For the past 10 days or so there has been a constant trickle of photos in my inbox from Deepak, taken at Hunar Ghar. They’ve come under subjects such as library reading, games, craft, repair clothing, cleaning, wall painting, help in kitchen, child letter, each denoting an activity done by the children at Hunar Ghar.
I find the list very encouraging, not least because other progressive activities have been going on too, such as Class 3’s train journey and trip to Abu Road:
Library reading shows that there has been a great increase in reading at Hunar Ghar. It is now habit for every class to go to the library to read at least once a week, creating opportunity for a habit of reading to be formed.
Craft means that the children are learning with their hands, discovering space and form, learning to understand, process and represent images and objects they see, and that such playful activities are gaining stronger currency at Hunar Ghar, carrying us away from subject based learning.
Repair clothing is particularly interesting; by learning a skill that is directly and immediately useful at home, sending children to Hunar Ghar become directly and immediately valuable, rather than normal schooling where what is learned today often cannot be applied or be useful until years later, if becoming relevant at all. If education is genuinely useful, more people will want their children to go to that type of school, and drop out rates will decrease.
Cleaning. It’s easy to give a school a nice name (like Hunar Ghar, which means ‘Skills Home’), but reflecting the positive name in the action is harder. Having the children help the teachers clean the school helps us become more of a family, and so Hunar Ghar more a home. As our children are at the moment they go at taking care of their environment, when stimulated to do so, with a genuine enthusiasm be it collecting rubbish, gathering grass for the compost, watering the trees or just sweeping up.
Wall painting to me reflects children which are able to contribute to shaping their school surroundings. It’s a superficial thing of course – painting a wall is nice but doesn’t mean much more on its own. But with the campus caretaking and if we move further on from there, as we are hoping to do in the coming months by having the children plan how to use our open spaces for fruit and vegetable production, they might yet become genuine contributors to the school surroundings.
Help in kitchen isn’t new at Hunar Ghar, but that is what makes it great. Since the first months the children have been coming to the kitchen and helping to prepare lunch; kids participating in the care of Hunar Ghar, working as equals with the staff and working to look after their friends. That is has been going on for years now gives me hope that other involvements of the children, when initiated, will last for a long time.
Child letter refers to our kids writing back to a group of students at a primary school in the UK. Our kids writing in Hindi which we then translate into English, and send both together along with pictures of their homes and school. It is a genuine reason, however small, for writing and learning to write, and even learning English.
I was pondering these ideas last night. What if a school could truly create value for a child every step along the way? It would be a learning process deriving directly from the home environment. The role of the school would be to verified what is learned at home, and the add to it or improve the quality, constructing a learning pathway that compliments existing knowledge and learning systems. I think I’ve spoke about such ideas before, but I feel that I have a new and improved understanding of it, and so way to get there. I’ve written before on why it makes sense for parents not to send their children to school, and this system of building value, like a drip of water on a stalagmite, is perhaps the reason they will choose to send their children, and keep sending them. It would also mean that the ‘curriculum’ can’t be imposed from the outside, meaning the community retains great influence on what their children learn, maintaining traditional skills, knowledge and livelihood, and putting them in control of their development.
