The last month has changed everything. Ed came out to India, with no particular purpose, just the feeling that something important would come of it. He was right.

Since we first started out, we’ve been using all the right development buzzwords- low cost, quality education, local relevance, replicable, sustainable… It sounded great and felt right and over the past year or so, we’ve been attempting to turn these words into action. What we’ve found is that to many already in the education development sector these words are just that-words- empty, dead. We’ve been facing the challenge of giving them life and meaning, trying to fulfil the promises we made to all the people supporting us (and ourselves), but in doing so, have compromised on each of these values. We’re far from perfect.

On Ed’s arrival in India there was a shared acknowledgement that the prescribed path we’d set out for ourselves was probably far from what is indeed needed and right for the community we’re working with. There are already 1000′s of low cost (concrete-shell) ‘schools’ in India, busily mass-processing students to learn by rote, through fear. These people will conveniently always remain in the subordinate class who don’t need to- and therefore aren’t taught to- think for themselves. To produce something of genuine quality within this system requires investment in your staff, their training and the resources available to them.

The problem with trying to create replicable quality, even if cost isn’t an issue, is this one-size-fits-all idea of development. People are different, cultures vary, children are individuals- what’s right for one community might work for another, but it’s important to take the time to find out if it does.

So in essence we’ve decided to give greater importance to the local relevance and quality of the education we provide, rather than settling for a replicable, bargain-basement project that does little of use for the kids and village.

What does this mean?

The first thing is to move away from the idea of the project being a school at all. It’s now just Jagriti, a project for community co-learning and co-living. This immediately moves things away from learn-by-rote, heavy handed disciplining and very little fun that is associated with school life in India. To further break away from the idea of what a school is to most of the teachers and villagers working with us, we will also break away from the boundaries of the school as a special location for learning, making it a place from which activities of learning together and discovering together are organised, but encouraging many of the actual activities to take place within the village setup. There is a wealth of knowledge and natural resources within the village that would be perfect for organising hands-on, engaging learning experiences around. We will work towards opening the teachers eyes to these, arranging ‘projects’ or ‘workshops’ that cover more than the basic learning needs of children around the existing local knowledge, culture and infrastructure. For older age groups these projects and workshops would be open to the whole community, but with a focus on children’s learning needs, making the learning experience a lot more natural than sitting in a classroom and reading from a book.

The pedagogy needs a lot of work and clarifying, but basically there is more than enough existing knowledge and resources within the community for a great primary learning experience it’s just about bringing learning and fun into what already goes on. Everyone’s a teacher, everyone’s a student, everything is a learning resource, every second is a lesson- we just provide a few people to catalyse the blurring of edges between life and learning.