This is the unedited version of a post submitted to Solution Exchange, a site initiated by the UN Country team in India, where the education community discusses questions of interest. This post addresses the question of agendas for social change that schools are often expected to serve.
In the conversation we have been having on child-centric education, some participants have pointed out that many cultural contexts, including our own, may be inhospitable to the child-centric ideal. It has been suggested that, in such cases and for some areas, it may be necessary for the school and the community to be “not in harmony with each other”. This, it seems to me, implies that someone other than the community (presumably those who decide policy on educational matters) decides what community practices the school should contest.
We can empathise with this. All of us have, at one time or the other, wished ardently for all children to be taught the horrors of the things we personally hate or the blessings of things we count as virtue. But when these emotions have the potential of informing policy, it is worth-while to explore them more deeply.
To do so, I would like to pose the following questions:
- · Granting that injustice and oppression are present in society, is the classroom an appropriate tool for contesting them? What are the implications for the child’s well-being of such a contest?
- · In a milieu where dominant and non-dominant groups of the society have starkly different view-points, should the school be a microcosm of the society or a platform for one or the other view-point?
- · How does the child-centric ideal deal with this conflict, inherent in practically every society?
- · What processes do we use to decide which community practices, values and traditions the school should contest?
I would also like to present my views of these questions and hope that members will take the conversation forward.
We must remember that a contest between the school and the community is not an impersonal face-off between bloodless institutions. Children are involved, and such a contest can be deeply unsettling. It can cause a deep sense of alienation among children, either from the parents, or the system of education or both. It can also lead to confusion about how moral choices are to be made. It is difficult for this confusion to be addressed, because the issues are being framed not as an exploration, but as given ethical imperatives. It is also difficult to address because the adults in the schools have typically not been equipped to help resolve it.
It seems to me that this is potentially so damaging to the child as well as the community that it can be justified only if it is immediately relevant to the children, their families, the community and the teacher. And, both in equity and in the interests of child-centredness, they are the only ones who should decide whether it is so relevant.
When a teacher encourages her children to question real events and attitudes in their environment, it does more than shine a light on the particular problem. It helps the children learn the art of enquiring into the questions of their times. It helps them learn to encounter the varied narratives that exist in their midst, through dialogue with one another. That, in turn, makes it possible for them to engage meaningfully with the challenges that will arise tomorrow, for they will certainly be beyond the challenges that may be prescribed for study today.
I remember being thrilled by Neil Postman 35 years ago as I read his plea to turn teaching into a subversive art. It had the distinct flavour of the individual teacher engaging his students and his community in an exploration of the questions that they needed to ask. At no time did it seem to require the teacher to focus attention (his own or the children’s) on a subversion agenda that had been decided by someone other than the children, the teacher and their immediate neighbourhood.
It seems to me that, as the content of a curriculum, there is a big difference between “questioning” and “questioning a particular practice”. And even the latter is very far from a straight-forward proselytisation of a particular cause into the forming minds of children. Surely, that is violence.
And in this context, it must be said that RTE significantly enhances the possibility that such violence will be visited upon children. By centralising curriculum content, school recognition, teacher certification and teacher development almost completely in the hands of the state, RTE makes it much more likely that individual agendas of people in power, rather than community perspectives, will decide what social issues children will discuss in classrooms. Ironically, while it claims to reach for a child-centred system, it takes a giant step away from it.
This is not a groundless fear. I remember how we, as school and college students, during the Emergency, were expected to memorise and recite the twenty points of Indira Gandhi’s programme as evidence of being patriotic good-boys. And I am sure we can all point out other, more current as well as more remote, instances. The fact is that, among the decision-makers in education, there has been little interest in engaging the community to decide what is worth learning and indeed, contesting, in the school.
It would be wonderful if we recognised that teachers need to learn the art of helping children look at their surroundings, raise such questions as are important to them and be catalysts of a broader questioning in their families and the community. They can then ensure that the process of education plays its part in moving the community to make wholesome changes. That is where child-centric practice will meet the need for social change.
We have all met teachers who have caused such changes in the lives of their students and the community. What we need is a focus on developing many, many more such teachers. That may well be one of the most worth-while tasks educational planners could address themselves to for many, many years to come.
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