I’ve a confession to make. Most of my early school life, I was ignorant (to say the least) about the issues that cripple our education system. I’d read the occasional article in the newspaper and wonder if things were actually as bad as they were portrayed. As I grew, I felt my understanding of the subject grew with me. The crux of the problem wasn’t that there was lots at hand to deal with (for students, teachers and administrators alike) but that everyone had got used to the problems existing and instead of searching for ways to overcome them, we have managed to find ways around them.
Until recently, I thought that there existed an endless list of people who at some level or the other are cynical about our educational system. And the ones who aren’t are unfortunately, so accepting of it, that they don’t want to see the shortcomings.
But my next stop in this quest of understanding our system of learning was an experience like no other. I can, with great amount of surety say, that I’ve never been happier about having my beliefs proved wrong to me. It was a chance visit to NAYA PRAYAS, a project of Prayas that helps out of school children, residing in the slums of Delhi, to get education. It is currently running eight centers of alternative education in South Delhi.
I was prepared for an unconventional setup but I think my narrow perspective on schools didn’t allow me to imagine what I saw.
I happened to reach before most students arrived. There were a set of women waiting to welcome the students. This is where the surprises started. Some of them were much younger to me and I’ve never, even in my wildest imagination, considered myself capable of handling the responsibility of laying the foundation of the education of a child. I suddenly felt a little skeptical. But there wasn’t much time to ponder over it as the next standard was to be broken. I saw children of ages between 3 and 13 years entering the same classroom. I’d have thought that they got the incorrect classroom had there not been a lot more surety on their faces than I could’ve managed, even with immense effort, on mine. Teachers always have the knack of finding the confused student in class….. The teacher in charge found me and guided me to the administrative head. She told me that Naya Prayas was an effort to help students, who for various reasons dropped out or couldn’t attend classes, attain a certain level of understanding of the primary subjects, Hindi, English and Mathematics, so that they can resume classes from that stage. Thus, each student is at a different comfort level with different subjects but all of them have the same objective, to go back to school.
A brief glance at the statistics that indicate the drop-out rate at primary level in our schools is sufficient to realize the importance of organizations like Naya Prayas. The average retention rate across all states is about 58.11% according to the survey by Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan(SSA). Another heartening aspect of the current batch at NP is that the ratio of girls to boys is exactly one. It might not be an accurate indicator of reduced gender bias but it is inspiring to see the gradual change in mindset.
Naya Prayas is school for about 300 students at present. There are 25-30 children in each batch, morning and evening. Each morning the students are given work according to their individual need and the toddlers are given various puzzles to work on. Since the task at hand is very demanding, the number of teachers in class often exceeds three. Some of the volunteers are students themselves. They are enrolled in various colleges and teach at Naya Prayas in their spare time. Their commitment is implausible. Within an hour of the visit, I found myself sitting with a girl, trying to learn the English alphabets. I corrected her whenever she went wrong. I’d found a new friend in her and a teacher in myself.
The classroom was a hub of activity. Everywhere I looked, questions were being solved, queries were being attended to and concepts were being explained. If a student was facing trouble with a topic that he/she had spent enough time with, he/she was asked to stay back and try a different approach to it. To ensure the presence of discipline, students were involved in various classroom activities like the morning and evening prayer, classroom questions, tests through placards etc. After a year of work with each student, the teacher, according to her understanding of the child’s comprehension help himher get admission a particular grade in the nearest government school.
What struck me the most about this system was the teacher’s awareness, not just about the difficulties faced by each child in each subject, but also about any domestic problems that might be hampering the child’s growth. The amount of patience that is needed to teach a child who has dropped out of school is huge, as their interest and concentration, both seem to diminish after the disappointment of their first visit to school.
I’ve been a student for most period of my life, so far, and have been fortunate to be taught by some fantastic teachers but this kind of student teacher relationship was beyond my imagination.
This experience did bring up a few questions in my mind. Does the contribution of unrecognized schools go unaccounted for in our country? Do qualifications make someone a good teacher? Is it logical for this informal system of imparting knowledge to be implemented at a larger scale if it is so effective in clearing concepts? Where does the school fail? And how do we make the lives of the children who seek help in such organizations stable enough so that they continue their education without any further hiccups?
