Yesterday there were a couple of emails that went back and forth between Ed, Ina and myself about two opposing ‘schools’ of thought regarding rural education in India, prompting this three part blog in which I’ll talk a little about formalised schooling, alternative education and some interesting schools Ina’s found to visit.

This is part one discussing formalised schooling in the rural under-developed environment- our criticisms of this system are well documented in previous posts:

- It’s a victorian system designed around the priorities of urbanising societies, not those of the rural poor.

- Children’s learning is compartmentalised into abstract subjects, rather than being based around their experiences, the society they live in and the application of knowledge.

- The methods applied, particular in places like India, over-emphasise knowledge, instead of understanding- they treat kids as though they are things that need to be disciplined and moulded (vacuums to be filled) rather than with the understanding that children are programmed to develop into functioning adults and it’s our role to facilitate that process, not rigidly control it.

The predominant education system is so ubiquitously applied, despite these problems, that it creates a sort of path dependency in society. By this I mean that almost all of us are products of such a system; when we think education, we think kids sitting in lines at tables, learning from books, a blackboard and a teacher. Our own experiences set the boundaries for what education will be like in the future; most of us for whom this system has worked in ways (including those in charge of development and education policy) would then go on to enforce the same system on others, including those in developing countries and rural environments, who perhaps need something quite different.

When asked to rethink what education could be like, these same people (who pull the strings or do the teaching) are unable to draw on many of their own experiences, but rather have to rely on their imagination. Unfortunately, especially in India, imagination and individuality aren’t things that are fostered, but rather beaten out of people through their schooling, creating an unfortunate perpetuation of a system that is clearly failing the people it claims to serve.

I think of this death of the imagination as one of the biggest crisis facing rural education and development generally, but despite the obvious and massive need (and the worrying downstream effects of these failures), a pitiful level of thought or investment goes into rethinking these systems, when you compare it to the level of investment going into educational processes and resources for the well-off in the developed world…

A void which the alternative education community could serve to fill, perhaps? Which leads me on to part 2 of my spiel…