Overcoming limitations - Baha’i-inspired village schools in India
Children at New Ideal Academy in the Kakori Block, north of Lucknow
What do you do if you are a parent living in a village in a country where many state-run schools are appallingly bad? Do you just accept that your child might leave school without being able to count? Or do you hope that some good hearted people will set up a school in your village?
Well, the people in eight villages in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh are in luck. Eight people - six of them in their 20s - have set up village schools with the minimum of resources. As this story on the Bahá’í World News Service site says:
Most of them set up their community schools by seeking the help of the villagers for land and basic furniture and by employing educated but unemployed rural youth as teachers. In return, they promise to provide good overall education for very modest fee (for a high school student, for example, it might be 50 rupees, or US$1.25, a month).
They are doing this with the support of the Foundation for Advancement of Science (FAS), a Bahá’í-inspired NGO based in Lucknow, State Capital of Uttar Pradesh.
Bahá’í founders
Left: Ram Vilas Pal; Right: Vinod Kumar Yadav (right), founder of Glory Public School
The schools’ founders are not necessarily the kind of people one would expect to take on the challenge of educating village children. The FAS looked for educated but unemployed Bahá’í youth in the villages around Lucknow with motivation and perseverance.
Ram Vilas Pal, for example, is a TV technician. He set up the Nine Point School in Dasdoi. Brajesh Kumar, on the other hand, has a master’s degree in education. He could have had a comfortable job in the city but chose to return to his village:
I could have done many other things that would give me more money and involved less effort. But here I am doing something not for myself but for the village as a whole by bringing about moral, social, economic, and intellectual change.
Ram and Brajesh and the others are committed to transformation through education and want to achieve more than merely reproduce what is already available in other schools. Says Brajesh Kumar:
Our whole reason for starting these schools was not just to provide better quality of the same thing that is available everywhere but also to give something new and much-needed in the form of moral education.
This is proving popular with parents, who see their children developing moral character as well as learning to read, do maths and so on.
Teaching values
The need for mutual respect and equality is taught throughout the schools. The arts are proving particularly effective in helping childrren learn these values.
Schools have to be quite assertive in dealing with discrimination against girl children. Women do not traditionally leave the home in these villages and they certainly have not been receiving any education.
Ram Vilas Pal explains how he tackles this particular problem:
We visit the homes of parents in the village and talk to them about the importance of sending their daughters and not just their sons to school. And after a period of patient counseling, they understand.
Challenges facing schools
A big challenge for these schools’ founders is to keep their schools profitable in poor villages. They also have to face India’s social problems, such caste discrimination and gender inequality. However, with patience and persistence these problems can be overcome, and FAS believes the schools can bring about real change in their villages.
Future development
FAS plans to find another 20 “quiet revolutionaries” to set up village schools in Uttar Pradesh.
Read the whole exciting story here.
All photographs © Arash Vafa Fazli
Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, India, Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow, education, schools, village, Foundation for Advancement of Science, morals, values
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