Two schools
“Teach them about the forests” . One late evening, a few years ago, I sat in the school room, in a small village, home to the Yanadi tribal community. I was waiting to meet two tribal elders.
It had been more than a decade ago since Subbarayappa, had asked a team from Bengaluru, “You are telling us about forests, about seeds. Why don’t you do something for our children?” Readily, the team set up a learning centre, in a cleaned-out goat shed. The children were free spirits. Their hands could shape in clay what they saw, they could hold a snake in their hands, the forest was their home – what must a school do for them? The eager community offered the team a choice of two sites – one for the temple and one for the school.
The children came – some readily, some hesitantly – but eventually they all came. The community elders came into the school to teach them about their forests, their life. A few hundred children from these communities have attended these schools. Several of them completed schooling, many could not. The school had touched many; how and when was not always clear.
And that is what I wanted to know. Duggeppa sounded happy, yet his voice had a trace of wistfulness. “Our children would not stand up and talk – now you have shown them the way to …. You have taught our children how to meet the world. We have lived all our lives here – we did not feel we needed anything. The forest gave us everything. (But now) our children do not have this. The forests are drying up. But now more people want access to the forests to take away its value”.
The school had come a long way with many proud moments. As I was wondering what next, he paused and said softly “(don’t forget to) teach them about the forests.”
“Google is wrong” . In another village, about 50 km from Mysuru, is a high school with a student strength of about 300. The class teacher decided that the children would map and document their village. Making measurements by bicycle, on foot, by measuring scales, the children toiled for 3 days to produce a map of the school and the village. They photographed events in the village, things that they thought were important. After much work and rework, they produced a map of their own village, and told the story of their world as they knew it. “We never knew the children could do so much work”, the teachers were surprised.
When the children were shown how their village looked as seen on a satellite map, they saw the richly documented Bengaluru and Mysuru. As they spanned out, there was nothing – their village recognizable only by the landscape change. Their village did not appear on the map. To blunt their disappointment, the teacher zoomed in, their school appeared. At this point, one of them could bear it no more. “Google is wrong!” the child exclaimed. The map his class had made of the school was more accurate and updated, showing what Google had missed. No further explanation was needed.
An era of alienation
What is our response to the vision of these elders, to teach them about the forest? And how do we assuage the indignation of the 14-year-old who saw that his world had been rendered invisible? They are seemingly unrelated problems. Or are they?
These were expressions of aspiration and hope; they were also expressions of resignation and indignation and of identities denied and eliminated. At their core, the concerns are similar – who decides what is knowledge, who decides who gets to use the knowledge and how, who decides how and where people can participate in social life, who gets to tell their story and where. Communities look to schools for learning yet they must leave behind what they already know; their pathways for a life of dignity no longer seem to include their physical or social world. There are millions of children called upon for “nation-building”, to build a society that they are excluded from imagining.
Appearance. The new normal. Drastically transforming the ways we live, work and interact with each other and disempowering the most vulnerable, we saw a glimpse of what this dystopia led by digital technologies would look like. No going back, we are being told – we do not even know who we have left behind and where. There are the seeds of alienation.
What should education do?
COVID may have been unprecedented but not unanticipated. With the relentless onslaught on ecosystems, weather extremes and new pathogens are no longer a distant imagination, affecting the marginalized disproportionately. During months of lock down, it was extremely clear whose lives, livelihoods and education mattered and whose did not.
We worship the technological makeover of society, yet large sections of society have no understanding of what is being made, much less how or why. It is more urgent than ever, that we understand the meaning of work; and what work does to affirm ourselves as human beings. And, it is time to bring this consciousness into education – of the need to end disharmony and to end alienation.
Fundamental to this is an ecological consciousness. Education must allow children to experience themselves as part of a larger ecology, developing a relationship with the life systems and the social systems around. Children are naturally drawn to the world around, and school education needs to build on this. And an equally important consideration would be to educate for democracy, with a conscious effort towards nurturing a culture of critical thinking, building attitudes and capabilities to function in a democracy, and creating a society that has place for the aspirations of all.
They say education is the making of society. If so, it is then surely time to take stock of where we are – perhaps to remake. This requires nothing short of a radical re-imagination. And now is the time.