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Well, I’m back in good ole India after a brief interlude in the UK. it was great to see the family and friends, although I think I almost killed my mum of shock; I didn’t tell her I’d be coming home so me appearing through the back door was not quite what she was expecting.

Fresh of the plane I hit the road to Hunar Ghar so we could head off together to Adharshila. It’s an informal education school in the state of MP that has been running for 11 years by a couple called Amit and Jayashree. So I, Deepak, three teachers, one friend from the village and four kids headed off there to see what we could share and learn for people who have been doing something similar to us but for a lot longer.

It was a great experience for us all; the kids made some friends and got a little more confident and the teachers were finally able to see what Ash and I harp on about the whole time. For them now Hunar Ghar is less of an intellectual idea we spout and a reality that has been running for over a decade elsewhere in India. They are starting to make connections, with people and ideas, so I’m super chuffed; they have come a long way in 15 months. When the teachers started out with us they were resistant to all change – a gov teacher gets Rs10,000 a month and doesn’t have to do any work, we paid ours Rs 1,500 and were asking them to think and change their behaviour towards education and children – so perhaps naturally they weren’t too into the idea initially. So to be sitting down with them, Deepak and Amit and debating the value of education and development was a fantastic thing. I even caught one of them reading a John Holt book!

The first day I got there, I was a little off balance as I was expecting something quite different. My preconceptions were of an informal education school, and I figured that since they had been doing it for so much longer than us then we’d just be swimming in new ideas and super motivated for change. It turns out that we’d be learning something different there. I consider Hunar Ghar to be more informal than Adharshila so there was less scope for us to learn such informal things there, but the discussions we had and the way that Amit challenged their preconceptions were good. They were also able to teach some other teachers some ideas, so that was a good confidence boosted. I feel that Adharshila is anti-mainstream but to a certain extent it still mainstreams its children, which led to my confusion. Their thinking is to train some children to be the next generation of freedom thinkers for tribal people in the area. My ideas were also left nicely challenged by Amit, with his sentiments of people putting too much faith in traditional ways being good. I still stand by my faith in local economies and methods being more sustainable and better for the community that mega systems that are growing today, and I still think that using natural, renewable materials where possible is more accessible to poor people and ultimately better for our health, and the people involved in the production system. It was good to be challenged, and I’m sure I’ll be making some adjustments to my ideas or arguments as a result, get them a bit clearer, and a bit less biased!

I’ve got to do a bit of tax stuff in Udaipur, then I’m going to chip out to the school for the next month; really try and nail the local language a bit more, which I’m pretty flimsy in. I’ll talk more about Adharshila in another post.