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An emergency for rural childhood

Krishna Kumar

The challenge of educational reform in the age of globalisation is very complex and rural children are especially vulnerable at a time when India is witnessing an unprecedented economic growth.

FED UP with dirt and pollution, eight children decide to clean up Mumbai in Sai Paranjpe's Chakachak. It is a bold fantasy, full of grim details of the degraded environment we live in, and also about the phenomenal potential children represent for change and initiative. Sai's characters are thoughtful and secretive, imaginative and optimistic as children have always been in human history. For educationists of any ilk, it must be a sad experience to watch, for it shows how marginal the school has become to children's real lives. It also reminds us how drastic a reform our idea of schooling must go through over a long, staggered calendar if the system is to be made fit for children. More than anything else, the film drives home the point that we must learn to worry about children as our collective future, not as our individual progeny. This last message is not easy to learn in a society, where unborn girls are killed with medical help and where crores of children work or beg to augment family income. We are not a nation where children are taken seriously.

It was not easy for thinkers like Mill and practitioners like Montessori to establish over the course of two centuries of industrialisation in Europe that children needed protection and professional care. To bring up the young mentally undamaged and motivated to live in an adult world faced with the stress of a gruelling work routine and afflicted with mass displacement and strife posed an impossible challenge to several generations of parents.

Teaching evolved into a modern profession and the state acquired a central role in education over a long period of struggle, in which the poor demanded welfare in return for their labour. Writers of children's literature fought the lonely battle of reminding the prudent public that imagination mattered. For quite a while in the history of education, teacher training stayed hostile to the children's natural urge to imagine. Many thought that it was a bourgeois child's privilege. Things changed in the inter-war years when a consensus arose among educators that imagination and other aesthetic instincts were basic to peace. In India, Devi Prasad is a living icon of that movement and his newly published book, Education for a Peaceful World, reminds us that child raising and teaching are deeply political activities on which the future of the world gravely depends.

Tagore was one of the few Indian educators who boldly spoke of the child's despair in colonial India. His trenchant critique of a system of education, which pays no attention to the child's nature and kills imagination early, continues to testify that he knew how terrible the crisis of unreformed education was. Our system has yet to appreciate, let alone absorb, Tagore's anguish. His idea that art can serve as the basis of education, rather than as an embellishment, finds few supporters in our age when utilitarian aims of education dominate our attention and minimalist programmes are considered fit for children of rural masses.

Though Tagore is included in the syllabus of teacher training as a naturalist philosopher, the implications of his perspective for the curriculum and for assessment are altogether neglected. Training institutes do not even try to point out the glaring contradiction between Tagore and his behaviourist contemporaries.

Last month, at a workshop in NCERT, a participant quoted Watson's famous boast to prove that her DIET takes child psychology seriously. Along with Thorndike and Skinner, Watson continues to occupy a solid space in our backward teacher training syllabi to this day. Cognitive psychology dispelled the behaviourist confusion between conditioning and education but its attraction persisted. In India, teacher training remained committed to it absorbing the message of cognitive theories only for lip service and marks in examination. Our teacher training courses perpetuate the conventional suspicion in the child's nature.

In the context of rural children, even the best of training institutions fail to overcome urban indifference and stereotypes. The insight and wisdom that can be acquired by observing children remain alien to trainees. Children's natural characteristics such as the urge to be physically active are ignored or barely tolerated. When children draw or paint, teachers criticise any departure from the stereotype scenery consisting of birds, a pair of hills and the sun. When children commit an error while reading aloud or solving a mathematical problem, teachers jump to correct the mistake. Little do they realise that errors provide a window to the child's mind, and only when we understand the child's thought process can we create a sustainable capacity for self-correction.

A few programmes have attempted to transcend the conventional training model. One is the B.El.Ed. programme offered in a handful of colleges in Delhi University. Successful in grooming young students into knowledgeable and sensitive teachers, this programme could also get ossified if its imaginative character is not nurtured and its products are not given the salary and status they deserve. About 800 products of this programme are now available, and they constitute a national resource for pedagogic renewal.

The conventional one-year B.Ed. programme can be reformed, incorporating some features of B.El.Ed., but the kind of investment, expertise and effort required for this is difficult to expect in a rapidly commercialising sector such as teacher training. The new entrepreneurs who are setting up B.Ed. colleges share the popular perception that teaching the young does not call for specialised, rigorous training. They are also responding to the trend whereby the teachers' identity is being assaulted and their role casualised. Mass recruitment of rural para-teachers as a substitute for career teachers in many States is part of the same trend. Supporters of this shift in policy argue that a workforce will be more productive if it remains insecure and replaceable. The reduction of teachers into the ubiquitous category of knowledge-workers is round the corner unless public awareness and policy address the crisis faced by teaching as a profession.

Silent victims

That this trend is part of globalisation seems a plausible argument when we consider the larger context of education. On the one hand, we hear about India shining with its 8 per cent growth rate. On the other, thousands of farmers are committing suicide, revealing the depression and alienation of rural India. The scale and speed at which the small peasantry and the landless are fleeing to cities in search of succour are symbolic of a vast and quiet war that urban India has waged on the rural. Children are silent victims of this war, and their economic misery is being exacerbated by minimalist educational programmes that ignore their intellectual and emotional needs.

Those who wish to ignore the bigger picture put the blame on rural teachers, treating absenteeism as a cause rather than as a symptom, and suggest remedies such as installation of cameras to compensate for measly salary and poor training. Others recommend shifting attention from provision of full-time staff to technical solutions such as e-learning. That rural children have a constitutional right to share the nation's economic boom finds no resonance in debates over state versus private responsibility towards education.

The recent events involving Digantar, a Jaipur-based institution reputed for its work in teacher education, reveal how far things have already gone. Digantar attempts to encourage teachers to reflect on their own practice and thereby improve performance. The programme carries the imprint of the late David Horsburgh, who ran a unique school at Neelbagh near Bangalore, and was a member of the National Teacher Commission appointed by Indira Gandhi. Through his unique approach and methods, Horsburgh showed how education could help children of the poorest sections of rural society develop their potential and bring their schooling on a par with others. Digantar was founded by Rohit Dhankar, a student of Horsburgh, and now it stands as one of India's best centres for in-service education of teachers. This stature has not helped Digantar save one of its schools located in a village near Jaipur, where a private university is being given the land the school currently occupies.

In a recent incident, villagers were brutally lathicharged for protesting the transfer of another adjoining piece of land. Rohit Dhankar also received a blow merely for asking what was going on. This story tells us how complex the challenge of educational reform is in the age of globalisation and how unprotected rural children are at a time when India is witnessing an unprecedented economic growth. The state has a crucial role to play as an instrument of social justice, especially in the context of children who represent the nation's human capital.

(The writer is Director, National Council of Educational Research and Training.)

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