A School to watch out for!!!!

Whenever someone asks me, where I completed my schooling from, I happily chant out the names of five schools from five different cities of India that helped me become a decent individual. Education, the brainy ones say, makes an individual....and schools designs the future of a child...opens the gates of childhood into adulthood...

I have read articles like these once in a while in newspapers about education in rural areas but this one recently caught my eye...the article calls itself Rethinking rural education!!

The article talks about schools in remote areas where students who belong to remote tribes are taught.

The writer says, the school is meant for the children of Paradhi and other nomadic tribes, many of which the British had branded “criminal tribes” because they were the most militant in the anti-colonial struggle. Even today, people belonging to these tribes suffer from extreme poverty and social exclusion, and rank lowest in formal school education. However, it would be naïve to think their minds are uneducated. As I discovered during my recent visit to Yamgarwadi, their children have amazing knowledge of the environment around them. These boys and girls knew the medicinal properties of the locally grown “weeds”. They could identify different birds with their sounds. They could name the stars in the night sky. In a little room that served as the “science laboratory” in the school, all the various types of snakes, crabs and scorpions kept in specimen jars had been caught by the children themselves. And how incredibly talented they all were in singing, dancing, playing local sports, and using their magical hands to create things of beauty in wood, mud and grass!

Unlike these schools, other schools, the writer says, bypasses the native skills, traditionally acquired learnings, and the rich artistic-literary heritage of our various “backward” castes and tribes in rural India. No wonder, children belonging to these communities perform poorly in the formal school system and end up swelling the ranks of the “uneducated” and “semi-educated”.

For RTE to become meaningful to these communities, and for it to make its fullest contribution to the realization of a progressive vision for the “Future of India”, big and innovative changes are needed in the school education system, especially in our rural schools. Smart kids like Avinash abound in India’s villages. What they need is not just the right to education, but also the right education.

The writer then says, for RTE to become meaningful to these communities, and for it to make its fullest contribution to the realization of a progressive vision for the “Future of India”, big and innovative changes are needed in the school education system, especially in our rural schools. Smart kids like Avinash abound in India’s villages. What they need is not just the right to education, but also the right education.

I am left to wonder that I wish they taught Marwari in my primary schools so that I could fluently talk to the elders in my family in a language they have grown up speaking in. Alas! My school days are over…..