This graph appeared in a recent newspaper. It makes for interesting reading as to the situation of school drop outs in India. For us at Project Why, its is of prime importance as our primary mission has been to contain school drop outs something we have done quite successfully over the past decade and a half. The other facet of our work has been our relentless effort to mainstream as many children as possible. We must have pushed back hundreds of children to school.
Our work continues.
However seeing statistics like these makes us weary and a tad sad. What held true in 2000 still occurs 14 years later. Nothing seems to change for one end of the spectrum while on the other we witness proliferation of new swanky schools. The school business only thrives for some, the others remain in the dark.
Girls drop out for the same reasons year after year and we can almost say generation after generation: distance of school from home, marriage, engaged in domestic activities, financial constraints, lack of interest etc. Some of these reasons are akin to those we face as we often have to persuade families to allow their girls to study.
Boys too drop out for the same reasons as those mentioned: to help the family finances or simply by lack of interest. One needs to remember that children from poorer backgrounds rarely get marks allowing them to pursue higher studies in affordable institutions. Joining the work force is often their only option.
Containing school drop outs remains a challenge even after 17 years of our existence. At times it seems like a Sisyphean task! But as I always held when faced with the daunting task ahead, even one drop out contained is worth every effort put in.
Kamala Goburdhun née Sinha 15 October 1917 – 13 June 1990
It is Kamala’s centenary today. It will be celebrated in the centre that is named after her and where two of her most cherished ideals are pursued: education and women’s empowerment. It will be a low key affair, a far cry from the loud and impressive centenary celebration of her better half a few years ago. A tribute to who she was: discrete while being strong, opting for the behind the scenes role as that is where she could truly colour the whole show.
She left this world 27 years ago but has never failed to guide me in every thing I have done, just as she did when she was alive. I feel her presence around me with every breath I take.
I am often asked why I decided to set up Project Why. There are many reasons, but one is undoubtedly the lessons learnt at Kamala’s knee. These were cameos of her life that she shared candidly leaving them to seep through my heart slowly, knowing that they would reach their destination one day. The destination was Project Why.
Kamala’s education was nothing short of a saga worthy of being brought to life in a TV soap! Kamala was the eldest child of a freedom fighter and in many ways his favourite. When the first girls school opened the town she lived in, she was rearing to join. Her father indulged her thinking that a few years of schooling would be a good thing. He never knew he had opened the floodgates.
Kamala had two formidable allies in her quest for education: her mom and her paternal grand mom both women way beyond their times. To ‘tame’ the freedom fighter they would use his own weapon: hunger strikes! So when Kamala wanted to study beyond primary school and the father was reluctant out came the big guns: Kamala went on a hunger strike! The two ladies would stand with forlorn faces just as the father sat down to eat and needless to say, he would relent. Sometimes it took more than a day but Kamala was fed at night by her two supporters. Hence she studied all the way to her matriculation. I guess my grandfather thought it would stop there as there were no institutions for higher studies in her city. But he did not know his women. Up came another hunger strike, this time a little longer, but permission was given to go to BHU in Varanasi to do her BA. Then would come an MA and LLB but by that time her father had surrendered totally.
Kamala also convinced her father that she would not marry unless India became independent. She did not want to give birth to a slave child. Life as a old maid was a better option.
So what would this tiny feisty educated young woman do? The unthinkable! Women’s equality is something she believed in fiercely and she knew that was her calling. She wanted to do something meaningful. After long discussions with her freedom fighter father she decided to work for the British so that she could ensure that war widows of WW II got their pensions, a pension that was often usurped by some male member of the family. This meant that she would have to leave her home and live alone in Delhi. Kamala drove a truck into the remotest villages of Uttar Pradesh and ensured that the young widows got their due. While in the village Kamala would talk to the women on several issues life hygiene, child marriage and girl’s education. All this when women her age were already mothers of many.
Kamala knew how to make a difference. She had the courage to stand for what she felt was right and never shirked from walking the road less travelled.
In a recent heated debate on women safety, a spirited woman anchor told a politician that she and for that matter all women, were not anyone’s daughters or sisters or wives. She wanted to be considered simply as a citizen enjoying the same constitutional rights!
A recent article entitled: There’s more to women than being betis and biwis, seconds that statement. Recently two young diplomats, who also happen to be women, were feted for their spirited defence of India at the UN. For the author and for man of us women, these remarks reek of patriarchy. We are sick of hearing politicians spout ‘our daughters’, or ‘just like our daughters’ when any issue concerning women is discussed be it safety or even rape.
Different rules are set up in universities for the so called daughters as it seems that they ‘need’ to be protected! Patriarchy seems to follow women no matter what they do or how high they reach. The sickening ‘in spite of being a woman’ is galling.
As long as this attitude remains, nothing is going to really change.
Women want to be considered as equal partners and so if the roads are safe for men, they should be for women too. We do not want to be talked down too or clubbed as the weaker sex.We want to be treated and recognised as professionals minus the ‘even though they are women”.
Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi’s launched a ‘Bharat Yatra’ against child abuse on Monday with the words: “Each time when a child is raped, our conscience, innocence is raped. I am not going to tolerate this. I am going to change this.”
The sad reality is that a child is raped with regularity in this land of ours. Children are raped within he safety of their homes or school. Just last week a 5 year old was murdered in a prestigious school in India’s capital city. In another horrific incident a minor was gang raped by the school owner and a teacher for months. The incident came to light after a botched up abortion organised by the perps. She is critical.
Nothing has changed in spite of public outrage following the Nirbhaya gang rape. Children are still being raped with impunity. Some cases make the headlines. But others remain cloaked in silence, a silence often linked to misplaced family honour. Rapes remain in the closet. It is time they were brought out in the open.
Madhumita Pandey is a student in criminology. For her doctoral thesis she interviewed over 100 rapists. This was prompted by the question she and each one of us ask ourselves: “Why do these men do what they do?” and then goes on to ask: “what prompts these men? What are the circumstances which produce men like this?” This is something we all want to know. Madhumita set out to find out from the horse’s mouth.
It is easy to call all such rapists ‘monsters’! To bung them in a category that has nothing to do with us. To think of them as some aliens from another planet. Anything else makes us uncomfortable. But that is not the reality. The reality is that they come from within our society. How can one forget that 90% of child sexual and other abuse is committed by people within the family or extended family.
When she interviewed the rapists in jail she realised that most of them are ordinary men, with little education, often school drop outs and what they did was related to the way they were brought up. Boys are given false ideas about their gender and most if not all the women they interact with are submissive. Consent is not part of their lexicon. Gender equality is an aberration.
Let us pause a little and look around us and ponder on the day-to-day reality of children growing up in what is undoubtedly a patriarchal society. Children are brought up in an environment where boys and girls are looked at up differently. If one is king, the other is more a slave! In school sex education has been obliterated as such topics corrupt the young and offend traditional values. All conversation about anything related to ‘sex’ is taboo. Never minds if hormones rage or if the young access the mine of information now available at the swipe of hand on the ubiquitous smart pone.
Rape should it occur, is quickly brushed aside with a boys will be boys, or he had too much to drink, or why was she out at night, or the ever present family honour. One cannot begin to imagine how many cases of child sexual abuse are brushed under the carpet to guard family honour.
So what needs to be done. First accept that the real cause lies within our society and that it needs to be addressed head on. Sex education has to come back on school curricula asap! Young children have to be taught to say NO! They have to be taught ‘good’ touch and ‘bad‘ touch and have to be heard. It is imperative to give children a voice. And it is imperative to respect that voice. Even a sex worker has the right to say NO!
A child needs to have an adult it trusts and can go to in case of need. If not someone in the family, then a teacher or care giver. A loud NO the first time any such dastardly incident occurs is all it needs to stop any further abuse.
Perhaps it is too late to change the well ingrained mindset of adults. Let us at least strive to make the next generation aware of gender equality and consent.
I recently stumbled upon an article entitled: India’s education system is broken beyond fixing; we need to reimagine it entirely. It caught my attention as this is something close to my heart. The author refers to education as being a ‘terror outfit!’. It kills an average of 20 teenagers everyday due to academic pressure. For her the indian education system is nothing short of calamitous.
She retraces the origin of the education as we know it today and quotes an interesting excerpt of a TED talk that sums it all: “The schooling system as it is today goes back to 400 years of an empire’s colonisation and this empire needed three kinds of people: Soldiers to protect their land interest, clerks to run their offices and, after the industrial revolution, assembly line workers to make things. So for 400 years we produced millions and millions of people like them and what are the properties of those people? They should be able to understand instructions, follow them and most importantly, they should not ask questions and they should not be creative. Imagine if an assembly line worker started being creative! o produce millions of such people, what the empire basically needed was a system that kind of worked like a factory. You take raw materials, subject all of them to exactly the same processes and conditions and finally test them. The finished products that clear the test are ready to be sold and the remaining products are simply passed off as defects. The empire managed to build such a system and a very efficient one that: The schooling system.
And we have been nurturing this system for four centuries. This system is obsolete and cannot be fixed. It has to be re-imagined. In tomorrow’s world where AI will reign and robots proliferate, such products will be jobless. In India the number is staggering: 600 million in a scenario where 68% of the jobs will be sacrificed at the alter of automation.
Who will bell the cat, or will anyone bell the cat. Without sounding alarmist, it is imperative someone look at this in time.
The question remains as to whether we can ‘fix’ the system as we know it. First and foremost ne can of course try and ensure that the system as we know it works as in many ways it does not. Over the years the rot has set in and a system that once worked is now hijacked by the absurd race for marks. Maybe that is the first thing that should be addressed as it is also the cause of the many suicides we see. A couple of decades ago 60% was considered to be top of the scale. Today it is close to failure. I felt extremely disturbed when I heard a topper question why she did not get 100% in a particular subject as she has mugged the entire book by heart.
That is what we have let our education become: the art of rote learning. A child has to give up everything to mug books by heart. Our education system has hijacked everything that is the prerogative of a child: playing, singing, dancing, running, laughing, giggling, day-dreaming, having fun, being creative and above all being a person. It is time all this was reinstated.
Learning by rote is useless. Once you have regurgitated what you learnt at the given exam, you forget it all. Learning is about understanding, interpreting, reacting, giving your opinion and it is possible but is needs commitment and motivation from the teachers. I remember the question I had to answer way back in the sixties at my History exam for my Baccalauréat. It was an oral exam without any choice. The syllabus was World History from 1914 to present days. The question I got was the following: Had the Allies lost the war, what in your opinion would have been the economic situation today! There was no correct answer, you simply has to analyse what you hd learnt and give your opinion and defend it. Rote learning in this case would have got you nowhere.
This happened over half a century ago and I still remember the question and my answer. That is because we were made to comprehend what we were taught. Maybe the first step to take is to teach our children to understand what they are being taught. That would challenge every child’s independent thinking.
School curricula are being reviewed the world over. Finland seems to have got it right. Please watch this Michael Moore’s film!
