The curriculum design has been and continues to be an ongoing, evolving process, which does pose some difficulties. On the one hand we need to provide a structure for our eight facilitators to follow which provides them with support and the children with consistency and stability. On the other hand we seek for Hunar Ghar, our school, to be a dynamic and child-led learning center. Too much of one and the children are stunted in their creativity and ability to drive their own learning, too much of the other and no-one knows what to do or how to do it.

Hunar Ghar used to teacher the Indian national curriculum but as the capacity of our teachers to understand and interact in informal learning processes has increased, so we have been transitioned from formal rigid teaching by rote to free and exciting self-generated learning. It's all a bit anarchic as of now, July 2009, so we're evolving that structure further to create a a syllabus of project based learning to support the facilitators, one that will maintain and expand on the open learning environment while covering gaps where necessary.

Why informal education?

Formal education in India is not good. The children sit silently in straight lines being taught by role by an unfriendly teacher at the front of the class who can be quite liberal with a cane. We don't consider this the ideal environment for a child. Informal learning for us means that the children are encouraged to explore and learn through their interests, initiative and exploration. That means they'll continue to learn whether in school or not, with or without a teacher and become life-long learners. The teachers are there to facilitate that process and help them gain the tools necessary to understand the relationships between all learning and be confident self-learners for life.

What about the need for reading and writing?

Hunar Ghar doesn't teach those; the children discover them. When I sit with a few children and start reading a book to them, they take an interest. Over time they don't want me to be reading to them, they want to know how to extract the exciting stories and things from the book themselves, so they have a go themselves using the bits of knowledge in reading which they have learned through play activities. They can't get it at first, but the interest is there so they keep trying, they share and learn with each other, they ask the facilitators to help them. And so they learn to read, not because they have been told to, not at the rate they are forced to, but in their own time because they want to. As it happens, we've found the children learn much more quickly that way.

Education and real-life

Learning has been dissociated from life by the 'modern' education system (quotation marks there indicate irony...). It separates living from learning, which them becomes something that needs to be forced into children and suggests that learning can apparently only happen in a classroom with a teacher and a blackboard. What rubbish! We work on the idea that children, people, are natural learners (we've all taught ourselves to talk and walk etc) and that the function of school is to integrate completely with the home and social environment; the two other main sources of learning. It should complement the skills, knowledge and capacities already present in a community, not breed disinterest in them, undermining the social fabric and being some kind of replacement way of life, fashioned on the tenet of western capitalist growth.

Our core curriculum is based on learning with a local significance, all conducted in the local language alongside the national language of Hindi so the kids can learn easily, but also become fluent in a more widely used language and so have access to the benefits that speaking such a language brings. This, we hope, will embed a deep sense of pride in their own culture and thus reduces the chance of them disregarding it for the glamorous excitement of physically developed, but morally corrupted, societies. From day one our children learn practical skills such as better ways to rear animals or farm land, but gaininsight into cultures, civilisations and current affairs from around the world, and how they too can interact with them. Ultimately, schools should give choice, not substitute one Hobson's Choice for another.

Boundaries

We are also redefining the boundaries of the learning environment. Where it was once proposed that our school have a boundary wall, Hunar Ghar makes no such distinction between a place to learn and a place not to learn, as learning is a part of our every day lives. A child isn't taught to speak, it picks it up through experience, and it is this experiential learning that we see as the most natural form.

Standard education requires child conformation to run. A child is punished for getting something wrong, even though it is often by getting things wrong that we learn what is right. At Hunar Ghar, beyond the promotion of equal understanding and respect, there is no such thing as wrong but merely a personal development path to be followed. We love all our kids for who they are, not what they should be, and encourage each to develop to his or her own potential, not to a predetermined list of knowledge and ability.

All in all we want the 'education' we provide to be applicable and interesting, while at the same time providing the children with academic and practical skills required to face life in their own village as well as the wider world, but as the bottom line it is the development of ability of the individual to be able to self develop, rather than having a dependence for learning on a set of environmental restrictions and associations, that counts the most.