NN37, May 2006
Special Theme on Education and Training out of Poverty? A Status Report
QUALITY SCHOOLING - ENRICHING THE VILLAGE COMMONS
By Y.A.Padmanabha Rao A.Rama, RIVER-Rishi Valley Education Centre (KFI)
The Rishi Valley Institute for Educational Resources (RIVER) has made an important intervention in improvement of quality of primary schooling in India. We believe quality schooling to be the most important instrument of improving quality of life in rural India, to be conceived as enrichment of the degraded commons both physical and intellectual. Our methods have been developed over a decade and through diverse contexts, and have proven successful, and are now being practiced in upwards of 40,000 schools in different parts of India. We have partnered with Government of India, and provincial governments, and International bodies like UNICEF, USAID, and European Commission for mass up scaling of our methodology. Outside of India, our first successful collaboration is with a programme in the Oromia region in Ethiopia, and several negotiations are afoot with a number of developing countries.We would like to present our conviction, that a community owned and community controlled model of self-sustainable school is an important instrument for lifting the community out of the continuously and increasingly degraded economic and environmental scenario. We believed that commitment to quality primary education is far more important than laws banning child labour. A high drop out rate in developing countries represents a negative value, but what goes unnoticed is the fact, that a high drop out rate is the result of a high enrolment. And in spite of economic pressures, parents continue to enrol their children in schools. Our findings were that the conventional system of primary schooling, itself created failure.
Central to our belief is the idea that each child is in charge of her learning, each teacher a pedagogue, and each parent a school administrator. Educational curricula, policies, plans and goals set in far away cities, by the national or international elite, are by nature alienating, making a child lose pride, in her own culture and mother tongue. Those who fail in the system are condemned and those successful alienated from their contexts. Elegant economic models of employment in developing countries have long back made clear that creation of employment opportunities in the urban sector is no solution to the rural unemployment problem and in fact, only ends up accentuating it. The only other alternative, then, is in the creation of non-farm work opportunities within the rural sector itself The rural non-farm sector covers a whole spectrum of activities, from gathering forest products to handloom weaving. Unable to look upon these occupations in a creative spirit, traditional livelihoods hold little appeal for the educated young men and women from our villages. The present educational system bears some responsibility for alienating rural youth from their backgrounds, so that instead of imaginative engagement with their community's needs they turn to gambling and liquor, and in more impoverished states, to violence.
Our model is based on the continuous and progressive decentralization and localization of education, as opposed to the globalising and homogenizing forces currently in vogue. We believe the only successful model of education to be that, which allows diversity to flourish, among children, communities, teachers, and nations. Basic education or imparting reading and writing skills in a child-friendly environment, we believe, is a necessary but insufficient condition for adjudicating quality. The term is ambiguous; it can be interpreted differently in different contexts, especially in an overpopulated country like India, where education holds out the promise of growth to the organised urban sector, but which also has long established village settlements with their own knowledge systems and traditions that are largely neglected, and where livelihoods count more than jobs. We don't believe that educational norms implied by the use of the word ?quality' ought to be viewed exclusively through the framework of job creation, even if science and information technology are added on at higher stages as basic needs of education.