Debates
In Education In
Rural Tamil Nadu
By Vrunda Prabhu
03 August, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The human aspect of a two-and-half-year
collaboration between mathematics professors of City University of New
York (CUNY), and grassroots organizers in rural Tamil Nadu, (Nagaipattinam,
Cuddalore, Salem and Erode districts), is the content of this article.
Reporting on student success in Calculus classrooms in the Bronx [1]
at epiSTEME-1 [2], just prior to the tsunami, the CUNY professors were
asked how their TR-NYC methodology of teaching-research could be implemented
in community-based schools in Dalit hamlets. In the non-formal, community-based
schools [3] and bridge schools [4], in the tsunami-affected [5] and
Arunthatiar [6] community, a new methodology, T-A-R, began to develop,
in which the educational environment of the child is viewed as it is
shaped by school, home, work and community.
Invited into both communities
by grassroots organizers, the teacher-researchers, in a perpetual state
of learning had the advantage of observing objectively the state of
affairs upon which they were asked to assist and act. The state of affairs
are reported here, as well as the task that remains. The most important
lesson learned by this teacher-researcher is the power of the human
connection, which is independent of perceived social standing, amount
of education possessed, or the standard socially accepted norms. The
most profound impact upon this teacher-researcher was the resilience
of the women, the unbounding joy of the children and the unrecognized
strength of the men of the communities. Each of these are partially
described below.
The collaborators
The women of the communities
are the unsung martyrs. Fisherwomen, teachers, Arunthatiar women organizers
and mothers and grandmothers, who are wood-cutters, brick masons and
agricultural laborers, all request a better life for the children.
In a hamlet with no modern
amenities, in the late evening, the children study under a tall, dim
street light. An old man of the hamlet, pointing to the huts, asks,
"Must my granddaughter live the same way as I did?" The questions
of the women and children, equally challenging in their innocence and
their despair, are about their living conditions. "Will you remember
us, will we meet again?", ask young, beautiful women in the 14-15
age range, who want to be I.A.S. officers, and when I say of course,
they ask, "why? Our village is so dirty, we are the village of
manual scavengers, look, look how much the children fight, why?"
As part of the activities
of the War Trauma Foundation project, the teaching-action-research team
interviewed several groups of women, men, youth and children to understand
how psychosocial professionals could assist. In a fisherfolk village,
the psychosocial focus groups encounter persons living in temporary
shelters. The youth are drowning themselves in drink and the men are
withdrawn. The women are vocal in their love of the child and desperation
for the child's future. "We want our children to live in government
hostels. When (note they say when and not if) the tsunami comes again,
we want the children to be far away, but we do not want the hostels
to be too far. When the tsunami comes we will have to go to them, who
will take care of them?"
A young woman teacher of
a community-based school from a nearby village sporadically breaks into
song, as we walk on the beach after lunch. The other women try to shoo
her. However, she is not to be quietened. "I will sing. I am not
under house-arrest, now, I am a bird, I will sing", she says. The
stories of the women are each heroic. A young woman, one of the few
paid teachers (paid Rupees 500 per month by a NGO), was a college student
in the nearby town when the tsunami hit. She had scored very high on
the 12 th standard examination and had continued on to college. The
tsunami destroyed her father's boat. As the oldest of 4 children, she
was asked to discontinue her education to support the family. For Rupees
500, the young woman gave up her education to become a teacher of a
community-based school. "I am very interested in studying",
she says.
The Arunthatiar woman –
No description of the gender
inequities ubiquitous among the communities that formed part of the
collaboration, would begin to convey the plight of one who must live
in perpetual separation from her own identity – a slave to the
dictates of a changing but ever present authority. Enslaved in body
and mind, the spirit learns sustenance on very little and minimality
becomes the norm, from which even visions of escape and victory are
measured in miniscule units and where the true meaning of absence of
oppression cannot be held together long enough to catch its own means
of sustenance. Such a community, which states itself to be "the
last on the steep cliff with not even the dog behind them", is
the Arunthatiar community of SathyaMangalam. The women of the community
are all in the labor force. Most are daily agricultural laborers. A
woman works from morning to evening to earn Rupees 50 and gets work
about 4 days a week. The man works longer hours, gets more days of week
of work and is paid 100 rupees.
Almelu is an active young
woman. She has overcome some of the inhibitions of being a woman and
works toward the social causes that she perceives as important. Among
all the self help groups (SHG) I visited, some of the ones that made
a very positive impression were those she regularly oversees. The women
have a brighter sense of themselves, their smiles are happier, less
questioning. Finding oneself in any small form, reveals her own strength
and frees the woman of the self-help groups to dream and hope just a
little bit more. Some have managed to buy themselves out of bondage.
When a woman of the village was being ill-treated, the SHG was called
to intervene. They are wise women, who weigh the actions, and their
consequences. Some SHG's weave rope from the abundantly available coconut
coir However, not all self-help-groups provide hope. Among the daily
agricultural laborers too are self-help-groups. What do they do? They
save money. An earning of Rupees 400 per week for the woman, perhaps
Rupees 700 for the man, long hours of physically exhausting labor, children,
housework, and saving of money. The women woodcutters have finely shredded
hands that hurt even just to look at. The brickmasons have no cuts on
their hands, but they are equally sore from the merciless labor.
The questions of the men
of the village are haunting…."What is it like to be born
of caste?"
The laborers in the fields
have thin stick legs, the cheeks are sunken, the eyes lusterless. A
smile is not possible, conversation is not initiated, just a beast of
burden. Hours and hours in the fields toiling, supervised by the "farmer/owner"
of the land. The Arunthatiars are a talented people. In the workshops
when language is a barrier as it often is, their drawings, their art,
song and drama and love of life, predominate. Maran is a "model"
student in the workshops. He translates, is excited about new ways of
learning mathematics, asks questions about how to teach better, or a
better mathematics pedagogy to teach multiplication of fractions. He
explains that not everyone "studies". What do kids who do
not "study" do, I ask. "They work", he explains.
"They go out with their fathers to learn the occupation. Some get
killed, as my uncle's son did. He mended chairs. He walked on the streets,
shouting "Sopa, Sopa, Sopa repair, Sopa". People then bring
their chairs to be repaired. They sit outside the house to repair the
chairs. My uncle's son died as he tried to cross the road, hit by a
bus".
Existent educational climate
The teachers that have attended
the workshops conducted over the two and half year duration have been
young men and women who are either teachers of children in the night
schools, or are coordinators of night schools or are the teachers of
two government run bridge schools. Both bridge schools are one-room
schools with mixed-age children, who have missed school on account of
being a child laborer and are attending a 1-year "bridge"
school before being mainstreamed in the government run schools again.
The educational background
of the teachers varies. We did encounter some young women and men who
had undergraduate and post-graduate degrees and who unable to find employment,
sometimes on account of their caste. For the most part however, the
teachers are educated 8-12 years, and their own mathematical background
is very weak. Thus, while the desire to assist the children exists,
the tools to assist do not.
The government run bridge
schools meant for child laborer to be mainstreamed to regular government
schools in a year, were part of the project since August 2006. The one-room
school with two teachers, each with 12 years of schooling, leaves much
to be desired by way of educational facilities and opportunities.
A description of the community-based
school: The community-based school varies in location. It might be under
a dim street light, or in the front of someone's house with a bright
light. The community-based schools in one location were exceptionally
good and it could be directly attributed to the harmonious working between
the teachers, coordinators, parents, etc. All schools regardless of
location or scarcity of resources have an abundance of happy children,
smiling, curious, loving with bright sparks in their eyes.
The children who attend the
bridge schools look exactly like all the other happy children around,
except that all of these children have been child laborers and now through
the government-scheme are attending a bridge school before being mainstreamed.
How is the school run? The teacher and the assistant teacher receive
monthly salaries from the government. There is a cook who cooks the
midday meal and serves the children. The teachers are from the community
– two have a twelfth standard education. One has an eighth standard
education. The children in the schools range from 1-8 standards. None
of the teachers speak any English, they all profess great fear of mathematics,
and English. No one in both schools can read the English text books
except for the very elementary grades.
What kinds of work do child
laborers do? Answer. There are 22,000 acres of jasmine plantations around
the river beds. Picking jasmine flowers earns Rupees 25 for 1 liter/measure.
The image of many, many children in a flower garden is a beautiful sight,
but the circumstances of work are far from pleasant.
Several moments of understanding
that occur in the joint collaborative exploration lead to new moments
of understanding as the cyclic process of T-A-R continues. A session
on moments of understanding - conducted by the mathematics teaching-action-research
team comprising at that stage of mathematics and psycho-social professors
of CUNY – that linked Loganathan's Sumerian Temple Hymns [7] to
Einstein's quote in his Autobiographical Notes to an excerpt from a
clinical interview conducted in the teacher-researcher's classroom -
led to a heart-stopping moment of understanding at the Pondicherry Science
Forum, from Dhanpal, the architect of a full- time school whose design
is along his vision of social integration and intellectual achievement
of the children. The psychosocial session alternated with the mathematics.
During one of the psychosocial sessions, the participants in groups
constructed community-maps, life maps and tree maps. The pyschosocial
team member asked participants to draw their community and mark the
places where they felt happy, where they felt sad, etc. The children
had drawn a beautiful map of the community. One place had pretty flowers,
and was marked with a danger sign. On being questioned for the reason
for the danger sign, Dhanpal explained that the area was owned by "upper-castes"
and the children sensed danger to themselves in that area. The children
with their love of beautiful places and pretty flowers live with the
awareness of their exclusion.
Interventions
Each TAR visit consists of
a series of meetings, workshops, and participation in the life of the
community. The workshops are structured on understandings gained in
preceding visits, based on interactions with the community. Mathematics
content and pedagogy is addressed through the workshops for teachers.
Among all the communities visited either in the coastal or non-coastal
region, the womens' voices were much more vocal. The mother sees the
slow extinction of her child's spark, and knows the life that is to
follow, and cries for help. "Tell us what to do, teach us your
methods, we will learn, we will teach. We do not want your certificates.
Certificates get our youth no jobs on account of the caste-mark. But
teach us to sign our name, we feel humiliated at the thumb print".
An important action research outgrowth has been Montesori-for-Mothers.
The idea underlying Montessori
for Mothers is that the mother in creating the "right" climate
for her child in her own "home", would in that creation herself
become literate, and a critical thinker – a way to nurture her
child by educating her/him while educating herself. In sessions women
of the community made the Tamil alphabet with fabric and practiced sounding
out the letters, in other sessions, women "discovered" they
could draw on paper.
The debates in education – from the professional field of mathematics
education to the educational needs of the Indian children of Arunthatiar
and other communities – need to be understood in their proper
perspective. There is a need for the re-education of the educated as
to what it means to not have access to education for generations. The
freedom to achieve (Sen, Inequality Reexamined, 1992) is severely restricted
as evident by the long-standing needs of the Arunthatiar community:
1. A real ban on manual scavenging
– no government quota for Safai Karmachari to be filled only by
members of the Arunthatiar community
2. A real ban on bonded labor
for those that have never stopped toiling the land of India
3. A real care for the Indian
Arunthatiar child.
"People say our people
are earning wages of 30 and 50 rupees, and are eating and sleeping,
so what is wrong? But animals eat and sleep too. We want more for our
children. We are discriminated ." - KaruppuSamy, Arunthatiar grass
roots organiser, READ, President of the Arunthatiar Human Rights Forum.
[1] Part of a 4-year project, Introducing Indivisibles in Calculus Instruction,
National Science Foundation – Research On Learning in Education
#0126141
[2] International Conference
to Review Science, Mathematics and Technology Education, Goa, 2004.
[3] The "school"
could be held behind a house, with children sitting in the mud, or on
the street under the dim street lamp.
[4] Government-run schools
set up for child-laborers to be mainstreamed after 1 year
[5] The work in the coastal
region was partially funded by the War Trauma Foundation
[6] Traditional and many
contemporary occupations are manual scavenging (paid by the government
as a safai-karmachari), leather-workers, deliverers of the death message
[7] Hymns of Humble Appar
and other Sumerian Temple Hymns extensively studied by Professor Loganathan
establish a link between the hymns in Sumerian and Archaic Tamil
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