Editorial

Thinking with you
Reflecting Together

Tokrala- That was the village we were headed to. As a part of the campaign for enrolling the girl child called Kanya Kelavani, I was scheduled to reach this village of Limdi Taluka in Surendranagar district at eight in the morning.

After a traditional welcome of vermilion and rice which had almost begun to look and feel like a chore accompanied by the sound of drums which sounded like a bland band with no life in them, I was ushered to a makeshift stage to witness a program presented by the school students. While the students, teachers and all that makes a school seemed to be there, a thick, heavy blanket of lifelessness hung heavily on the school in its entirety!

As the welcome song and dance was presented by the students who seemed to have internalised the meaning of the phrase ‘poker faced’ rather early in life, my eyes caught a young lad of seven or eight, also a part of this group.
With auburn, dry, unkempt hair and a jet black complexion, he wore a parrot green shirt with no buttons but one. I could distinctly see a choice point: one could choose a less risky, beaten, staid path by witnessing the program, voice the rhetoric about cent percent enrolment and the need to enrol all kids, collect all the data required or mandated and move on. The other path beckoned me: could something be done to pour some life into this ‘school-scape’ sans life!!!

Not very clear about the how and what, I nevertheless decided to try, understanding that this may have fallen flat and made the school scape even more lifeless!

Signalling to the Principal, I looked into his eyes, smiled and asked if he knew how to sew. His eyes brightened and he replied with pride in the affirmative. Pulling out the sewing kit from my handbag, I offered him a needle, thread and a button, asking him to call the student with the parrot green shirt and stitch the button.

Standing right in front, in full view of the audience, he stitched the button and sent the child back to the dance. I suddenly felt the atmosphere and the “emotionosphere” of the school changing palpably. With a bright smile, Jadhavbhai returned the needle to me.

Those few moments of demonstration, I thought, was a huge stride in education for the kids, their teachers and the village folk assembled there. It was almost a permanent button stitched in their minds- a button that symbolised a lesson by their Principal, in sensitivity, a lesson that no work is too small a lesson that small acts can forge great bonds.

Incidentally, a recent study by Kremer et al in the Journal of the European Economic Association shows that teacher absence in Government Elementary Schools is to the tune of 17% as against the average for twenty states of the country which is nearly 25%. The teacher absenteeism is lowest in Maharashtra at 14.6% and maximum in Jharkhand at 41.9%. While this may seem marginally encouraging for Gujarat, this is no reason to be complacent. What is more interesting is that the study, states that “With one in four government primary school teachers absent on a given day, and only one in two actually teaching, India is wasting a considerable share of its education budget, and missing an opportunity to educate its children.”

For if we can put in place the necessary systems of community based monitoring and social auditing to improve their physical presence and real presence in scools, only then can there be a quantum leap in the quantity and quality of education in schools. But equally and perhaps, more importantly, if the teachers can really connect to students, we can truly transform schools.
-Smt. Jayanti S. Ravi