The Accidental Activist :: Venita Coelho One Nation Reading ... but are we in Goa?
A couple of years ago I published a children's book. That led me to being a part of 'One Nation Reading'. Every year my publisher, Scholastic India, has its authors go to schools and societies for underprivileged children and read. For every reading that you do, Scholastic makes a generous gift of books. I read at Shantiniketan at Assagão, at Care and Compassion center in Panjim, and for BeBook, the library for underprivileged children. Each of these was astounded to received 18 cartons of books each. It's a fantastic effort and I am very happy to be part of it. My first encounter with reading and Scholastic came when my book was launched. As an effort to promote it, Scholastic sent me on a reading tour of various schools in Goa. The bigger city schools were more or less on the same level of education as Mumbai ones. But when I started reading to village schools I was in for a severe shock. The standard of education was appalling. While my book was aimed at children of Class Four and Five, in villages I was reading to students of Class Eight and Nine and having them stare at me in blank incomprehension. Even more terrifying was the fact that teachers had great difficulty following what I was saying. I finished my reading tour a very worried person. A friend of mine with no illusions said "Education is the greatest fraud we are practicing on the poor. We educate them enough to have them despise being labourers and farmers. But we don't educate them enough to make them fit to get a job." Poor parents across India are sacrificing a lot to send their children to school. Their children emerge from the system with such an awful education that they will never be able to get ahead in the competitive world. An education that isn't good enough is actually a handicap. You no longer belong to your roots, nor do you have the passport to another level of life. I am not the only one concerned about the gap. Projects are being set up across India to address this, and the Scholastic 'One Nation Reading' is part of the effort. But this time around there was a lesson to be learned about how blinkered we are in the solutions that we offer. The Scholastic 'Reading Kit' came with a booklet filled with short stories and poems by their authors. I chose a few to read out. The first one was about how the Giraffe got it's long neck. The kids loved the sound effects and the underdog story but there was one problem -- no one had any idea what a giraffe was. I moved onto Rumpelstiltskin -- to be met with more blank stares. I desperately searched my Hindi vocabulary for equivalents of "spindle", "millers daughter" and "straw". Gandhi's charka ended up featuring in the story. My last piece was a delightful little poem that explained that it was bored to death of Lochinvar, Robert Frost, and Highway men. I had barely got past four lines when I realised that this too came out of such a convent educated frame of reference that my grass roots audience had no idea of what I was talking about. And there lies the problem with the solutions. Too often we offer solutions that come out of our experience, our background, and our frame of reference. We are imposing our idea of education upon people who have no way of connecting with what we are talking about. And our convent education that we are so proud of was designed by the British primarily to churn out clerks for the empire. They didn"t wish to teach initiative, real thinking, or pride in culture and heritage -- all of it could lead to the ruled turning around to question the rulers. Instead of radically redesigning the syllabus when we gained independence we carried on a system that closed minds rather than opened them. A friend of mine who was instrumental in pioneering call centres in India expressed his frustration. "Goa is the perfect place to set up call centres. But amazingly -- Goans speak awful English. Their education is so poor that I would end up having to hire outsiders." When people complain that Goans never get jobs in Goa, a large part of the blame lies with the awful standard of education that is being handed out. I have encountered it first hand and I really think this is a problem that needs to be tackled on a war footing -- with solutions tailored to reality. Otherwise the only kind of job a Goan will be capable of getting will be a menial one. When one nation reads together, our children will be struggling to keep up. Venita Coelho writes her Accidental Activist column for the Herald, Goa. -- 'You must be the change you want to see in the world' - Gandhi The author is based at Casa Coelho, Bambordem, Moira Goa PIN 403507 Phone +91-9867166057 or +91-832-2470861