Lessons beyond parents, teachers and textbooks

My first formal visit to rural government schools in the interiors of Karnataka was with a very sincere government officer — way back in 1999. We visited seven schools during the day and there were three remarkable incidents.

The first was where we found a class without a teacher. We were told by the children that the teacher had gone for a “hair cut”.
When we decided to wait for 15-20 minutes, the children told us - the teacher has “not gone for his own hair cut” — but to “give hair cut to others” — in his saloon.

Over the years, I learnt about the fact that the unauthorised absenteeism of teachers across the country is around 17%. It is simple. Just leave an undated leave application with the head master — who would manage in case of an inspection.

The second experience was of a Std IV boy severely pushing the other boy who was trying to show me his notebook. He said something in Kannada and the teacher slapped him in our presence. The teacher told me that the child did not want me to take the notebook of the other boy since he was from the lower caste! I was disturbed.

In the years that followed, I learnt this was a deep rooted phenomenon in thousands of our villages where the lower caste people were required to live outside the village boundaries and hence easily identified by the community. The parents of the upper caste children casually tell their children not to mingle with/ touch the lower-caste children.

The third experience was the meeting with a group of about 35 people consisting of the education functionaries and parents in the village. Out of the total 115 children in the village, only 18 were out of school.

Thus with a great style I appealed to the parents to ensure that these 18 children were enrolled in the school. After an initial silence I was greeted by an angry reaction of the parents. They asked me as to why I wanted the 18 children to suffer the same fate that the 97 children were suffering inside the school — the roof was leaky and unsafe, no teacher, no drinking water and children were simply stuffed in the classroom.

This effectively drove home the point that it was far more important to worry about the 85% children enrolled than the 10-15% children “out of school”. This influenced our agenda at Azim Premji Foundation in a big way in the following years. Over 12 years after that, I find the school scene more or less the same.

Reading a recent news item on how a district collector in Tamil Nadu admitted his daughter in a government school, I and my schoolmate were reminiscing about our own school days.
We used to get strong messages from our parents — do not mix with the minorities. Even the textbooks added fuel to the fire by making us hero — worship historical figures such as Shivaji, Swami Vivekananda and Rana Pratap.

Not so much for their greatness in other aspects — but because they were great Hindu leaders. The teachers gave gory descriptions of how the Mughals raided our country several times and destroyed the temples.

However, as children, we were a secular bunch. We ignored our parents, our teachers and our textbooks to form our equations entirely on individual experiences with classmates. Even my best friend was Mohammad Daruwala.

Sunil Paradeshi was our favourite, not because he was the son of a collector but for the delicious omelettes he shared from his lunch box. Everybody in the class loved Musa, whose parents used to make leather footwear, for his nature.

Almost every day after playing, we used to drink water in Bhanudas' house, though his parents’ profession was cleaning the toilet. His community was described as Bhangi, a term I believe is gone now.

All that we knew was his house was cleaner than ours.
Considering that I and my classmates even today continue to be secular in our approach, I think the children are the key hope for our society if their natural instincts are not seriously altered by the parents, teachers and textbooks.

Dileep Ranjekar is the CEO of Azim Premji Foundation