Preaching in a Desert

So this week I've been spending some time in another government primary school--Kumaraswamy Layout School--in the same area as Chandranagar School.  It's been interesting hanging around a new school and facing some of the same obstacles I faced when I initially began to work in Chandranagar School last summer-- distrust, curiosity, excess hospitality, etc.  The older teachers of course were very shocked when I wanted to carry my own chair around, or when I insisted on being ignored in the classrooms.  The headmistress actually speaks no English, which is a change for me, but she kept insisting that I have some yogurt mixed with salt and water, and before I realized it, I had accepted a drink made with unboiled water.  I had like four sips and then my mind started playing tricks on me, my hypochondria settled in and I started feeling a stomachache.

I kind of sensed that some of the younger teachers were more suspicious of me than anything.  I explained that I was doing research on government schools, and one asked "What's the use?"  Totally valid question.  I tried my best to explain that I wanted to understand schools to find out how NGOs could do a better job of helping, but I'm not sure if I was making sense to her.  It seemed to be quite odd to her that an outsider, let alone a girl from the US, would want to hang around a poor government primary school.  It makes sense though, I would be curious too.  But beyond trying to do anything of use for NGOs or whoever (which in and of itself is a lofty goal, and honestly presumptuous in a lot of ways), I'm here to learn.  At that level, I don't think this teacher would have seen the "use" in what I was doing at all.

Being in KS Layout school reminded me of what it's like to be a true outsider again.  In Chandranagar School I can enjoy the luxury of hanging out with the kids, talking easily with the headmistress, poking around and asking questions.  But even there, I think I am still somewhat of an outsider to them.  

But if there is something I've really learned so far through my experiences in India and with Indian education, it is that to try to make change as an outsider, delivering yet another interpretation of a valuable input to reform schooling that is just as invaluable as some of these government inputs, or lack thereof, is to misunderstand the nature of the challenges of working in government education.  We are constantly inundated with statistics on government education--but we have to move beyond the stats and recognize that wait a minute, we're actually talking about people.   To make change in government education, I think that you really have to understand each of its challenges in depth, and also understand the role that you, or an organization, are playing in addressing those challenges.

Paulo Friere puts it well, as always:

We simply cannot go to the laborers--urban or peasant--in the banking style, to give them "knowledge" or impose on them the model of the "good man" contained in a program whose content we have ourselves organized.  Many political and educational plans have failed because their authors designed them according to their own personal views of reality, never once taking into account (except as mere objects of their actions) the men-in-a-situation to whole their program was ostensibly directed.

The task implies that revolutionary leaders do not go to the people in order to bring them a message of "salvation," but in order to come to know through dialogue with them both their objective situation and their awareness of that situation--the various levels of perception of themselves and the world in which and with which they exist.  One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people.  Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions nonwithstanding (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 94-95).