To prepare for it, we’re going to hold a conference of our own in London on the 11th of September. That way I’ll get the opportunity to practice my speech in front of a large audience before hand. It will also give us some more exposure in the UK and, combined with the TEDx talk, will act as the beginning out of journey into an increasingly vocal and advocative role in the world of rural development and education.

Shivani is organising the London conference. Please get in touch if you’d like to help. You can see our Gumtree advert advertising for help here.

Teddy is leaving tomorrow. He’s going with Deepak to stay at with his family, then see a teeny-weeny bit of India, then flying back to France.

Hunar Ghar is going to miss them, they’ve both been amazing over the last few months. Teddy has built three tremendous classrooms, done beautiful integrated landscaping and fixed umpteen extra tasks along the way. Ash has been forcing into place some systematic changes that will help us organise ourselves better, so we can make better schools. We’ve both got great feelings for the coming months.

And now, in all their splendor, please bear witness to the beauty and wonder that are the classrooms Teddy has designed and built. An informal school in a rural Indian villages requires that resources be rethought and redesigned. Why repeat when you can innovate? We think Teddy did a pretty good job, and we hope you do too.

This is part 3. In the previous posts I talked a little about the failings of the formalised and alternative systems from my perspective. However, despite this, it seems there are a few places that are doing some exciting stuff that we’re thinking of visiting to learn from…below is an extract from an email Ina sent me regarding what she’s found so far.

1)      Sarang Hills (http://saranghills.org/):

-         Sarang is based in Kerala.

-         It works in a typical rural sector of India (more like a rural university!)

-         It does not follow any strict curriculum but functions on a truly experimental basis.

-         They can be helpful w..r.t. the topics that they cover at the campus, e.g. watershed management, natural farming, yoga, dance, martial arts, etc.

-         Besides this, their insight would definitely help us finding solutions to some of our recent problems. The founders of this school, Gopalkrishnan and Vijayalekshmi, themselves have been teachers and have struggled their way through immense difficulties to raise and run a school like Sarang J

2)      Sita school (no website available):

-         This school is based in Karnataka and is run by Jane Sahi for past 30 odd years!

-         It basically deals with the problem of drop-out children from the Government schools.

-         Though Jane and her family are more into art, the school follows the regular SSC curriculum upto 7th std.

-         It is a kannada medium school, which adopts innovative methods for teaching.

-         You can check the following links, which will give you some idea about the school:

http://www.learningnet-india.org/groups/karnataka/JaneSahi/index.php

http://www.sutradharindia.org/profilestore4/10784857138748

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# Both the above schools have the local language as the medium of instruction, which I see would be a point beneficial to us, especially to find out, how to deal with the problems of providing alternate education using the vernacular medium.

3)      Kanavu:

-         Though ‘Kanavu’ probably would be the best school to visit for our purpose, I have not been able to find any current contact details of it

-         Kanavu is also based in Kerala (Wayanad district) and it is a truly tribal school.

-         I read about it a few years back and know that their experiences could be really useful for Hunar Ghar considering it started and worked in the more or less the same setup.

-         Nevertheless, I will try to find out the details from one of my friends in Bangalore, who hails from Kerala

4)      Parikrama schools (http://www.parikrmafoundation.org/):

-         Parikrama learning centers are based in Bangalore and are actually more of ‘urban’ schools.

-         They basically work in the slum areas of Bangalore and follow ICSE curriculum as any other ‘normal’ school in India.

-         But what I think would prove to be helpful visiting these schools is that the socio-economic class that they are dealing with…

-         The children come from a typically compromised background and the education level of the parents is next to nil here.

-         Which means, the children at Parikrama aspiring to appear for the ICSE board examination at the end of 11^th std, must be facing the problems of non-conducive environment at home, non-exposure as well. I want to find out, how does Parikrama deal with these problems? What are the strategies they adopt to boost the moral of these children and keep motivating them to strive for a better and healthy education?

-         Parikrama also has community development on their agenda in addition to the education of the underprivileged sector.

-         It would be interesting to find out, how to do they integrate the innovative ways of teaching and learning at Parikrama.

5)      Grammangal (http://www.grammangal.org/):

-         I think, all of us are already  aware of Grammangal. They are based in Pune.

-         There are a couple of things wherein they could be useful to us.

-         I wish to find out more about their training programs for teachers, their education aids (material) and see, if we could make use of any of them.

-         In addition, Grammangal runs a Balwaadis as well a primary school at Aina village, which is a hardcore tribal area in Thane district of Maharshtra. I am planning to go to Dahanu to visit this.

-         It will also be interesting to find out more about their ‘Learning Home’ project in Pune city.

-         The founder of Grammangal, Ramesh Panse is considered to be a pioneer educationist of India :-0

6)      Aksharnandan:

-         It is based in Pune and was basically evolved from the concept of ‘home schooling’ for some of the children.

-         This school was founded by the interested parents, who did not want their children to go through the agonies of formal regular schooling.

-         Though the school still follows the normal curriculum of SSC board, they have come a long way adopting methods to make learning is truly enjoyable and valuable process for the children.

-         Of course, I have kept it on my list since it is easier for me to visit it (being in Pune!)

7)      Mahatma Gandhi Vidyamandir:

-         This school is based in Mumbai.

-         It is a regular SSC board school but I recently read an article about how innovatively they implement their curriculum and I found it quite astounding!

-         Even here, they believe in ‘Learning through experiments’ and use the textbooks only for providing guidelines.

-         I am sure, it would be worth visiting this school and documenting their methods for our benefit.

This is part 2. The previous post introduced some of the problems with the formalised education system and suggested there was a void that may be filled by the alternative education movement.

This section offers my perspective on the alternative education movement and how it also seems to be failing the rural poor. Alternative schools are by definition more diverse in their methods & philosophy than the formalised education system, but I think there are some common(ish) characteristics that are worth being aware of:

-         Again most are based in urbanised and developed settings rather than the rural underdeveloped areas- the areas we believe the current system is failing most.

-         They can be quite elitist establishments designed for the upper & middle classes.

-         Often non-formal, means non-replicable as well, with limited sharing of what works, where and why- the emphasis seems to be on context to highlight the difference between themselves and conventional schooling.*

As can be seen from my slightly generalising list of characteristics, it doesn’t seem that the alternative education movement is making significant contributions for the benefit of rural education in developing countries either.

The picture I am trying to paint is one of systemic problems within formalised education as we know it, but a lack of systemic solutions coming from advocates, pedagogues and schools. If anything the alternative schools seem to shy away from these activities in order to create an alternative for the privileged, not those that need it.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t organisations working well in rural development and education to find small solutions, however they are rare, under-resourced and fragmented meaning what they have learned is often not shared or replicated elsewhere.

It’s not all bad new and failures though…In the next post I’ll share a little document written by Ina about some of the alternative education organisations we have found around India that we feel there is something to learn from…

*One quite separate part of the ‘alternative’ education movement believe the entire idea of educating people is defunct and that the education system is a hegemonic tool for manufacturing and manipulating people. This again we feel is something that is easy for the privileged to talk about, having already benefited from the same education system they complain about.

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…

On the Sunday we went to Bikani (our home, although not for long as we are moving to Rohida again, but that is another blog post…) where again it is all smiling faces and people laughing and joking. Teddy jokingly very proudly produced an ice cold Pepsi from our new fridge (what luxury we now live in!), myself retorting with the beer to go with the World Cup final. No, we don’t have a TV, but Gopal, our new coordinator, kindly vacated his house to stay with his parents for the night so we could watch it.

On the Monday Ash and I went round an area of the village checking out wells to decide where to dig ours. We said hello to everyone we saw. Not out of stranger politeness but because in the three years we’ve been here we’ve come to know who they all are, and their children. We hung out with a few of the kids, chiding them gently for not being at school but all in a good nature. We had a chat or two with people about their wells, simple and nice. In the evening it was more jokes about slow cooking chips and Deepak’s hunger.

I love working with Educate for Life. I think it is possibly the happiest work environment I’ve ever encountered. There is a real spirit of always trying to improve our work, share with others, coaching others and learning from others. More and more for all of us the work we do just seems to be a way of life, becoming a pleasure to do what we do and doing it for ourselves because we love doing it and are good at it, not out of some distorted sense of responsibility or ‘saviour syndrome’. Everyone gets on really well and helps each other out. On the whole everyone is so honest and non-judgmental that any disagreements are short lived and kept in context; we can say things that can be pretty hard to take, knowing that the person will take in the good spirit it is meant and not react in an egotistical way. We do, of course have our moments and probably lack in many ways, but it really is a lovely place to live and work.

Any time with Ina though is good time. It has been such a pleasure having her up with us for the last two weeks. It hasn’t always been easy for her, with her shoulder giving trouble and the living conditions not what they should be, but she’s never short of a smile and warm, infectious laugh.

She also really understands what we’re doing, and is a very clear and intelligent communicator. I think she feels some of the frustrations with the situation that we do, but still genuinely wants to work with us, if we can work out together a way that it will be possible for her and her shoulder.

Her input doesn’t stop when she gets to Mumbai though, there are lots of things that she’ll be getting on with from there while we try and tidy things up a bit at Hunar Ghar. This year we are almost doubling our budget, the extra investment going into people – new teachers and coordinators and training for them. Through this we should be able to bring about some significant improvement in quality over the coming months, and give people the support they deserve.

Even though Ina was with us for a short time this time, she has already started identifying problems and coming up with solutions to them; we too have learnt a great deal from her in the last 15 days. It’ brilliant how she is so proactive and taking ownership of Hunar Gha and for us, sometimes we just need someone to give us a push and take some decisions, which Ina is fantastic at.

I thought again about how communities are, in many respects, taking the right decision by not sending their children to school. People, humans, innovate, it is how they survive. Our community is surviving so they must be taking decisions and those decisions are working for them.

In our community, most rural communities, there is no social security. If something bad happens to you it is up to the good will of family and neighbours to support you, if they can. There are no emergency services – last time I was in the village I saw two men walking carrying a woman slung in a cloth beneath a cut branch between them. They had walked a long way to get to the local health centre. That is as close to an ambulance as we get. They couldn’t even know if the health worker would be there or not, more often they are not. Are there drugs or sanitary conditions, that is another question, and are those drugs in date is the next. Will the health worker treat the patient appropriately is the next. They also have poor access to market for their produce, making them financially vulnerable, an issue compounded by their rain dependency for production. Government spending in the area is frequently procured by a very small number of corrupt people, making it hard to improve their situation. Political processes are far from democratic. The education is similarly defunct, children going for years and often not learning very much in classes over subscribed with poor quality, under trained, under supported, isolated teachers, if the teacher comes at all at is, or even if a teacher has been appointed to a school – there are many ‘schools’ in India that are actually cattle sheds.

These processes – social support, infrastructure, pensions, job-seekers allowance, exceptional free health care, fairly well function political processes, working councils, decent dependable schools – are all the things that we take for granted, but are the safety net which we know we will fall into if anything goes wrong. We won’t starve, we won’t be living on the street. We can afford the risk of investing in the future, because our present is already taken care of.

People living in rural India don’t have that luxury. The have no choice but to live every day as it come because if the don’t focus intently on today, there may be no tomorrow. They are, if the proper wider security isn’t in place, making a very good decision not to send their children to school and this should be remembered at all times. From this perspective, we can start to develop an infrastructure that changes those pre-conditions, so that parents are able to safely make the decision to invest more in their children’s future.

1)Rain- it’s arrived. It’s the latest it’s been in 15 years, but definitely falling down good and proper now. Whoop whoop!
2)First room finished. Teddy (our architect friend) has been a superstar these last few months, slogging away despite the horrendous temperatures, a worker’s strike and multiple other hiccups & at last he has a completed room to show for his toils. 2 more are still to come.
3)Gopal, an RBKS employee who we’ve know for a while has shifted across to Educate for Life to help Deepak with the running of the school.
4)2 new teachers- Pushpa & Ajit- just joined us today. They’ve both got teaching qualifications and experience, so we’re keen to see how that translates into practice at Hunar Ghar.
5)New year for the kids- so we have 128 on the register now. Of these 60 came the first day, 70 came today and we’re hoping more will come as the week progresses, otherwise we’re just going to have to march over to their homes and drag them in for a few days.
6)Village survey- did a quick survey of the community last week and it’s revealed a few interesting things to us. The starkest figure is the male to female ratio. Way fewer women than men in all age ranges, suggestive of either foeticide or neglect of female babies; something we weren’t even aware might be an issue. I’ll try and work on the figures a little more over the week before reporting more fully.
7)Ina has been with us for just over 10days and despite the tough living conditions and working environment, she seems to be creating a little niche role for herself. Her laughter is infectious and I’m extremely excited that she may be working with us over the coming years. More on her role soon.

I told you there was a lot going on!