Article on importance of philosophy in education

The VC of Azim Premji University in this article bats for the fundamental importance of philosophy in enhancing the quality of our education system. Can't agree more with him

A tale on culture and language issues in our classrooms

Came across this story that was shared in one of the forums by Yogendar Dutt

The Butterfly In The Tiger's Stomach  - from the Marathi story by Mohan Nanavre

I am Mohan. Let me tell you the story of a little boy called Mhowan.

Mhowan's grandmother was illiterate. She used to go to Market Yard and buy nearly-rotten vegetables. She would set out her little shop on the roadside in Bhokarwadi, and sell these. The people of Bhokarwadi were all very poor. They were masons, porters, daily wage earners. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, and all they could afford was the stuff Mhowan's grandmother sold. But it did not suffice to make ends meet. So Mhowan's mother used to sweep the pavements and streets outside shops and restaurants. She would sort out the waste worth selling, and make a bit of money. When she got a bit of cash, she would buy Mhowan a toffee.

Both mother and grandmother adored the fatherless little boy. But both were illiterate themselves, and were busy all day, slogging to fill their stomachs -- sending Mhowan to school was not something they even considered.

Mhowan was now around eight. He used to trail along behind his mother as she swept the streets. His mother had a cup tied up in her sari. After she swept the street outside a restaurant the owner would pour some tea into the cracked cup. She would call out to Mhowan playing nearby, and share the tea and a biscuit with him.

Many days passed in this manner. But suddenly, one morning, grandma took Mhowan to the Bhokarwadi school. She stood outside and called out to the teacher. "O Master, take this kid into your school. Write his name down. Come on, write! Mhowan is his name." The master looked doubtfully at the boy, his torn clothes, his dirty face and hands, his unwashed body.

"Do you ever bathe the child?" he asked.

"He hates bathing," said grandma, laughing. "Take him into school, he may become smarter." Turning to Mhowan, she told him, "Okay now, don't be naughty and bother the teacher. When you come home, mi chunchuni, chaani dutwaila deel."

The teacher could make nothing of all this. How could he? It was not his language. It was the language of the poor people.

Before she came to the city, Mhowan's grandmother lived in a village. They were very poor there too. They tried to fill their stomachs with begging or doing odd jobs. Sometimes, when they were very hungry, her father and brothers used to steal corn or grain from the fields -- it was only to feed a hungry family, but if they were caught they were beaten up like criminals. To communicate with each other without others understanding them, their community had developed their own special dialect. And that was the dialect grandma spoke now. What she said was, “When you come home, I will make you a yummy dish of mutton.” Mohan got it, of course, but the teacher did not.

So Mhowan began school. He had joined school much later than the other boys, so he was older and larger than his classmates. The teacher put him on the last bench. The backbenchers were a rowdy lot, constantly fooling around, teasing each other. But when they were caught, it was Mhowan who got a thrashing, because he looked the biggest. So a beating every day became a regular thing. Gadekar teacher was always angry. She used to rap Mhowan's knuckles every day. Mhowan's homework was never done; there was no place to study in his house. In the wasti where he lived, fights were breaking out all the time, and Mhowan could not bear to miss the fun. And his mother and grandmother could not help him. They could not even understand the pictures in his books, leave alone the text! So homework never got done, and that added to the beatings.

Mhowan's fingers hurt with the knuckle raps. They hurt so much that he could not even break the dry bhakri that his mother had left for him in a pan. But Mhowan's world had become opened wonderfully since he joined school. The pictures in his books and on the walls of his room filled his days with colour and his nights with dreams. When Gadekar teacher beat him, he used to look at the pictures on the walls – the peacock strutting with his beautiful tail, the giraffe with his long neck, the striped tiger, the colourful butterfly. Every day a beating and every night a new dream.

Every year on September 5, the school celebrated Teachers' Day. At the morning prayers, the headmaster told them, "Every day the teachers ask you questions. On Teachers' Day, you children will get to ask them questions." Mhowan wanted to do something on that day that would win over Gadekar teacher, and make her stop beating him. But what? The answer came from a dream.

One day he came home after an exhausting day, aching from the beatings, tired and hungry, and fell asleep without eating anything. The tiger from the pictures began to prowl in his dreams. The tiger was hungry. He pushed his face into the empty vessels in the kitchen, and turned them over angrily. All he found was some stale stinking bhakri. Well, how could he eat that? He was a tiger after all, even if in a dream! Finally he saw the picture of the butterfly. He swallowed it in one gulp.

The butterfly was still alive and began to flutter around in the tiger's empty stomach. The tiger began to giggle. He rolled about laughing and called out, "Stop, stop! You are tickling me to death!"

"Well," said the butterfly, "You had better sneeze me out, or I will surely tickle you to death." So the tiger gave a mighty sneeze, and out flew the pesky butterfly.

Mohan woke up with a sneeze, to find his grandma tickling his nose to wake him up. The dream gave him an idea. How could he tickle his teacher and make her release him from his daily beatings? A plan began to form.

On Teachers' Day, children asked questions like, "Why did you become a teacher?" or, "How did Shivaji teach the monitor lizard to climb the fort walls?"

But Mhowan asked Gadekar bai, "Tumhi karpati dutawli ka?" The other children began to giggle. The teacher looked blank. "Tumhala bailadi nanwat thikti ka?" Mhowan went on. The giggles began to grow louder. The children were mostly from Mhowan's community, and they knew what he was saying, even if the teacher did not.

"Kachra dhundna pudaal ka naanwat?" was Mhowan's next question, and the class grew a little quiet at this.

"Teacher, this is the language of my family. My grandfather, and even his father, spoke this language. I just wanted you to hear it. What I asked you was, -- did you eat your bhakri? Do you like mutton? And lastly, is gathering garbage good or bad?

Gadekar bai was silent for a while. In fact she was shocked. How could she say if gathering garbage was good or bad, when Mhowan's mother did it for a living? And now she understood why his homework was always undone. From that day on, Mhowan did not get a thrashing. His teacher understood him a little more. She appreciated the fact that he even knew a language that she did not.

The years went by, and Mhowan dropped out of school. He sold vegetables, worked as a doorman, began to buy and sell waste materials. Slowly the dreams faded away. He worked hard all day, hoping for a better tomorrow, but dreams don’t come when you call, and neither do they always come true.

I am Mohan. When I think about Mhowan's school days, I think, a butterfly flew into a tiger's stomach, and managed to escape. But what if the butterfly had got plenty of good education? Where would he have been now? He would have lived as Babasaheb Ambedkar exhorted us to – “Get Educated, Get Organised, Struggle against oppression." Even today, children in Bhokarwadi are dropping out of school and starting to work to help the family. When I think about them, I feel miserable. Then I tell myself Mhowan's story. That's why I am telling it to you.

Language issues

I am reading the book 'Language Conflict and National Development' by Jyotirindra Das Gupta. The role of language in drawing lines across population and its role in politics is as alive as probably it was several decades back. The genesis of this langauge conflict and the key aspects of what went earlier can to an extent help in understanding the popular sentiments of today. This is one of the areas of interest that I have today along with other scientific and sociological aspects pertaining to language development. I am thankful to Prof Rajesh and TISS which decided to choose the course on 'Language Mind and Society' in our curriculum on Education. Never realized that linguistics was such a deep aspect worth multi dimensional study.

History is fascinating as it is one way in which one can interpret the present by going well past today and then coming back to the present. The interesting part is that issues of language which are so fundamental to the modern fabric of our society are very easily ignored in our history books at school level for the very fact that these cupboards store within them most volatile skeletons that the powers that be would not want to be tampered with.

Most political parties have chinks in their armour and meticulously ensure that history books are written in most neutral ways possible without actually giving an opportunity for the study to really understand who played the key role in national development or its disruption.
In the absence of that, the perception of youth on these crucial matters is shaped mostly by popular opinion and feelings than any reasoned understanding. And both of them are of little value in helping us interpret things well enough.

Sharing a passage on the reasons for resentment of Southern states towards Hindi

"The opposition to Hindi found its strongest political expression in southern states, especially in Madras. In these states there had been a long tradition of suspician against the North. Even during the national movement, political leaders from the North were sometimes treaded as cultural outsiders in the South. For many leaders of the Dravidian movement, the North symbolized a potential source of Aryan domination. In part this was tied in with the anti-Brahmin resentment expressed by the non-Brahmin leaders of the Dravidian movement in South India. .............. It is not difficult to imagine why the identification of the southern Brahmins with Sanskritic culture, and of the latter with the Aryan symbolism evoked by the northern leaders, could attain a unique symbolic capability for political mobilization of the masses in the South. The northern leaders themselves were largely responsible for generating this resentment, if not consciously, at least by virtue of their actions.

As we have seen before, political mass mobilization in the North was substantially facilitated by the actions of many Hindu symbols. Phrases like Arya Samaj, Arya Sanskriti, Arya Bhasha, Arya Lipi- referring to the greatness of Hindu organization, culture, language and script respectively- were extensively used, not only by the Hindu communal leaders bu also by many of the leading lights of the Congress organization in North India, especially in UP and Punjab. Some of the national leaders like Tilak and Lajpat Rai defended the cause of Hindi and Deva Nagari by claiming that these were sacred Aryan inheritances. It was precisely the use of these Aryan symbols which substantially contributed to the alienation of Muslims. These Hindu leaders weighed this loss against the great mobilizational capacity of these symbols among the Hiindu masses. What they failed to see was the power of the Aryan symbols to alientate southern Hindus. They failed to develop a sensitivity to the idea that what is functional for mobilization in the North may be dysfunctional for communal unity in the North as well as for national unity in general."


Most of the ideas that I read in the book really revealed to me the gross errors that were done in the name of language based nationalistic movement initiatives that were started even before the independence.

The baggage of the errors still continue to haunt our present...

Skill development center experience at Gujarat Ambuja

Last week, my work took me to Saurashtra area of Gujarat and I covered three districts in a span of 4 days. It is the coastal line of Gujarat where the Trust has been working towards reducing the impact of salinity ingress, which is the impact of reduction in soil fertility on account of salt water percolating into agricultural land. The visit was done to understand the work being done by few of the organizations in that area towards skill development of youth. It is to be understood that skill development of youth is crucial both for ensuring that there is availability of trained human resource for the economic growth and secondly, in the absence of options for working, the likelihood of turning the demographic dividend into liability looms large.

The problem statement reads thus 'Nearly 80% of new entrants to the workforce in India have no opportunity for skill training. Against 12.8 million new entrants to the workforce per annum, and a target of skilling 500 million people by 2022, the existing capacity is to train only 3.1 million per annum. How will this divide be bridged in a short time?' [from ORF newsletter on skill development]

Various initiatives have been taken by the Central government and also by some specific state government to trigger useful work in this domain. I felt specifically about the experience of one of these visits that i made recently to the magnificant township of Gujarat Ambuja Cement in Ambujanagar, Kodinar taluka in Junagadh district. The work done by the organization in the area of agriculture is something that needs to be seen to be believed in a geography that has been under drought. The water management has been amazing along with efforts in the area of increasing the productivity of land.

view from Gujarat Ambuja township

The organization is spread out of several states and other than its chief business of manufacturing cement, it also runs skill development centers through its foundation 'Ambuja Cement Foundation'. The centers are termed SEDI- Skill and Entrepreneurship Development Center. There are 17 such centers across various states in total.

Skill development center at Kodinar

Inorder to understand the magnitude of the problem and the need for such interventions, one has to go to those geographies where you have youth with no hope for dependence on agriculture based livelihood and who have dropped off from mainstream formal education for various reasons viz. financial problems at home, lack of quality of education and hence no interest in continuing, inability to see future in the flow of formal education etc.Lot of these youth enter the cities and join menial work and end up in living a dissatisfied life marked with drudgery.

Some of the interesting aspects that I learnt from the coordinator of this center- who according to me was really well suited for the role which entails labouriously working with the grassroot people in a far flung rural area Kodinar. He mentioned that he was one of the top 5 master trainers in Gujarat Government in the area of Natural Resource Management and his friends were highly sceptical when he chose to shift to this place all the way from Ahmedabad (an important city for both business and cultural center in Gujarat).  This was something that he answered when i asked him specifically about his own background in this domain of work.


Some of the interesting points:

1. The target group comprises of students whose parents must mostly be either not holding any agricultural land and would be involved as labour in other land owners farms. This ensures that the students who come to them are actually deserving and hence would value the inputs being given.
2. The engagement with community was fundamental to get students since how do you distinguish yourself amongst 20 other private services providers whose ads they were seeing every day. They went ahead and actually discussed their dream with the villagers on what was their aspiration about their youth that they would want fulfilled. On learning that they wanted to have a good school in their vicinity and that it couldn't get done for some reason, they motivated them with supporting the foundation with their own efforts to build a skill development school. So people pitched in with their skills on electrical fitting, flooring etc. Thus the cost of building the center was significantly brought down and more importantly, there was a sense of ownership amongst the community. These are very sensitive conversations and the challenge can't actually be explained through words. This is a complete leadership challenge according to me since you are trying to offer something to a group who has no inkling of what work being agriculture actually is.
3. The curriculum was prepared after due diligence of studying the existing course material available through ITIs and NCVT and realizing that they are much behind the modern technology that is in requirement. The need was assessed by visiting various organizations and understanding the technologies and practices being used by them. At present they run courses on Electrical works, welding, nursing, BPO entrance training etc.
4. The trainers who were brought in were people who had spent significant years in that discipline. It was interesting to note that they didn't go for people who wanted to train because they didn't have any better option. They thought in vocational training, the best people would always want to be in practise and hence all their trainers are people who either work in Ambuja plant or people who retired after significant services given in the areas like nursing etc from outside. The trainers are experts in their domains and are more practioners than teachers and hence most of their inputs are actually given through working on live models.

5.The training is done by starting with videos as against showing them text from books as they realize that these are students who have not had a great time with books and thats one reason they had to drop off. So better start with methods that they would be more comfortable with. The batches are divided keeping in view the need to optimize the availability of both machines and classrooms and understanding how do you make the best of the limited resources. Gujaratis as a community would probably be the best in India in this capacity as they have proven this in various business spheres.

Hands on training to the students. Trainer standing to the left

 The center has tied up with Gujarat Government modular skill development program scheme and hence students are able to get one certificate from the center, one from the government (after formal assessment) and a marksheet at the end of it. The courses have reasonable demand from the market since placement is given key priority and they see to it that students who actually go from rural to urban centers are able to adjust to the significantly different environment that they find in the cities. It is to be noted that these youngsters get employed for around 8000 to 11000 Rs per month and they are taught how to manage their financials in these compensation levels and also ensure that they are able to develop their skills further so that their career growth is secured. At present over 6500 students are able to complete these short term courses every year.
The institute also emphasizes on students entering through proper competitive process so that they are able to value the job that they get at the end of it. There is significant effort made to ensure that students develop the attributes of communication, team work, work ethics etc,which are fundamental and can't actually be taught through classroom based methods. In the image below, we can see students actually coming and speaking for a minute or two on what was the interesting thing that they learnt in the last one month. This is done every day before starting the sessions so that students get to learn to speak in an open forum in English.

Student coming and expressing his key learnings in the month in front of the whole group during morning assembly

It is to be noted that since they also train girls to become nurses, they have to take added care when ensuring their employment in urban centers. There are cases of harrassment of girls in private hospitals and hence due interest is taken to validate the credentials of the hospital and atleast two nurses are sent in one hospital. They have provided all contact details for close follow up.

I really liked the well grounded and thought through approach that the organization had adopted and considering the difficulty in starting vocational training for the manufacturing sector particularly in rural centers, i think this was a promising story. The coordinator was right in expressing that one may really not get to understand the core challenges of running such centers by referring to secondary reports alone..

Taking science to masses

Arvind Gupta is no less than a magician. In a world where the price of toys are shooting out of the roof, here comes an engineer having the capacity to make science enjoyable by making scientists out of municipal school kids.

Barefoot College talk by Bunker Roy.

A wonderful talk by Bunker Roy on empowerment of village folks through the concept of barefoot college. Great talk. Hats off to these people who see villagers as equals and have the grit to enhance the quality of their lives. It calls for Himalayan conviction and self belief.

Zindagi roz hamari class leti hai

A beautiful commerical from Britannia but aptly covers the idea of 'School of Life'

Dismal performance of aspiring teachers

National Council of Teacher education at the directive of Ministry of HRD conducted a national wide Teacher eligibility test that is going to be mandatory for any teacher wanting to join a government or a private school going ahead. The results of this test which was conducted this year through CBSE in June this year was declared last week. To say the least, the findings are highly discouraging. Amongst the over 7.15 lakh candidates who gave that test, barely 14% were able to get through.

At the outset, we need to laud the government for hitting the problem at the right end by revealing to itself and everyone around, the yawning gap of quality of teachers. It also throws up a lot of questions in parallel.

With the Right to Education getting included as a Fundamental Right, if we don’t have teachers to translate that legitimate right into a reality then what does it leave us to feel elated about.  RTE opens up a need for 6.5 lakh teachers for its successful implementation. And it is just one of the several complex requirements that it gives way to. Teacher quality is one of the fundamental pre-requisites for ensuring that a school delivers. Thus if this Act has to see the light of the day in both letter and spirit, it would require a systemic view to the problems that plague our education system- starting with the issue of addressing the challenge of getting teachers who can deliver followed with aspects of resources, enrolment, reducing drop-outs, incentives, public private partnership etc.

Secondly, we need to have requisite checks and balances to evaluate the effectiveness of the teacher training programs. A society which is transforming gradually into a knowledge centric economy has to understand these aspects from the very core. This becomes all the more important in an environment where unlike Finland and Singapore, teaching as a profession (particularly in primary and secondary levels) in India doesn’t attract huge number of bright minds. And thus the nature of intervention and its currency with regards to changing times has to factor in this reality.

Thirdly, this test was not meant for the existing teachers who are already on the job so we can’t say how they would have fared. But still we can rationally presume that there may be a significant number of teachers who would have not fit the bill. If teachers who are not fit to qualify such an exam are assessing students and their learning, what is the credibility of those assessments? How many a tender minds must they be labeling incorrectly to thwart their learning journey for long..

Fourthly, on one hand there is our growing economy with its ever increasing need for skilled people and on the supply side at the farthest end we have teachers who are not in a position to teach children.  Does that imply that more and more students would end up in either being under-employed with no idea of what their strengths are or else seek short term vocational courses to atleast be fit enough to earn their bread and butter. Last year Aspiring minds managed to hog front page news http://www.aspiringminds.in/news_items/Aspiring_Minds_employability_report.html by coming up with the startling finding that just 18% of our tech students are fit for IT jobs.

Another problem that this result gives way is the fact that it further convolutes the debate on whether the system is weak or is it that we don’t have the right teachers to work within the system which may or may not be really so weak.

The only silver lining to this outcome is probably the fact that it should encourage our institutes and aspiring teachers to introspect and try harder going ahead so that they are able to shoulder the responsibility which the entire country is expecting them to do today.  Build a truly powerful nation. 

Premji foundation's audacious goals

Education sector is experiencing interesting changes. Several NGOs are putting in efforts to bring about change in the education sector by approaching the problem in ways they deem appropriate. Some of these efforts have potential to be scaled up while some others may not be able to run too far.

As the country meets the challenge of poor quality education posed by the 21st century economic growth of the country, we realize that the solutions sought would need to come from BHAG (big hairy audacious goals) the way Jim Collins puts in his book- Good to Great.


Amongst the players in NGOs who are really trying to make an impact at a large level, the Azim Premji foundation comes across as a clear player to be taken really seriously. Check this out.

This group is starting a university to develop teachers who can take the challenge of educating the less privileged who pose a unique plethora of issues to grapple with both for the educators and also for the administrators. This foundation which consciously avoided getting into the implementation mode of NGOs and focussed more on trying to influence policy at the State level. This decision of starting an education university is a distillation of the efforts gone in research and deliberation with various experts both from the government and outside it.Their understanding (which looks fairly appropriate) is that without good teachers we can't move much further in this direction.

It is getting more and more evident that the solution will not come from the HRD Ministry till we don't have the requisite political will (though Kapil Sibal is trying really hard) across all levels of education delivery. The challenge comes mainly from the fact that education policy unlike infrastructure development doesn't get translated in the same vein in which it is planned out mainly because of the nature of this service. Its not like you budget for 10 million vaccinations and you role it out and get polio eradicated. Making a person think and act responsibly is a far too complex a challenge. A paucity of funds at either the state or center level can downrail the best of the plans drafted at the Yojna Bhavan.

Thus projects which are really ambitious and which are backed by really able people can probably bring about impact much faster than the pace that we are otherwise used to.

Best wishes to this foundation for its audacity.

For further views on education you can check out my other blog