Congruence Of Education And Sustainable Lifestyle

Very often this question of ‘Education To Vulnerable Children’ is being discussed these days – almost every forum and every workshop that is related to education, is tuned in. It is definitely a trending topic in development circles; not because it invites long and intellectual conversations, but because it is high time we become conscious about this. It is also high time that we accept learning as something beyond conventional pedagogy.

A talk with my friend Rohit over coffee left me with these questions to reflect upon –

“What does education for the most vulnerable children of our society mean for me?”

“What would be my rationale around the importance of their education?”

“Given a chance to, what changes would I include in their curriculum to match their need for a sustainable lifestyle?”

Honestly, I have never dealt with the education systems directly. I felt I could try solving intricacies in my mind related to this same subject line by reflecting on my personal experiences and reflections. I come from a city, where the problem of accessibility of education is solved, for certain class of people at least. However, the biggest vulnerability lies on the standard of quality of that education. By quality of education, I argue if it caters precisely to all the gradients of students such as Socio-Economic Background, Child’s Ability To Grasp, Child’s Interest, Fearless Environment To Play With Ambiguity – to name a few. I have completed all of my education from Kendriya Vidyalaya. If I look back at the standards of education and the opportunities I availed attributes to what I am today.

Personally, I would rate it around semi-ideal standards. Most admirable thing of that system was that; curriculum was never forced. Children had their freedom to explore their interest in passion and chase it. This means, encouragement to children with the options of sports, vocational courses made them confident and motivated to attend the school and the confidence instilled in them helped them excel in studies as well and complete education. Perhaps the model therefore was around creating interest among the children. Thanks to this philosophy that most of the children from KV are seen to adapt easily to any kind of ecosystem, be it in higher education, employ-ability scale or being self-reliant. I would credit this confidence of being self-reliant among the KVians to its education system. Confidence behind this premise is based on my sister’s work and experience of teaching children from slums in Hyderabad. She did a fellowship program with Teach For India, where she was given the responsibility of educating children in class 5 and 6. I had followed her work quite closely.

The vulnerability that largely prevailed was lack of motivation. The children came from poor background where the choice of education was an obligation and highly influenced by the fees charged. The communities raise their kids as more hands at work and therefore after very preliminary education, write-off their further education and happy with them earning livelihood. This adds up to the dull learning atmosphere at the schools to make the things worse. The matter of fact here is, education has become more of an obligation. Majority of the children rely on private and substandard schools for their education.

This grievous practice compounds the reasons for dropping out among the children – unable to cope up with the standards at higher levels. Therefore, it is very urgent and pressing need to give importance to the education to this group. Also, in addition to the compounding problem of not coping up with the standards at higher level, there are several other issues – viz. educated youth fairing very low on employ-ability, further increasing number of educated-unemployed youth, increased distress at work, high attrition ratios, very poor work-life balance etc.

At TFI, she had quite good freedom to approach her teaching assignments. She was passionate and committed to contribute to their vision of Eliminating Educational Equity In India. The fundamental challenge here was instilling motivation among the children and their parents towards realization of importance of education. She had therefore invested a lot of time building rapport with the children and beyond the classroom, their parents as well! Which she called as catching nerves. This worked! It opened a window for students to express their thoughts freely and also created a healthy feedback loop between me and the parents. Therefore making sure that the motivation to children comes even beyond the boundaries of school. From a teacher to a Didi!

Another significant observation here was that no child likes to go to school, sit and listen to boring content from the textbooks. Even, I did not like that when I was a student. Therefore, she laid a lot of importance on designing a curriculum that could help fission of positive thoughts in the minds of the children.

When we talk about a sustainable lifestyle, it implies we are very conscious about purpose of everything around us, our actions and a rational approach of looking at events and reacting to them. To me, in ideal world that is the enlightenment we look forward to; from education. I strongly believe that by creating a fearless ecosystem with liberal learning is the solution. Focus should like on developing a culture where the source of learning is rather left voluntary than forced by curriculum and conventional pedagogy so that children are always directed to consciously make their decisions and act.