We had a bumper child attendance on Tuesday, over 90 and yesterday, even though their was a fair down the road, 80 ish (ok ok, I’ll admit that we had a grand total of zero in the afternoon. The kids decided that they’d come in for the morning then all go the the fair, which I suppose is reasonable enough!) 90 may sound like a lot, and it is, but I think we officially have 87 enrolled so it shouldn’t be a bit deal. But for the last few months we’ve been hovering somewhere between the 50-60 daily attendance mark, so to get all those kids coming, and coming without us or their parents telling them that that have to (not that they really listen anyway…) means something has got to be up.

That something is the bags all the children are making and decorating. We’re having another feverish week of bag making and the word has got out that it is a fun thing to do. We also bought a sewing-machine on Tuesday, so some of the children have been having a good time on that too, as have I!

Whilst we sit making bags we tell stories and sing songs, talk to the children a bit in Hindi or English or work out how we can spell the names of the pictures we are putting in the bags, so the children keep on learning the things that they used to have to learn sitting in silent lines staring at a blackboard and being taught not to interact, at the punishment of a beating.

Paulo Friere, the Brazilian pedagogy god, talks about critical consciousness, Ash was explaining to me. This is essentially critical mass – the minimum required number of participants needed for an idea or meme to self perpetuatingly propagate in a society – except instead of participants it is little chunks of understanding, and instead of society it is the teachers’ brains. If we have reached critical consciousness it means the informality and its increase in quaility over the years is now inevitable; the teachers have enough to go on, a high enough understanding and sufficient self-derived desire for improving and learning to make that happen. That being the case, it is an incredibly exciting state of affairs. What with the children taking a high interest in what they are doing, working outside of normal school hours and starting to take the lead, guiding the path thier learning will follow then perhaps they too are reaching a critical consciousness, which makes everything even more exciting.

Only time will tell of course, and for me it has always seem inevitable but to see it starting to take shape in a reality beyond that of my dreams is a most satisfying thing indeed.