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Ash’s Dad forwarded me an article about Babar Ali who, age 16, has opened a school for 800 children. It’s typical rubbishy BBC prose, but interesting to see what he is doing. I think it fantastic he has taken the initiative to do something about starting a school. He thinks it will be good for the children so rather than wait for someone else to do something, he has just got on and created what he wants to see. However, I’m reserved as to what the outcome will be. We at Educate for Life are less than enamored with the national government education system in India (and may other places).

Although in the surface of it he is doing a Good Thing, and the children will certainly learn good useful skills, it may be that he is also stunting them in the ways that the government schools typically do: Putting to much importance on academic study alone; dissociating learning from body and expression so it is bastardised to an act of knowledge gathering; grooming them to to be dependent on teachers and orders to learn; creating the impression that things learnt in school are more valuable than ‘backward’ village knowledge; reducing their base, through lack of use, of skills needed to live in that area, forcing migration to already supersaturated towns and cities. He may be doing the government’s dirty work for them. This is a major danger of modern education, that which is bad is thought to be good.

Fortunately it may be that his lack of money helps him make the school better; he cannot afford school uniforms and he cannot afford teachers. Adult teachers may think that children should only do what they say, causing the children to learn subservience, which is compounded through beatings, and the children will learn the habit of learning and action being the resultant of reward/punishment stimuli.

Hopefully if he has the inspiration to start a school he may have the inspiration to really look at what schools are providing and adjust his accordingly. And the children that attend may be led by his get-up-and-go attitude to also get in control of their own learning.

Apologies for the shoddy grammar in my posts; I spend so much time speaking Hindi or a clipped and broken version of English that I although I know there’s something wrong in many sentences I can’t figure out what to change!

Putputiya (putt-putt-iya) – Local language word for moped.

A week tomorrow I’ll be in India for the forth time. Now there’s a thought to cause apprehension. I’ve gotten rather used to life back in England, and looking back on what it was like for the six months last year, I wonder why on earth I’d want to go back.

The answer is of course that I love it there, and am bursting at the opportunity to do more hands on work. Yes things can be slow and frustrating, but frustration is something I have to deal with on a personal level, and speed isn’t of the essence, so long as we keep moving in the right direction. I also can’t wait to see Ash and work on the school together, in the same country, for the first time in a long time.

I came up to London today to get my visa. By the time I got here it was closed, so I’ll get it in the morning, and then that is last bit of paper work to complete before getting my passport stamped at Mumbai International!

educateforlife.co.uk isworking again. Huzzah! Unfortunately, I still can’t access the old content of educateforlife.co.uk, so still remain without lots of things, but at least my t-shirt has the right address on it again.