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Ah, it’s that time of year again. The cold weather is retreating, tulips appearing in the shops, snowdrops in the woodland, and I’m posting blogs with titles depicting a very few number of days until I get to India again. Being February time, it also means that Educate for Life is due for one if its biannual shifts in understanding and/or approach. We never plan for it to be this way, but it seems to have worked out that way. Probably largely because it is only really twice a year, if we are luck, that Ash and I are out at Hunar Ghar together.

In March 07 we started the build, August 07 started the school, February 08 started informal teaching methods, February 09 took on more teachers, August 09 took on more children and Deepak asserted his place fully as principle coordinator now February 2010, what will it bring? Well, it could be something to do with this:

I [Ash] feel a quality education in the broadest sense is one that enables people to fulfill their potentials. However, I think there is a problem that we face with this idealised definition- it is unattainable for most schools, most children and most teachers. It’s difficult to explain, but I feel this results in a polarisation of educational practices in India. The best schools and most prominent advocates will talk of education in this idealised sense & suggest a quality education is highly contextual- it responds to the needs of the children and the major problem with education at the moment is its systematised and regimented form. While I broadly agree, this means that for those of us that aren’t part of an elite schooling, don’t have time, understanding, capacity, resources or support to respond to individual needs there are few options out there- there is little middle ground. You will either find idealists- isolated and highly critical, or hopeless government style schooling- demoralised, regimented and with no way of attaining what the idealists want etc.

I think that Hunar Ghar’s role in creating a quality education is to explore this middle ground. I do not believe that everything is contextual. A lot is built into structures and systems (curriculum, the way teachers are trained, where they are recruited from, materials they can use, how communities are involved) – these are things that can be changed on a large scale & reasonably quickly, but there is a real lack of sincere dialogue about how this can be done. Hunar Ghar is place for experimenting and coming up with reasonable suggestions and then hopefully over time providing support, advice and policy pressure to see some of these changes realised.

I’m not sure how much sense that quote makes when isolated from the school and education debate, but essentially a lot of innovative informal schools in India a big critics of government education and tend to shun it in their attempts to create better learning opportunities. This can indeed create fantastic schools, but they are isolated and generate limited external benefit. (That is a bit simplistic; they seed all sorts of ideas and possibilities, create a national alternative education culture and open many eyes to different ways of learning.) Rather than trying to develop a competing learning system to the government one, we should be infiltrating the existing system as much as possible and advocating its change, based on substantiated knowledge and experience learned at places like Hunar Ghar. This has two benefits. One, it improves to lot of children with no option but government schooling, two, it further readies society to be more receptive and responsive to alternative learning methods, thus facilitating those that want to pioneer better independent schools. So if we can do mediocre really really well, then it is probably more useful than doing amazing really really well.

Some people like to describe the evils of the modern world, capitalism and industrial education, all masterminded by the rich elite to proactively keep the poor poor, I’m sure I’ve been guilty of this. No doubt there are powerful people that exploit others, but I think it is a bit simplistic to write everything off as evil. Yes, India’s current national education system was designed in Victorian times to create god workers, not happy, productive responsible individuals, and No, it hasn’t been updated significantly since then. But to say that the system is like that in order to create the worker class is probably narrow-minded; that may be the result, but the majority of people just get on with what has always been done, people who are products of that system and so have limit capacity to motivate or effect it, and so it becomes self fulfillingly polarising to society.

What this means for us is that if we can demonstrate better ways of teaching children, can engage with the right people and wade through the bureaucracy, we can implement the system in better ways. India is currently desperate to educate the masses – part of the reason China is doing so well is because of the mass education schemes undertaken by Mao in the 60s.  India missed that, and is subsequently behind. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating educating India in order to compete with China, but there is a demand for rapid education and informal self-learning is more efficient, so it will be considered if it is plausible. If the government’s motivation is growth and a by-product of that desire is that people get an education that is more self-fulfilling, relevant and creates, not displaces opportunity, then I think it is probably a good thing.

I bumped into an old school person and her mum yesterday, and they asked me about what i was up to. Having explained a very watered down version of Educate for Life, and jesting a little about my not being a qualified teacher and am off to Ahmedabad to be a teacher the comment was  that “I suppose they will take anything they can get over there, being so poor and all!’.

I’m not a fan of those sorts of comments, but there isn’t much you can do. I suppose that I may have set it up slightly by joking about my not having taught but running a school but then often people who run places don’t do the things they organise (Tesco’s MD probably didn’t start his career stacking shelves). The comment betrays two things to me: The first, a certain dependency on qualification as a sole judge of competency; the second; a highly outdated view of poor people being hopeless and ‘taking any thing they can get’, and of India a poor and needy country. I explained that MGIS takes the children of some of the elite of Ahmedabad and that choosing good decent people rather than the most highly qualified was a decision based on what is best for the children, not because there is no other choice.

I accurate opinion of people is caused by a lack of understanding, and a lack of understanding someone means that we can’t interact with them in easier manner possible. Backward thinking about poor countries and poor people holds back the relationships we can for between the two. It’s not to say this woman was at fault, she was speaking syptomatically of her experience and image of such things, a negative image – often encouraged by charities, and of her class and social background. None the less, development will be a lot more equal when an unequal view of people has grow out of us.

I’ve got my visa! I’ve got my visa! I’ve got my visa! *does a little visa approved’ dance

Yep, so I’m off to India, Hunar Ghar, and MGIS. I’m pretty happy about it, to say the least. For a moment I thought it was a tourist visa, as the sticker in my passport is the same, only there is an ‘E’ rather than ‘T’ in one corner.

So I went back an looked at my last visa, which I thought was a tourist visa even though I applied for a business visa back then. It turns out there is a ‘B’ in the corner. Business. Oops. I could have save myself quite a lot of hassle if I’d noticed that a year ago.

I forgot to mention when blogging earlier, I went up to London for the day today to apply for my visa. I’ve asked for and employment visa this time, as I’ll be working as a ‘teacher’ in MGIS. There was a slightly worrisome moment when the guy said I wasn’t getting paid enough to be eligible – I needed to be paid Rs 35,000 at least per month and my wage is nowhere close to that, but the woman in the next window along overheard and said that it would be fine as I was applying for a teaching role. That didn’t mean I could get away with filling in more paperwork and the details of the ‘plant’ and its ‘output’ I’d be working at. I think I can see the kinds of jobs working visas are intended for.

But still, I got it in OK and I’ll know by next Wednesday probably if I’ve been granted it or not. It’s never confirmed til it is in your hand, and I’m applying for a teaching job which can make it harder to get a position as they work on the basis that there are already plenty of teachers in India, so why employ me from outside? But teaching at MGIS is slightly different, as I explained in a covering letter, so hopefully I’ll be OK.

Fingers crossed…

There was an article in yesterday’s Financial Times about Room to Read, an education charity that works in similar situations to us. I thought it worth mentioning here because it is a very typical article about poor people in foreign places/ charity. It paints that cliche picture, yet again, of hopelessness without industrial style education. It’s subtle, and something we have all become quite accustomed to, but I think it jolly misleading. It is written, as they often are, without consideration for the quality of the education or the wider implications that that education has, beyond the economic, and health to an extent, benefits of it. In this type of schooling there are many potential benefits, but there are also many potential destructive elements too, and for some reason these seem to be under, or not at all, considered by the vast majority of ‘education’ organisations.

To illustrate; the article starts with a fairly typical picture of destitution, using such fragments as ‘for miles no sign of anything’, ‘ trudging through a roadside ditch’ and ‘trickle of a river’. Nothing too sinister, but it is all diminutive stuff. At this point we are talking about western Nepal which is for the most part stunningly beautiful, and these are the children on their way to school, so the nothing for miles is actually their homes, fields and communities. Not a terribly nice description really. It goes on to talk about illiteracy and education synonymously, as if the ability to read is the only measure of education, assuming that is that they view education as capacity. At this point the dusty road by a ditch becomes a ‘pilgrimage’, suggesting that schools are something to be revered and somehow special and out of the ordinary, disconnected from the every day around them.

The opinion of schooling equally in education is further bolstered by references to sporadic schooling resulting in one girl’s sporadic education. From this it can only be assumed, and there is certainly no attestation to the contrary, to any degree, on any level, that a person can only be education, thus capable, if they have gone to school. The skills of the area and generations of knowledge and culture can only be the knowledge of peasants then, worthless and ‘uneducated’.

It makes other unconsidered comment, such as the markers of the free uniforms and textbooks they give the children qualifying the school, with no comment on what the children are being taught or the quality to which it is being taught, let alone a balance of the skills the children aren’t being taught, and are being denied learning through the restriction of conformity and obedience.

Worldwide there are schools being run and built and people thinking it good that education is coming to the masses, such as the UN’s millennium development goal of universal primary education. But there are relatively so few looking at what those schools actually provide it is really rather worrying, and articles such as this only go to prolong the myths of education while not addressing what it means to be educated.