleased then, but wondered when he vanished for few days...

I went to his house (a small but pucca house) in the village and the door was partially closed. I peeped inside and here was Ravi spread on a cot and watching TV (colour) at a distance of 2 feet. There was another old woman sitting on the floor watching it too. She was not his mother, who had gone off to work. He came out looking sheepish and when I asked him why he did not come to school, he said he had fallen down from the cycle on Thursday evening and so could not cycle on Friday (it is a tough 3 km ride with ups and downs). Since his friends had Saturdays off, he loafed around on Saturday and since he did not come for two days and could not get a leave letter he did not come on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. When I asked when he planned to actually come to the school, he had no answer.
His mother was back from work by then and she started bawling that how hard she is working so that he goes to school and here he was watching TV. She said that the only way he could get out of her situation is to continue his education. "I am in this state because I did not go to school" (how true this causal analysis is, is not clear). By this time there was a small crowd of old women outside the house (curious about the dapper looking outsider in jeans and t-shirt) and giving their bit to this hapless young fellow. Feeling sorry for him I took him away for a walk and asked him that if he is really interested in coming to school he should come, if not I will not trouble him like this again and let him be. He said he would come tomorrow.
I am hoping he would!

Settling into a rural rhythm

It has been extremely difficult to do any kind of writing. I have fallen way behind my assignment schedules for my M.A. course and you all know that I have done no blogging. Something to this rural phenomenon that I feel knocked out by 8:30 at night. To keep at least an arms distance from the zillion bugs that have made my home their home too I sleep inside a tent inside my bedroom! It actually makes sense. Mosquito nets are too cumbersome to put on and take off. The tent has netting and it is very easy to handle. Getting back to the sleeping early situation, yes I do wake up early in the morning at around 5. I look around and I see no sun in all its full glory and I pull the sheet tightly over my eyes and sleep for another hour and a half. My beauty sleep is now 10 hours and the effects are showing. Bollywood beckons.

I made some soap with the 7^th standard boys. It is rather simple. You can 200 ml of sodium bicarbonate and mix it with 100 ml of Aloe/Neem extract (grind the neem leaves into a juice and filter it). Soak this mixture for a day and the next day you add 100 gms of gram flour and some fragrance and mix it well into a paste and then shape it into soap bars and let it dry. After a month the soap is ready to use. This would give you around 10 soaps. The children have made almost 70 soaps and they are eager to sell it in the school’s annual fair at 5 Rs per soap. Ready to buy?

What do you do with students who go far beyond the teacher? There is this Ravi (hmm.. I can hear some in the audience sniggering that it is all in the name) who solves puzzles in 10 minutes that took me more than 12 hours and I still could not solve. All teachers except Meenakshi, who has excellent visual sense (she is a trained architect after all), could not solve the puzzles. Ravi is in 7^th and is good in almost all subjects except English. Even English, in a single year he has picked up the entire decoding aspect (making the correct sounds out of the print) but cannot comprehend. He did no schooling for couple of years moving with his family in Bangalore on construction work. He is now in the hostel. We have around 10 to 12 puzzles that we are planning to display as a challenge in our fair. The customers pay Re. 1 for trying it and get back 2 if they solve it. For the difficult ones they get Rs. 20 if they solve in 30 minutes! Ravi is manning that booth.

Ravi - Yes, this is how they come to school everyday!

Aims of Education

Any educational endevour should be clear about what its aims are. Here we look at some of the aims of popular efforts in India – Siksha-Satra propounded by Rabindranath Tagore, Nai Talim of Mahatma Gandhi, The National Curriculum Framework of 2005 and finally a list provided and justified by yours truly. In the coming Asha bi-annual conference I am planning to propose these aims and see how Asha would go about developing a strategy and implementation for achieving these aims.

Siksha Satra

1. Education should provide an environment and opportunity for children to exercise their natural desire for self-expansion and growth.
2. Education should provide skills in art, science and business to assist in self-preservation of individuals
3. Education should prepare individuals to operate effectively in the field of human service and citizenship. It should inculcate in individuals the capacity to understand and sympathize with their neighbors and hence function as a decent member of the human society. Through education of children entire neighborhoods can be rejuvenated for active self-governance.
4. Education, through art, should assist the individual in self-expression and imagination. It should provide the ability to expand the horizon through this imagination for spiritual abstraction and human welfare.
5. Through the above education should provide the basis for a renaissance of the countryside in India.

Nai Talim

1. The core aim of Basic Education is to help students to develop self-sufficiency. This self-sufficiency is not limited to the narrow sense of preservation, i.e. dependence on others for daily bread but also develop the power of acquiring knowledge for oneself and ability of individuals to rule themselves to control their senses and thoughts.
2. Basic education laid a strong emphasis on manual work. The belief was if everyone in society does most of the manual work required to sustain themselves materially, it would make society more just. Material production also involved co-operative and co-ordinated activity and thus education would also promote these important values.
3. Basic Education did not look at art as a separate area but as an integrated component within the physical work. Whether creating a pot or building a hut, adequate energy was spent on the aesthetic aspects. Doing a job well done and moving beyond the mere function and giving importance to the form was emphasised.

National Curriculum Framework

1. Education should aim to build a commitment to democracy and values of equality, justice, freedom, concern for other’s well being, secularism, respect for human dignity and rights.
2. Education should aim to build independence of thought and action and value-based decision making independently and collectively. It should make individuals capable of constructing knowledge independently by learning to learn and unlearn.
3. Education should aim to develop a social temper. It should help develop capabilities that would enable individuals to participate in democratic processes and economic processes. It should enable individual to find work not only for self-sustenance but also to contribute meaningfully in the socio-economic processes of the nation.
4. Education should encourage creativity and aesthetic appreciation. It not only provides creative avenues for self-expression but also guards against exploitation of aesthetic gullibility by vested interests.

Aims of Education - Thus Spake Ram

The essential aim of education is to provide the ability to persons to achieve their various needs – individually and collectively. The needs can be broadly categorized as physical, psychological, social and self-actualization. Good education should aim to create a disposition amongst students that would make satisfaction of these needs possible. Education should strive to create:

1. An introspective and confident being – Knowing and understanding oneself is an essential quality that a person requires to live in a community. Education should provide the opportunity and space for individuals to introspect and understand what kind of person they are, what their likes and dislikes are and what their capabilities and limitations are. Understanding and accepting oneself helps in acquiring self-confidence and one of the primary aims of education should be to help individuals be confident about themselves. The ability to introspect and evaluate oneself for the consequences of their actions and inactions is essential for harmonious communal living.
2. A knowledgeable being – To know about things around them is a natural curiosity that human beings possess. This curiosity needs to be encouraged systematically through education. Knowing what, how and why about things and events should be a habituated desire and the ability to find the source of such knowledge and assimilate it is essential if a person needs to understand the world around them and act accordingly. Education should aim at helping this ability to construct knowledge.
3. A rational and thinking being – The ability to reason and find rationale is critical to operate in a complex environment, which is what human society is. In a democratic society, force of custom or word of higher authority cannot be sufficient justification for a person’s actions and its consequences. Justifications have to be made based on logical reasoning that is acceptable to all. Science has made enormous progress to increase our understanding of the world around us and it is also based on reason and critical thinking. To create a scientific temper is an important aim of education.
4. An adaptive being – Self-sustenance is very important for any individual. But school education rather than teaching ‘a specific skill’ to its students should create the ability and disposition to learn skills as necessitated by changes in the external environment. Since change is constant, only those who adapt quickly and correctly to these changes would end up successful. Education should also go beyond providing mere adaptability; it should also enable individuals to be agents of change themselves.
5. An ethical and moral being – When capability is not followed up with ethics and morality, society is riven with injustice, inequality and strife. School education should help students explore the ethical and moral dilemmas and develop a social temper. How important is individual liberty? What is the balance between individual liberty and communal responsibility? Education should assist in at least making students think about these issues and finding satisfactory answers for themselves.
6. An aesthetic being – Humans have always aspired to transcend beyond the mundane through artistic expression. Ability to appreciate and participate in good art brings out so much joy in us that it is imperative that education brings out and develops this aesthetic temper amongst us. High art and literature may also temper our desires and acts as a curative in our ethical pursuits.

A society that consists of confident, knowledgable, rational, adaptive, ethical and aesthetic individuals would definitely be a more just and equitable one.

Constructivism

After several years of deliberation on whether Asha Bangalore should fund physical infrastructure in government schools, it was finally decided to go ahead and build a compound wall around Chandranagar school and also fund for drinking water supply and additional bathrooms.

The government funds were not sufficient to build the compound wall and further the money spent towards it was able to create only a half-constructed wall. The teachers and students felt that a compound wall was an absolute necessity for the school considering the hostile local environment.

• There had been repeated instances of local youth loitering in the school premises and pestering the students.
• Tourists cars were also frequently parked in the school campus and sometimes disturbed the classrooms by playing loud music.
• The school play ground was unusable since it was used as a public garbage dump and latrine

Considering the above factors and also a hope that a more formal school space would improve the sense of a school amongst the students, Asha Bangalore has decided to go ahead and construct the wall.

Asha Bangalore has also been trying to get the parents to be more actively involved in the school issues, but the response has been lukewarm. The last time when a meeting was organized to go and demand additional teachers from the BEO only 20 parents (for 340 students) turned up. It was felt that Asha’s involvement was not visibly felt in the community and if we contribute to a visible asset may be it would motivate the parents to participate more. This theory is yet to be tested!

The construction started on Oct 9^th, 2007 and here are some photographs of the work in progress

Sump for drinking water (15000 litres)

Wall (to the right of entrance)

Wall (to the left of entrance)

God of learning!

Yesterday I was so pissed off that I didn’t go to school!

The Chandranagar school (where I teach) is a public space that is utilized for everything, including tying up cows, parking tourist vehicles (sometimes with music blearing out of them) and such. For the last 3 years Asha Bangalore has been trying to get a compound wall around the school so that there would be a sense of a separate school space within the community. The hope was that it would bring a notion of sanctity to that school space. We could have easily raised funds to get that wall built. But, as you all probably know by now, we don’t do things the easy way. We do it in a way so that we can complain and gripe about it, may be just so that we can get another blog entry!

We wanted the local ‘community’ to make some contribution towards this compound wall. All the usual reasoning like ‘ownership’ and ‘empowerment’ has been thrown around quite liberally in this context. For three years we have been trying, trying and trying. Recently one of the parents who happened to be a construction person even made an estimate of the costs for the wall, plus additional toilets and drinking water facility. It came to about a lakh of rupees. This included around 15000 of labour charge. Since many parents are construction workers we were trying to see if they can contribute labour in kind along with Asha volunteers (our volunteers have no skill in the construction industry or for that matter....). No movement... “how can we work for two days without wages”?

Yesterday I go to the school and I see this huge Ganesh pandal. So many lights and decorations and I asked the guy working on it how much did that cost. He said it was around 10,000 rupees. The local folks are quite happy about the pandal. I don’t think they paid that out of their pockets, some local politico-goonda must have. Nevertheless, why couldn’t they channel that to improving the school infrastructure? What do they expect this pandal would do to them? Do they really believe that Ganesha, god of learning, is going to help the children learn better? This country, I tell you...

In any case all this fretting and fuming (and blogging) has helped me calm down. With tail between my legs I am back to school today. Out of the 43 kids I teach may be one of them might find reason not to invest in Ganesha pandals, may be not... It seems like any focus on the end-result is a route to disaster. Just focus on the process...just focus on the process..

Muthu - II

For those who have been waiting with baited breath to hear what happened to Muthu, don’t worry..... nothing happened.... his mother just ‘forgot’ about our conversation....ooofff.

Muthu was ‘behaving’ fine for a couple of days before he started his antics once again. Last week I conducted a test (quiz) and made sure there were two sets of question papers so that the children don’t copy. Copying is prevalent and as natural as gravity in this school. I had told the children that the question papers are different and if they tried to copy it not only indicates their nefarious purpose but also exposes their stupidity!

Not so surprising, Muthu had copied two answers from his neighbor. I gave a 0 out of 20 and then while I was distributing the answer sheets, he was busy trying to gouge the eyes out of Maruthi (an extremely bright kid). I just lost it. I guess since the physical route was not available, I had decided to emotionally scar(e) him. I went near him and threatened to fall at his feet and plead with him. I told him that I had exhausted all other avenues of reaching out to him and the only way I can see now is pleading. There was so much emotional drama in the class, all students went “beda saar, beda saar”. Muthu started bawling, if I were he I would have prefered one tight slap...

Heroic Teachers

Will Oklin is a teacher (English and Photography) in Chicago school and he has blogged about his work. My mentor sent me this link and I thought it was a good read.

Muthu

Muthu is an 11-year boy studying in the 5^th standard in Government Higher Primary School, Chandaranagar, Bangalore. I have been teaching 5^th standard English and Maths for the 8 months (I taught them when they were in class 4 too). Muthu is an hyper-active kid and is always busy up to some mischief. But when paid individual attention he used to pick up things quite fast. This year his messing around in the class was even more. He either used to constantly fight with the kids around him or he used to fall asleep. For the last few weeks I was really wondering why is he falling asleep? Is he really very tired or worse is he sniffing some gum or something? He was not learning anything academically in the class and had started doing more crazier things like making faces at me when I turned my back towards the class (still unusual in 5^th standard, I am expecting that only in 7^th or so). I had wanted to talk to his parents and asked him if I can meet them. Both are construction workers and he said they are never around. His younger brother, Arun is also in the same class, but he is quite the opposite. He pays attention and picks up things very fast. He is a good student.

I used to complain to all the teachers about Muthu and even to some of my friends. I used to even joke that he is my nemesis and he comes and frightens me in my dreams.

Today his mother happened to come to the school. She came to complain that she say him roaming around the streets yesterday instead of coming to the school. I also complained to her that he is not paying attention in the class and was disrupting the class too. But I did not expect what was coming next. She produced a stout stick and said that we should thrash him more often. “He would listen only to some sound thrashing Sir. Look, we are like this (construction workers) because our mothers did not thrash us”. She also started beating him then and there. I felt miserable that I ratted on him. Ominously, she also threatened him “let your dad come back home today, you are going to be dead body only”. At that point I recovered a bit and told not to worry about him and I will talk to him. Since I am “English” teacher (who wears jeans and t-shirt) I get a little more leeway in this school, so I hope (dearly hope) she takes my word and leaves him alone. Man, I have resolved I will never complain about my kids, not even in a non-serious fashion.

After she left I had a long conversation with Muthu:

Ram: Whats up Muthu, why all this trouble?

Muthu: I don’t know sar.

R: How come you feel sleepy all the time, too much work at home?

M: No, sar.

R: Ok, what are the issues you are facing in the class, why did you skip school?

M: Everyone bothers me and talks to me and then I get caught. The students and teachers beat me and so I did not come to school

R: Do you beat the students too?

M: Yes :)

R: What do you do at home, when do you get up?

M: 6 am

R: What do you do after that?

M: I fold all the bedding

R: And then

M: I go and collect 10 pots of water. The distance is like between here and the bakery (around 300 meters).

R: And then

M: I cook food.

R: Doesn’t your mom cook?

M: No, she also leaves early. My dad leaves without eating. My mom does other work at home, eats and then leaves. So I do the cooking

R: What do you cook?

M: Rice and sambar. Some times sambar with just dal and sometimes with vegetables.

R: Do you like vegetables?

M:No

R: Don’t you like potatoes?

M:Yes :)

R: What else?

M: Potatoes and Bhendi (Okra)

R: Wow, I like potatoes and okra too. They are might favorite, in that order. We have things in common. Do you like bitter gourd?

M: Yes, also they say it helps in clearing your stomach of bugs.

R: What about nighttime?
M: I cook then too and have to get 2 to 4 pots of water.

R: Do your parents beat you?

M: My father gets drunk and beats me. He also beats my mother.

R: Why does he beat you?

M: When I don’t do my work. Like not getting the water.

R: Why don’t you do your work?

M: Because I have to study and all.

R: Yeah right, really tell me?

M: I also like to go out and play with the other kids outside :)

R: Hmm, that is not right beating you like that. Is it?

M: No, it is not right.

R: How come then you beat other kids?

M: !!!!! (silence... smile)

R:ok, lets come back to the classroom. What do you think can be done?

M:Everyone talks to me and bothers. When I talk back or hit back I get caught all the time.

R: Well, if you don’t sit in the back row it might not be a problem. Do you go to movies?

M:Sometimes

R: Where do you like to sit, in the back or in the front?

M: In the front

R: Why?

M: The screen looks big and I get excited :)

R: May be if you sit in the front in class also it might be exciting. Think of the class as the movie and think of the teacher as a hero or a heroine or a villain if you like (ha ha ha)

M: ha ha ha

R: Will you do that?

M: Yes I will sit in the front row from today.

We then had a math’s class and Muthu sat in the front and was very eager to participate in the class. He repeatedly attempted to answer questions though only a few times he was right. I hope this continues in the future too.

I was feeling quite bad that I was quite quick to judge this kid and complain about him. A 11 year old cooking and doing the housework. So much violence in his house. I think he would like to unwind in the school and his idea of doing that is horsing around and have some fun. Can we blame him? I have to be kinder and more patient with him. This also explained why Arun was doing better academically. He had a more relaxed life (comparatively).

That said, having 43 such kids in the class does test my patience. I don’t know how long all these nice feelings will last before I go back to my....

M.A. in Elementary Education

It has been a while since I made an entry. Thanks for your patience. It might be hard for you to believe but I have been actually kinda busy these days. In a moment of madness I had reasoned that I require higher education on the education front and hence enrolled in M.A. in Elementary Education offered by Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and I now don’t regret it at all. It has been a fantastic 3 weeks in Mumbai.

It is a 2 years with 4 semesters, each having a month of contact classes in Mumbai and rest of which can be done online. It is far more rigorous than I ever expected with 3 assignments to be submitted every month. So it is not really like a correspondence course. Through special software we are expected to continue our discussions with the faculty online throughout the course. The three courses in the first semester are Philosophy of Education (PoE), Sociology of Education (SoE), Child Development Cognition and Learning (CDCL).

PoE as the name suggests is a broad philosophical analysis of role of education, its aims etc. The course is being jointly offered by Rohit Dhankar of Digantar and Alok Mathur of Rishi Valley (Krisnamurthy Foundation). It has been an excellent course. They have been very careful to provide us just with aids and readings such that ‘a philosophy’ is not thrusted down our throat but we develop the capability to philosophise. Our first reading was from the concluding chapter of John Dewey’s book Democracy and Education. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the field of school education. There have been other readings from Dearden, Hamlyn, Logic and Ten Theories of Human Nature. Though the readings have been heavy I have enjoyed them very much.

SoE is two-semester course and expects to give the students an understanding of the relationship between the society and education. We have so far dwelved to some Sociology basics like Social Struture, Sociological Imagination, Social Stratification, different theories like the functionalism, conflict-theory (Marx) etc. It has been quite illuminating and some of the readings have also been very interesting. Currently I am reading some chapters from the selected works of B.R.Ambedkar and his views on caste along with Andre Betelie on Caste, Class and Power. There have been lively discussions in the class (19 out of the 25 are women) about gender and education. Reading from Kamala Bhasin on gender issues is good.

CDCL has a lot to do with child psychology and theories of learning. We were introduced to

• Behavorism by Pavlov, Skinner and Gestalt
• Construtivism by Piaget
• Social constructivism by Vygotsky
• Information Processing

CDCL also covers aspects like nutrition and child development and how self is constructed. I have to read Erikkson’s theory in this subject and then read a autobiography (I am planning to read K.M.Panniker’s) and analyse how he has constructed his self. Shouldn’t that be interesting?

Summer Camp

The schools are closed for the summer vacation. This year the Karnataka government has decided that they would provide the noon-meals even during the vacation time! So the teachers are expected to come during the summer vacation and keep the schools open. I have taken this opportunity to have a kind of summer camp for the children with more informal sessions. The government’s plan is, as usual, not very well thought. There are around 25 students (out of almost 300) who turn up. The meal provider has so far (it has been one week) not provided the noon meals.

I now handle 10 children and it is lot more enjoyable. There is direct interaction with each and every child and I am not playing any policing role at all. We still do English and Math. I bought these bi-lingual picture books from Tulika, which has both English and Kannada on the same page. The idea is that the children would read the Kannada and know the story and I would help them read the English bits and slowly they would be more comfortable reading and speaking English. I also work on Math using the decimal blocks and Cuisenaire rods.

Since the class strength is reasonable, we have lot of conversations outside and along with the teaching/learning. Here are some snippets:

Dogs

Out of the 10 students almost all of them have been chased or attacked by stray dogs. 3 of them have actually been bitten and had to get those horrible injections for rabies. Anyone in Bangalore or even outside of it would have heard of the recent happenings in this context. The dogs are a serious health problem and I really don’t understand these “animal lovers”. Do they let cockroaches roam in their houses and not kill them? Are dogs endangered? Would they upset the ecological balance? Just cull them. It is nice to sit in houses with security gates and travel in cars and wax eloquent about their concern for dogs. Let their children be chased every day by dogs and be bitten by them and then I would like to hear from them.

Mobile Phones

All their families have mobile phones. Some families have more than one. Most of the children remember the 10-digit number of the phones in their families.

Private Schools

There are 3 children who come to my summer class from private schools in that area. They belong to the same socio-economic background as the other children. Two go to “Blossom” school. They have better capability than the government school children but only marginally. A class 6 student, Annapurna, who has supposedly learnt English from class 1 can just about read a simple English book. But her attitude was amazing. She took the book back home, worked on it hard and the next day could fluently read it. This is very different from the government school kids. Though I have given them the books for a week, I doubt any of them even open the books at home. This drive to perform could definitely be seen in the private school children. Another kid, Hemanth, goes to “Orchid” private school. He is in the 1^st class and he is very good! He can already read simple English books. His brother Manjunath, who just finished 4^th class in the government school, can barely read English. Seeing the difference in performance from the same family but in different systems makes me wonder if I should re-calibrate my opinion on private schools, at least in the urban slum context. For "Blossom" the kids pay Rs.85 per month and a Rs.750 donation. I was not able to find out how much is the fees in "Orchid".

A Fine Balance

“It is a fine balance between despair and hope” - Rohinton Mistry. In my opinion, this pretty much sums up life in India.

Hope – There is now a sleeper bus to Bijapur. It costs 400 Rupees one way but I could stretch my legs and try to sleep during the twelve-hour overnight journey from Bangalore to Bijapur. Bijapur seems to be a happening enough place for people to go to in sleeper buses.

Despair – The bus turns up 3 hours late. I was supposed to leave Bangalore by 7.15 pm and I actually left around 10.30.

Hope (mini) – The bus reached Bijapur by the scheduled arrival time of 8 am in the morning. So those 3 hours was just a buffer in their planning. The VRL travels probably allows for more buffer in their schedules than any of the famed software companies. May be our software tycoons should travel more in VRL buses to understand the concept of planning and scheduling.

Hope – The Shikshana Vahini program run by SVYM and supported by Asha has an ambitious goal of enabling all the SDMCs in Bijapur district by 2010. The team (of 5 people) seems to be very dedicated and energetic. Rather than simply running a school for around 200 children, Mamatha of SVYM has immersed herself in the un-enviable task of enabling the local communities to take ownership of the performance of their neighborhood schools funded by the government.

Despair – This trip only reaffirmed my opinion that it is easy to spout “community involvement” as an inane mantra but in reality it is a back and soul breaking effort. The program has been operational for 18 months. We visited 3 schools and met the SDMC and the teachers. There seems to be no ownership from the SDMC. The strong message from them is that the teachers are paid and so everything, including getting the children to school, is the teacher’s job. It is strange to hear from parents that they would not spend any effort in sending their wards to school but the teachers would have to run around every day to round up the children in the village and get them into the school. The schools are badly understaffed. Pressure on the BEOs (block education officers) is not working. The schools are in a moribund shape.

Despair (untrammelled) – Child marriage is still very prevalent in Bijapur! In every class I visited there were at least 2 or 3 girls who were already married. We are talking about elementary school here, 3^rd and 4^th grades. I didn’t have the heart to ask if they were married to adults or children. Some continue to live with their parents after the “marriage” and others actually live with their in-laws. If the civil society has not been able to stop this pernicious practice after 50 long years, do we really have hope about quality education and such esoteric stuff?

Hope (am I trying hard here?) – The SVYM team fully understands the current status and its implications. There was a very open and involved discussion on how to change track and tactics to be more effective. I was absolutely amazed at the energy and verve shown by two Asha Silicon Valley volunteers, Padma and Kiran, with whom I was traveling. They have come for a few weeks vacation from the US and in spite of the pressures to meet and spend time with family they took considerable time off to travel to these “projects”. I can’t stop gushing about them. They are ultra marathon runners and they hold Indian records. They have raised phenomenal amount of money through their running for Asha. Even if we consider all this as to be expected, the mental effort they spent in understanding the situation (in such a short time) and working with the SVYM team to find solutions does give hope. Does it not?

Do we really have a choice otherwise?

Value of Education

I have high blood pressure; my diastolic pressure is usually above 90. After a lot of diagnostic tests the doctors say it is due to a kidney condition. But I have my doubts. I think my pressure shoots up when I hear the following two arguments and let me tell you why.

1. Asha has a lofty goal of ‘catalyzing socio-economic change through education’. I repeatedly keep hearing from several volunteers, some of whom who have been in this racket for almost a decade, that even after ‘n’ years of running a school things have not changed. I think they are forgetting elementary logic. Education is a necessary condition for development but not sufficient. Do I need to explain more? I am actually not able to!
2. The second peeve I have is the narrow focus on only the instrumental value of education. There are educated who are un-employed, so why do we need education? This argument completely ignores or does not even recognize the existence of the intrinsic value for education. I take, some would think an extreme, position that basic education is an end in itself; it is not a means to an end. When I make this statement I will have to qualify what I think ‘basic education’ is. So let me jot it down as succinctly as possible:
1. Ability to read, write, comprehend
2. A good foundation in basic computational skills (arithmetic) and ability to form abstractions out of concrete situations (mathematics helps a lot in forming abstractions)
3. A good foundation in science as a tool for critical thinking. The aspect of science through inquiry and questioning in a systematic fashion and the acceptance of ‘truths’ through experimentation, which is repeatable and transparent (not because somebody or something said so or because that is what is being done before). The ability to questions ‘why’ and ‘how’ for almost everything and acquiring means to either comprehend answers that have already been found or acquiring ability to systematically approach those answers.
4. The applied part of the previous section in terms of problem solving techniques. ‘What is thinking’, ‘Is there a systematic way to think’, ‘Is there a common pattern in problem solving in general’.
5. Logic
6. A good grounding in social sciences. Understanding human history and questioning past events and their relevance to today’s life. Economics and the various social systems, their philosophies and how they affect societies.

The ultimate aim of ‘basic education’ is to create an autonomous thinking individual who can critically analyze problems and have some basic techniques of problem solving. (I might have missed out several things since I am writing this when my blood pressure is high. But in general I feel basic education should include things that affects the individual’s life in a day-to-day situation).

I am borrowing thoughts from a wise man (I need to introduce him in a better way later) here. What defines and refines humans is appreciation of beauty. Beauty when felt is pleasure, beauty when acted out is kindness and beauty when understood is realization. He opined, and I concur, that the best training for appreciating beauty that is available to all is literature. How can literature be absorbed without literacy? How can we put an instrumental value to this?

A lot of folks have unrealistic expectation out of education from a different angle. They expect it to answer the question ‘How to be a good human being’ or ‘How to be happy’. I think they are trying to play god here (even though some of them are avowed atheists!). Is there really a sure shot formula for that? I guess only the rabidly religious folks claim that there is an answer. May be on the other hand I believe, in true advaitic tradition, that god is within everyone. The individual best addresses the fundamental problems and there is no external formula for that solution.

While I am complaining about annoyances, I will state another high BP argument. When questioned about spending habits of the poor for e.g. wedding expenses there is an argument that why we are questioning only them and not the rich who spend on extravagant weddings too. If the arguer has some grounding in economics and understands the concept of diminishing marginal utility they would not be making this argument. For a person with a crore of money 1 lakh may not be of great value but for a person with only 1 lakh it is everything. Usually the poor don’t even have that, they borrow to spend which does not make economic sense at all! But then usually arguers hide behind cultural apologies (because it is how it was done before), without questioning why. Lot of well meaning and liberal folks do probably a lot more damage by apologizing for situations, which do not warranty them.

Ok, I am calming down now….