Friday 6 November 2020

Villages need livlihoods. Not schools.

 


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There are posts celebrating schooling in villages. My heart aches. Schooling every potter and weaver and farmers away from their vast traditions is a defeat and no victory.
It is the indicator of the destructions of diverse learnings and strengths and existances. And the establishment of the monopoly of the Schooled.
When a farmer, an adivasi deeply learned in the lore of the forests, desires his children to learn reading, writing and go to colleges and start anew in the other world, losing every vast inherited wisdom and starting anew as a first generation learner - then I see the utter defeat of my dreams, and the end of my imaginings.

Subramani Reddy
That is the deepest damage that is being done today.
In the name of making your life better through 'education' which they think is possible only in the schools where they control.
Forests and villages and elders who help their children understand how to lead a harmonious and balanced simple life with nature is considered no education.
What else can be more painful than this.


Villages need livlihoods. Not schools.
That schools create livlihoods is the biggest hoax perpetrated on villages.
The village children lose their traditional calling, farming or weaving. They lose the skill, and also all respect for that skill.
The village children also find no space in the white collar world. Posited against privileged children whose very inheritance is that learning, supported by vastly superior schools.
The children are a sacrifice to the holy cow called schooling.
Welcome to my village.

  • Govindaswamy Ganesh
    That's the whole idea .. Of current education system .. To make people loose their native and primitive survival skills and become a dependent .... 
  • Aparna Krishnan
    We have made local skills unsustainable, and today we cannot do anything but school them into a nothingness. A couple of very hard working ones will become a school teacher or a nurse. And those will be showcased, and the implication is that 'hard work' is all that is needed. The games we play are very very devious.


Schools schools urban youth to look down on village youth.
Schools school village youth into look down on themselves.
All schools, alternative, mainstream, green or blue or red.


To proponents to Schooling for All. To all those on the mission of setting up schools in every remote village.
Today my village is full of schooled unemployed. Who also did not master traditional skills as they we busy being schooled.
Is it realistic for a country to aim at tertiary level livlihoods for all ? And none at the primary, secondary levels ?
Or to strengthen the primary and secondary livlihoods and create a parity in value of all livlihoods ?

Arun Rajagopalan
Current day schooling only destroys the skill and makes them fit only to act on instructions fed through so called learning. In case of a person, one who has even worked in an organized unit (say corporate), realizes this at some point in his career, he will have no skills or roots to get back to. He/she becomes redundant blocking the opportubities for next generation employable workforce. In case of older systems, skills were passed on to next generation and the need was always created or exist.
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  • Aparna Krishnan
    Arun Rajagopalan
     imagine India as a country where everyone aspires for a desk job. And is capable of nothing else.
    There's Schooling for you !


If my children could all get good nourishment, if their parents all had rural livlihoods, I would seek no more. They do not need schools. They are having a far more rounded education with crops and cattle and sustainable skills, and elders in a community passing down wisdom and knowlege. They learn nurturing from older children, and all the adults in the community. They learn by nurturing smaller children. They learn that life move in co-operation and camaraderie, not in competition, and self promotion. They can educate the world, were the world open to listening. They can teach the world how to save itself from certian apocalypse today.


A story ...
There was a wise and wonderful community in rural India.
The educated, decided to 'develop' them and give them the basics of health and education.
They were given an allopathic system, which invalidated, before their own eyes, their vast and detailed health practice.
They were given a schooling system which proclaimed and established the supremacy of a certian type of learning - based on reading and writing skills - and rendered worthless before their own eyes their vast and deep knowlege of animals and plants and farming and animal rearing and cures and stories and dances.
A wise and wonderful community lost its sense of worth and value and thereby lost everything.
... When 'the modern-educated', engage with the village people 'the traditionally wise', if we are not aware of their own paradigms, we will only impoverish them.
... It takes long years in a community, to even begin to understand their wisdom and worldview.
Paranthaman Sriramulu, Akanksha Damini Joshi and 12 others
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  • Suraj Kumar
    Hey, you forgot to write about how all these people got an aadhar card, got funded through Jandhan accounts, became Make In India "entrepreneurs" (in their nearest "Smart City") and lived happily ever after!
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  • Chidambaran Subramanian
    I can't wonder, how, at some point, they are partly responsible for their own mess.
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    • Suraj Kumar
      Oh, the "you are a woman so you are also responsible for getting raped" line of thinking?
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    • Chidambaran Subramanian
      No. Please. When the water level started going down, why did they not stop? When the pesticides started harming them, why did they not?
      I am not justifying anything. But the reality is that not everything is forced. All around, everyone wants to make quick money. Even the villagers. That is what has led to the situation today
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    • Aparna Krishnan
      A society has a direction, a goal. When the larger society gets consumerist, monetized, it takes everyone in their wake.
      Our consumption creates waves that entice and drag others along. Giving a damn for the future.

Modern education is leaving whole swathes of rural children unemployable and frustrated. It is a curse. More and better schools is no answer.

"Schooling for all is the answer", they tell me.
What is the question that this answers ?

We need the larger picture of how we want to world to be, and how we want the country to be. The ethics, and the economic framework, and the sustainablility. Into this understanding we design and weave in schooling. If we do that, I suspect it will be very different from what we consider as a school.
Instead there is a 'schooling for all'. There are some debates on the content. And there is a generation of rural children schooled, degreed, and unemployed. There is a generation of upper class children schooled in modern sciences that in final analysis will only serve to strip the earth more and more.

  • Aparna Krishnan
    And 
    Rajiv
    , that is why schooling can never be centrally important for me. We are catching the wrong end of the problem. Or, to be more blunt, we are not even understanding the problem, but are forceing the solution. And I suspect it is because our own class (or may I call it the modern caste ?) superiority is secured only thus.
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  • Palanivelu Rangasamy
    Earth and society are nowhere in the scene as far as the current educational policy is concerned. When I express my feeling about the need to be socially sensitive, people in normal walk of life think that I am making some esoteric talks. In the current existential paradigm, society has become the victim rather than being the beneficiary.
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  • Rajiv Ramnath
    "And I suspect it is because our own class (or may I call it the modern caste ?) superiority is secured only thus.". I disagree. Aspects of the education systems that we have today don't work well not because of some crazed desire for superiority but because the people who implemented these systems didn't know any better. We have to work to improve the system, not try to blow it up.
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    • Aparna Krishnan
      We have institutionalized our learning (reading/writing) as the mainstream skills thro' schooling. Weaving, pottery have fallen by the way. These cannot be 'incorporated' in any meaningful way in schools. Thats waht I meant.




This is why this parody called schooling has to be exposed. There can never be any attempt towards levelling through this process of schooling - the inequities will only widen, as the facilities offered to differing sections are worlds apart, and getting farther apart with the day. There are children in Bada Amda and in my village, and other children going to designer schools in Delhi and Bombay.
Unless we can establish local livlihoods, and local sustainable skills and local economies the war is lost. We will anyway engage in small battles as it allows us to sleep at night with conscience lulled. ... and so i have taught my village children for the last two decades ...



Children have always learnt, and are always learning - whats new. We've put up buildings called schools and say what happens there is learning.
Subtly invalidation all other learning.
In actuality schools only reinforce our power, because our knowlege system is treated as the only valid one by the 'school'.
The skilled farmer and potter and thatcher also buy our message, and feel invalidated.
Comments
Aparna Krishnan A friend objected severely and said that if i dont work to change schools with the passion i try to show, she cannot take me seriously !
Well, it does not matter - i stopped taking myself seriously long long ago. And I dont want to 'change schools'. i want to 'outlaw schools'. But unable to do that, i teach my children and tell them to 'get marks', and help them forget thair vast inherited skills, and become 'nurses' or 'clerks'.
Along with outlawing schools, one needs to build up a society that validates and values all skills equally - the potter's the thatcher's ... And that is the main and only challenge before us. Schools and schooling is neither here nor there,


Schools are the greatest homogenizing weapon. The way to enter communities and invalidate all knowledge except what is promoted within the walls of the school.
Every village. Every tribal hamlet. Every kind of school.
Alternative schools accomodate a little bit of the village s own learnings within the walls. Which while seeming better. Actually only underlines that validation happens only when the school accepts it.
A school is structured to lay waste the identities of communities, their self respect, their integrity. And reinforce the dominant system. In complete ways.
Been there, seen that, seeing that ...


Schooling works against the innate strengths of every village child anchored in a million traditions and skills. Skills far vaster than any that schooling can offer.
Schooling invalidates all of them. The skills. And the children.


The only worthwhile part of village schools is midday meals.
Otherwise its a process of deskilling, deracinating and rendering useless children coming from a hoary heritage of sustainable skills. Farming, pottery, weaving.
And tossing them into a dead end.

The day a village child measures itself by its low marks
... that child which can climb every tree, ford every stream, milk every cow, treat every illness of the cow, who knows every plant around for its medicinal and food value ...
... that day we the Educated have conquered the village and the village child.



And there is the the retarding effect of school which is more visible with every passing generation (at the least the personalities are disjointed, with some scholastic ability but little perspective or empathy, just like the subjects they learn which are as artificially disjointed).
But more worrying is the hegemonising effect of schools where wise and learned village communities become 'iiliterate', second division holders, and suddenly and cruelly inferior to the literate community. The complete negation that schooling does to the potter and the thatcher and the vaidya in our village is a crime vaster than any.
But unable to beat this system, we also school our children, and goad them to do 'well in board exams'.

  • Ekta Agarwal
    True, retarding effect of schooling is visible over generations, urban and rural alike.
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  • Naveen Manikandan Periasamy
    How can the system be amended? Will making the 3 Rs compulsory along with vocational and civic education have a higher impact for the masses?
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    • 6y
  • Aparna Krishnan
    I would think that the potter's son makes pots with the father, and the thatcher's son thatches. These are skills learnt by working thro' growing years. Required literacy skills can be supplied in the evenings. And before someone jumps in to tell me that I am 'depriving the poor of schooling' I extend an invitation to all to come to my village and see where the poor are left postschooling. In a nether world. Unfit to farm, and unfit for the dream white collar jobs. Simply making a beeline to the arrack shop.
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  • Aparna Krishnan
    But parallely we need to structure a world where every sustainable skill has respect and remuneration equal to that of 'computer skills'. Faling which, lets lump it. And watch communities get negated and destroyed.
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  • Naveen Manikandan Periasamy
    The problem of traditional workmanship skills getting destroyed is worsened by false heroes like Kailash Sathyarthi.
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  • Aparna Krishnan
    Anyway we are unable to rebuild the world of our dreams. And so we play along as well.



I hate schools. In a cold and dispassionate manner.
Eashwaramma called me up now to ask if I had spoken to Sasi thro' the headmaster. That she day she dropped him there in the residential school, that evening he called up and wept and said he could not cope with the English medium and to please bring him back. I told her I had not called the headmaster again, and that he would settle down, and to not worry. And all my own worries, carefully supressed came to the fore again.
Children of a farming community, rich in knowlege of herbs, and care of cows, and in climbing trees, and in making catapults. Children who co-operate and share, and help the slowest to run faster, and never think of personal aggrandisation over community well being.
Such children are placed in schools, and judged on the single yardstick of their literacy and book skills. They fail. Sasi, multi talented, will simply be made into a medicre or slow student. And become one of the peons or clerks for us the rich and beautiful.
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