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two things to me: The first, a certain dependency on qualification as a sole judge of competency; the second; a highly outdated view of poor people being hopeless and ‘taking any thing they can get’, and of India a poor and needy country.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.