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** ** Hum aur hamaare bacche quota ke baare mein sochte bhi nahin hain Here, literacy is unimportant 22 Jun 2008, 0011 hrs IST, Joeanna Rebello,TNN " Quota! Hum aur hamaare bacche quota ke baare mein sochte bhi nahin hain ," says Kantibhai Vasava with part resignation, all humour. "Our children don't even survive school, so how will they make it to the quota lines of college?" Vasava is a tribal from South Gujarat. He is presently squatting with two dozen tribal brethren on the floorboards of an idea that has begun changing their lives. Call it education. Situate it on a 10-acre campus and identify it as a school. Usher tribal children in,to stay, and categorise it as a residential school. Two years ago the Vasant Niwasi Shala (that name may just change rural education as we know it) was accommodated within the brick-knitted complex of the Adivasi Academy, a research centre of Bhasha, a non-profit organisation pivoted on adivasi concerns. The school could go two ways-either serve as a conduit to good government schools or a preparatory ground for state-level exams. Situated in the eastern tribal belt of Gujarat, in a village called Tejgadh, the school is backed by a statuesque hill called Koraj and circled by fields of future corn. This is a utopia made more ideal by the fact that it throws all rules out of its indigo window. The children decide what they want to wear, whether they'd rather have shoes or slippers (they opt for slippers-easier to kick off), and the vote even extends to their attendance of 'class'-an informal congress helmed by a teacher who could be holding forth on the lawn or in the gazebos or underneath a Saptaparani tree. The traditional age-based stratification of students gives way to mixed migration, so children, no matter the age, can sit in with any teacher, on any subject, and up and leave, should something else, like the on-site tactile museum of tribal culture or the 27,000-strong library, for example, arrest their attention. Because there is no punishment, there is no crime. The syllabus is an improbable grouping of nature studies, tribal culture, language and history, art and craft, dance and music, drama and farming. This is the empirical portion of their education that receives no attention in government schools, and one that is valiantly working to reinstate the children's fast-falling indigenous identity. However, the aim of this schooling is not just to confine tribal children to a local ambit but to also acquaint them with wider disciplines. So maths, science, geography, languages, and social sciences are also co-opted into the programme; not rendered in formulaic inscriptions, but through audio-visual engagements that administer knowledge first, characters later. The construct of this non-formal, unorthodox model of education had its cornerstone formally laid in the mind of Ganesh Devy-litterateur, freewheeler and social reformist-in 2004. This was when, via an article in Little Magazine, he critically examined the net worth of the script in the index of learning. "Scripts have nothing to do with knowledge," he held. "They have been an organised means, by the state, of institutionalising language. Many tribals have no coded equivalent of their language, but they are no less intelligent than 'literate' individuals. Unfortunately illiteracy is equated with ignorance and this is a social stigma many tribals are branded with. How do we remove this stigma? Through a system of education that begins with learning instead of character recognition. One problem with writing is it divides reason from image. A unified focus on learning is arrived at if scripts are avoided for a while." And so scripts enter this school unhurriedly. The knowledge of things inspires gradually a curiosity to spell them. "Unlike most schools where learning is almost immediately imposed through written characters, here a student learns to write as late as six months into his residence, at his own pace," offers Vasant Rathwa, school programme coordinator. "And unlike village schools, where the uniform medium of instruction is Gujarati and students who speak tribal dialects lose out, here, teachers speak Gujarati, Hindi, and also Rathwi and Dungri Bhili, the two primary languages of these children. A software we have even teaches them to read English phonetically; and excited about 'speaking' the language, they then want to learn its meaning." Between the age of six and 14 they come, with little or no experience of schooling, from villages where government schools are only ornamental proof of policy, and teachers keep embellished attendance records to hurry salary increments. "The success rate of tribal children from government schools is very low," ventures Sonal Baxi, academic coordinator at Bhasha. "And so they remain in an unremitting cycle of illiteracy and migration to cities as cheap labour, taking their children with them. Their defence is 'What's the use of education?' This is why it took us almost a month to convince them to send their children to our school, despite admission being free. At first we had 45 students, and now, 60." There is no upper limit, they'll admit all who come. But the school's success is not its robust roll call, and not even in the citation (Centre of Excellence) the academy received from the ministry of tribal affairs this year. It isn't the regard it gained in the sight of the district primary education department that dispatched 50 of its coordinators to the academy to be oriented in tribal culture and language complexities. In fact, its singular success is a narrow failure. This April, 35 students sat for the 6th-standard entrance exam to the government-run Eklayva model residential schools. "Their cut-off percentage was 60 and one of our students almost made it with 59 per cent... after only two years of schooling," says Devy. "And when I prove that our children can compete equally with state-level students, I will go to the ministry of education, campaign for this model and demand that the number of school years be reduced as well. My aim, after all, is not just to educate a small number of tribals but to improve the education system on the whole." http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-3152492,prtpage-1.cms ** <http://www.jharkhand.org.in/contact.htm> [image: Join Jharkhand Network]<http://www.jharkhand.org.in/jharkhand_flier.pdf> Click on pic to download this Jharkhand Flier . * News TV <http://www.indian-tv.blogspot.com/> Blog <http://www.jharkhand.org.in/blog> Photo <http://www.jharkhand.org.in/photo> Music <http://www.jharkhandi.org/music.htm> Video <http://www.jharkhandi.org/video.htm> Live Chat <http://www.jharkhand.org.in/live> Directory <http://www.jharkhand.org.in/directory> Testimonials <http://www.jharkhand.org.in/directory> Forum <http://yahoogroups.com/group/jharkhand> Contact <http://www.jharkhand.org.in/contact.htm> . * -- Jharkhand News [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jharkhand Online Network www.jharkhand.org.in/news
