More on pedagogy

Kishna Kumar, the present director of NCERT,has been crusading for neighbourhood schools for a long time where children from all classes come together to study. I had an opportunity to listen to him last year. But he admitted, in the talk, that it was a difficult proposition to put in place. Look at Kendriya Vidyalayas. Once upon a time every government official who had a transferrable job enrolled their child in this school. However, as private schools mushroomed it became socially fashionable to send the child to these schools. Now, as my colleagues tell me, how can my child study with the child of my servant. There is an underlying apprehension too: What if the servant's child turns out to be better than my child? So the Kendriya Vidyalaya on campus serves to the children of the economically weaker section whereas those with even little bit of money prefer to send their child to the private schools. It does not matter if the private schools do not teach anything-it is private. The name tag takes care of everything and for the things it does not, there are coaching classes.
The Government schools including Kendriya Vidyalaya have suffered from this apathy. The teachers have no motivation to teach- their own children attend private schools. So why should they bother. Anyway these children will never learn...
Today's interview with Krishna Kumar published in Hindu does not have to do with neighbourhood school. He tackles another of his favourite topic: pedagogy. How do you teach language and arithmatic skills to class I and II children?

Learning- First time learners vs Us

Most of the rural and urban slum children are first-time learners. There is considerable difference between them and us.
Textbooks: Most of the examples given in the textbooks will be familiar to us or to children from our milieu. Even if it is not, or if there are things in the textbook that we do not understand, we can approach our parents, our teachers, and now of course the Internet. The point is that we have an entire support system. Our parents are educated and there ways and means of getting to understand what is written in the textbook. For a child who is a first time learner these support systems are lacking. The parent does not know what is written in the textbook, the teacher might or might not know (most often not know), and the entire social structure is such that the child feels disconnected from what is being taught at the school and what is happening around him or her. Jean Dreze and a group of other researchers conducted extensive survey and published the results in form of a book called PROBE report. I used to possess this fantastic book but in all the shiftings I have lost it. It is still available from Amazon and it is a must read for all of us who wish to understand the problems facing the education sector. Two NGOs who have brought out excellent books are Pratham and Ekalvya. These books are written in simple language and easy to read manner.
Language: Which brings me to the second point. Most of us who are in the urban milieu speak a different dialect than the kids in the rural area. As an example, we were interviewing kids for the KVPY scholarship instituted by DST. One of the child was from rural Bihar. He could only communicate in Hindi so we conducted the interview in Hindi. Now, in Hindi, a boy uses masculine gender and a girl uses feminine gender. So a boy will say Main Karta Hoon and a girl will say Main Karti hoon. This kid, a boy, constantly referred to himself in the feminine gender. So he would say Main aisa karoongi. At the end of the interview we asked him why he was speaking like this. He said this is the local dialect. So irrespective of what the textbook says, the child was using the language that was prevalent in the village. This is only Hindi. Imagine English!
Reading materials: Most of the children living in the rural areas have no access to reading material. The cities also lack libraries but most of us can get books from the school library or our parents will buy them for us. For a child who lives in a remote village, this avenue is closed. The only reading material for them at many times is the textbook. And if it is dreary, why should the child read?
I never realized the importance of reading materials till I started writing stories. I had grown up on a staple diet of Enid Blyton and Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie. For me to write a story in which the characters were all Indians was so difficult because my thinking was completely Western. I had to make a conscious effort to redo my thinking. So reading materials do color our perspective. Our lives are to a large extent Westernized but not for a rural child. The disconnect is much larger for a rural child than for a child from our surroundings.

I was going to reply to Suresh's comment. Instead I ended up writing an entire blog on this.

Ek sansadiya samiti ki uttak baithak

That was the name of the play that the Faculty club sponsored yesterday. The actors were from Darpan, a group based in Lucknow. The play was written by Ranjit Kapoor, who had been invited for the screening.
The play was a fantastic satire on our esteemed parliamentarians. My only grouse was the ending...
And the way the faculty club behaved.
It is a well-known fact that we do not have a good auditorium. The tiny thing can at best accommodate about 250-275 people. On top of it, the front three rows were reserved. And a faculty member announced that the rows were reserved for the faculty and therefore could the students squeeze themselves in the back. Oh for heaven's sake! Can we please not have such apartheid policies. The PRO explained this morning that it was reserved for guests but as I saw only Ranjit Kapoor, I do not know who the other guests were. Though given the fact that many faculty do not make it to the university unless they have a class to teach, I guess they equally qualify as guests.
I get this question constantly from other faculties when they see me hurrying around 8.30am to the University.
"Do you have a class to teach?"
"No."
"oh."
And the look says it all!

The educator from Chicago

She introduced herself as an educator from Chicago. And just in case I did not know where Chicago was she added "USA". From her accent it was clear that she was a second/third generation Indian-American. I was little put off by her assumption and accent. But she turned out to be a surprise.
One of the questions she asked was:
"Why isn't education tailored for different people differently? For example a child in rural area is not going to comprehend what a child living in Urban will. A rural child is going to be familiar with the practices in the village- the farm, the cattle (every house invariably has a cow/buffalo), water from the well/or to walk long distances to get water...these are things a urban child will be unfamiliar with. But the textbooks are filled with examples/lifestyle of a urban child. Why can't the teacher get textbooks or modify the subject so that he or she can teach in a language familiar to the rural child."
I have no answer to it. The government policies are such that we cannot experiment unless you are in a place like IIT or JNU where you can create your own syllabus and teach what you want. You cannot even do that in DU. It is sad because as the girl pointed out it is ultimately the child who is the loser. The textbooks are dreary and filled with examples that a rural child finds difficult to comprehend. There are some changes: Pratham and Ekalavya have done excellent jobs in getting alternative textbooks. But if a child wants to pass class V/VIII board exams then he or she will have to read the prescribed state/central government textbook.
The second question she asked me was:
"What is the scope of this education? Is it that every child should go to college?"
I have wrestled with this question a lot. Invariably I have noticed that a village child and his/her parents on getting education expect a government job. And the child after getting education looks down upon the traditional work of his/her parent. They do not want to go back to the village because it is demeaning to do the same work after getting educated. And in the city their qualifications do not fetch the kind of job they expect. So they are most often left nowhere.
And on the other hand there are girls like the one I met in Varanasi who wants to become a doctor but cannot because she has to get back to work to support the family.
Sometimes life is full of injustices or as I always claim:
Life is miserable.

Pravasi Bhartiya Divas

Asha had been invited to put up a booth at the recently concluded PBD. CII said that the focus of this year's PBD was philanthropy and would we participate. We said yes. Who knows we might get volunteers/funds/exposure...
Then things went haywire.
First they said we would be given a stall and it would cost us Rs10,000 assuming we get more donations than that.
Then they said that what we would get is a small booth and we would be given specific timings when we should be present.
Then they said that we need to be there at 9am.
Tuesday morning at 9am I do Eukaryotic Gene Transcription with M.Sc (IV semester). So two other volunteers went over to Vigyan Bhavan.
They were shown a shed. We will clean it, they promised, and you will share it with three other organizations.
Finally, Tarun did the only possible thing. He grabbed three tables, cleaned up the premise with Ravi, and set up Asha for Education banner. This is our place.
Well, for all the hoop-la, it was not only chaotic but CII needs to be taught the meaning of philanthropy. Not a single soul turned up.
The saving grace was the fact that I was on the panel on Challenges in Women empowerment due to a quirky turn of fate. I used the opportunity to talk about education and Asha. And we got couple of interested people stopping to talk to us about the status of education.
The panel was interesting: Mallika Sarabhai, Brinda Karat, Krishna Tirth, Girija Vyas, Meira Kumar, and Anu Peshawaria.
Mallika Sarabhai threw a slogan and left saying she had a performance in the evening.
Girija Vyas talked about Sita and Mirabai amongst other things. She also pointed out that the Chief Justice has never been a woman.
Meira Kumar rolled out the statistics. And both Meira and Girija Vyas took care to praise UPA as well as Rajiv Gandhi (They forgot to mention that he was the one who took that decision in Shah Bano case but as it is said in Hindi: Hota hai).
Brinda Karat was the most sensible. At least she talked about how in this whole NRI thing we manage to ignore the blue-collar workers especially women who have absolutely no support system abroad.
Anu Peshawaria, who also happens to be Kiran Bedi's sister, took care to mention that she had represented India in the Wimbledon and that Girija Vyas had give her many prizes. Then she publicized a book she had written that gives hotline numbers for women's organization. And she publicized it a bit more, some bit more, till Girija Vyas asked her to stop.
But the highlight of it all was when I was introduced to Sam Pitroda. He was boasting about his prodigious memory and how he gets more than 700 emails a day. Fortunately I was introduced by my first name. Who knows from my last name, given his memory, he might have deduced that he knew appa in the long gone days when he was part of C-DOT.

Architectural woes

A brand-new building for the School of Physical Sciences is coming up in the campus. We can see the sprawling building (for some reason vertical expansion is anathema to the administration/architect). It looks beautiful if one excludes the fact that many trees were chopped off and the Arvali mountains were flattened for this building to come up.
"So when are you folks moving?" I asked the current Dean of the school.
"When the entrance is constructed," she replied.
It turns out that the architect forgot to put in the entrance in the design. Oops!
So the administration has a brilliant solution to the problem of missing entrance. They have asked it to be put for Phase II construction. Now, the problem is how can one have Phase II construction when one cannot even enter the Phase I construction.
But for all those of you who revile the CPWD fellows, remember that they are not alone for the shoddy construction.
(Incidentally, the architect long time back won a prize for designing the JNU campus)

New Year Resolution

The rector in his new year greetings asked us to pledge a resolution that we will minimize the use of cars within the campus.
He too lives within the campus just few houses away from mine.
He continues to come by car to the department.
Oh well, resolutions are meant to be broken.