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Yesterday Deepak, Neha and I had a bit of a brilliant day. In the morning we went up to see Stephen, an old friend who works at the Global Hospital in Mount Abu. Global Hospital is run by the Brahma Kumaris, and is a very high quality charity orientated hospital. He’d set up a meeting between us and Dr. Pratap, who is responsible for the hospital’s activities in the surrounding communities. Neha and Deepak had met with him before, and Neha had written a fab proposal for him about a partnership between the hospital, Educate for Life, and the Bakhel community, and we’d gone to discuss next steps.

The long and short of it is that the three stake holders will be forming a partnership. The Global Hospital, in collaboration with RNT hospital in Udaipur which specialises in community health, will be pre-testing, intervening and post-testing consistently and iteratively on 5 health issues: diarrhea, immunisation, malnutrition, respiratory diseases and anaemia. They will also provide basic health training to all our teachers to help them act people who can flag up people in the community who potentially need support in these areas. I also intend to talk to the local government health workers and have them receive this training too, so we can help them have more ongoing training and support and perform their work to a higher quality, as well as build them into our team and connection with the hospitals.

In the afternoon we went to see Heike and Wolfgang of Solare Brucke. Wolfgang developed the Sheffler reflector (his surname is Scheffler) , an efficient parabolic reflectic disc and sun tracking system used for capturing solar heat energy. We’ve been wanting to have a solar cooker at Hunar Ghar for years, since it’s beginning 5 years ago, but they are hard to comeby and organise for a cooking capacity of 150 students. But if you want to be able to cook for a lot of people, Wolfgang and Heike are your people; we met them in Abu Road on one of their current projects – construction of a 1Mega Watt solar power plant which will provide all energy needs for a community of around 15,000 people. They have already installed a solar kitchen that cooks for up to 30,000 people a day.

Hunar Ghar is small fry in comparison, but it’s the beginning of a larger network of developmental initiatives and intentions.  We discussed our need and we’ve invited them to Hunar Ghar tomorrow to come and check out our setup and how to go about installing the dishes.

Deepak reflected in a small solar cooker.

Fixtures ready for the solar dishes to be attached

Deepak in front of a Sheffler reflector

As much as we would like, no, need the extra money, I think we have a responsibility as an organisation to make people think twice before giving to us. If someone is informed about what we do then they should be able to go right ahead unhindered and give us a couple of coins every so often. But to allow someone to just donate without understanding a few key principles, isn’t that encouraging bad habits?

Let me explain: Read on »

I’m skim reading through a paper by Jandhayala Tilak about the linkages between education, development and poverty in India. It makes a pretty straightforward case for greater investment beyond primary education and begins to touch at the complex relationship between Education and Development and how they both feed into each other.

At Hunar Ghar, the older children are coming to a stage where they’re ready for seconday education, but unfortunately we’re lagging behind. Getting the right personnel, infrastructure and curriculum in place are massive tasks that we need to start working on!

You can read the abstract to the paper below, or dowload the whole article by following the link below.

Tilak- Poverty, Education & Development India.

Abstract:

There is a general presumption among many policy makers that secondary and higher education is not necessary for economic growth and development. On the other hand, it is literacy and primary education that is argued to be important. Estimates on internal rate of return also contributed to strengthening of such a presumption. Increased national and international concerns for Education For All, also led to overall neglect of secondary and higher education in many developing countries. The problem of resource scarcity added further to the problem. Accordingly, secondary and higher education do not figure on the poverty reduction agenda of many poor countries. Indian experience also testifies to all this. Secondary and more strikingly higher education has been subject to neglect by the government and the current situation with respect to not only elementary education, but also secondary and higher education is far from satisfactory.
Based on some of the recent research, and based on further research evidence on India presented here, it is attempted to show that the general presumption on the weak or negligible role of secondary and higher education in development is not valid and that post elementary education is important for reduction in poverty, in improving infant mortality and life expectancy, and for economic growth. Accordingly, it also pleads for sound and comprehensive education policies that recognise the importance of not just elementary education, but also of secondary and higher education and for integration of educational planning with development planning.

My mum pointed me to this BBC Radio 4 programme about Russell Ackoff. He’s not so much an education guy but a management guy, but he is more than aware of the impact education has on business and management system. Freeing up education isn’t just about obtaining some kind of ideal of individualism, freedom and culture, if also has massive implications for the abilities and productivity of economies – hard-nosed capitalistas should be interested too. I’d not heard of him before, but in the 10 minutes that have passed since I started researching him on the internet, I think he has some sensible things to say on education:

Learning should be a lifelong enterprise, a process enhanced by an environment that supports to the greatest extent possible the attempt of people to “find themselves” throughout their lives.

For too long, we have educated people for a world that no longer exists, extinguishing their creativity, and instilling values antithetical to those of a free, 21st century democracy. The principal objective of education as currently provided is to ensure maintenance and preservation of the status quo-to produce members of society who will not want to challenge any fundamental aspect of the way things are. Traditional education focuses on teaching, not learning. It incorrectly assumes that for every ounce of teaching, there is an ounce of learning by those who are taught. Being taught is, to a very large extent, boring, and much of its content is seen as irrelevant. It is the teacher, not the student, who learns most in a traditional classroom.

Without motivation, no amount of teaching can produce learning. Motivation comes from within, not from without-it can not be imposed on students. With motivation, young students and adults learn, and they do so by means they select. Most of what we learn before, during and after attending schools we learn without it being taught to us. For example, some schools have done away with reading instruction altogether; these schools allow children to acquire that skill when they seek it on their own. They eventually do, some at age 4 and some at age 12. Reading disorders are extremely rare in such schools. In the old one-room schoolhouse, the students taught each other. The teacher was a resource that students could call on when they want help.

Mass education was explicitly developed to mold naturally unruly children into compliant, obedient young people. Inspired by the Industrial Revolution, schools were, and still are, designed and operated as much like factories as possible. Incoming students are treated as raw material to be processed into saleable products. Creativity is actively suppresses , and in most schools conformity – which is anathema to creativity – is valued instead.

Worth reading in full, which you can do here.

I was recently on a train from Urumqi to Shanghai when I met Teddy, a young architect, in the restaurant car. We fellow Europeans ignored each other for the first day or so, neither wanting to just gravitate to the familiar ‘other backpacker’ when all around there were people and culture to discover. But on a two day train journey, one can meet a lot of people, and time came up for us to chat with one another.

Teddy was very interested in Hunar Ghar and thought he might come out and help us, which I thought a splendid idea. But lots of people think it is a fun idea to come out to India as they live a happy fantasy of challenge and adventure. Teddy however seems to be a man who converts his ideas into reality, because he continued to email me about the idea, eventually say that, if it was ok with us, he would come in March. And so he is coming in March to help build two new classrooms.

I’ve not fully developed his brief yet, but a central idea will be the creation of ‘developed’ classrooms from local materials. This is not a simple challenge. The idea is that the completed classrooms should be of as high a quality as can be achieved using modern materials and equipment, but using the simpler tools that we have to hand. It is a great misconception of developmental thinking that it must use materials such as concrete and steel. These are both expensive, high energy, polluting materials that cannot be maintained as effectively as more local materials.

The challenge is to use materials such as stone, mud and wood to the effect that is required, strong, secure buildings of ergonomically effective design that people can be proud of. And there in lies the problems; poverty, as it were, is not always objective. There are many houses in the UK made from wood, wattle and daub that are strong, secure and highly desirable but in India among certain societies it may be seen that it is the materials used that defines a house as modern and developed, rather than the house itself. In this same manner, it may be more desirable to have a poorly designed building, because that is what other people have and it is desirous to fit in, rather than have that which is actually better.

This situation is not all too dissimilar to the PT which Ash talked about in the previous post. Wrong or right isn’t a concern – what other people are doing is.