Alternatives in Education

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The Swami Vivekakananda Youth Movement was started by a group of medical students to work with dispossessed tribals in H.D.Kote. The Viveka Tribal Learning Center (VTCL) at Hosahalli, has grown from a thatched hut with a few students to a government recognized semi-residential school imparting quality education to over 400 children; helping them fit into the mainstream while retaining pride in, and contact with, their tribal heritage. The VTCL today trains teachers from other schools, develops teaching aids, and enhances children’s lives with innovative concepts like joyful learning, experiential learning and activity based learning.

SVYM was started by a group of medical doctors strongly inspired by Swami Vivekananda. Our initial work was in the area of health care. We later on moved into the field of education. We have a partially residential school for tribal children. There are 400 children out of which around 200 are residents and 200 are day scholars. We have also been working with government schools in H.D.Kote area. With our experience in working with tribal children we have now entered into a partnership with Karnataka government to work with 312 government schools of HD Kote taluk. We have also started mobile schools for the tribal children in H.D.Kote taluk. Our goal is to reaching primitive tribal areas on a mobile school with flexible times, where we impart reading, writing and numeric skills. It is difficult to get all the tribal children to the main residential school.

We also have a center called the Viveka Center for Excellence, catering to non-tribal children of Sargur town. We want to make this a learning center. We don’t want to have it like a regular school with government recognition or having uniforms or timings. We want the children to be small in number and explore learning in different ways. We want a lot of interaction with the children. Our children are very non-competitive by nature. Their style is not memory based. They are not used to memorizing. They have inherent talent with lots of artistic skills - singing, art, dance, drawing, painting and athletic abilities. Our school buildings are more open to suit the child. We follow Nali-Kali method of teaching (Rishi valley card system). Though we have adopted the government syllabus till 10th standard we don’t test or assess the child based on marks. The child is sent to the next class based on his or her interest and willingness. We don’t force children to go to the next class. We believe in emphasizing hygiene education a lot. We have developed workbooks in Kannada medium especially for Science and Mathematics since there is a dearth of such books.

With our background experience of working with tribal children, we started working with government schools. Today we work with 30 government schools near the area we were working. Our area had many School Development Management Committees(SDMC) appointed by the government. These were not functional, the parents were supposed to be on the committee, they were not meeting regularly and their participation was very poor. When we started interacting with the community we managed to get the SDMCs to meet more regularly. Youth volunteers from the area started contributing their time voluntarily, helping in the schools and teaching children in the night. Gradually the parents in the community started questioning the school authorities and all participating NGOs more. This dialogue increased. They also started participating in all activities within their school such as festivals and school fairs. After this point we started feeling that we can start working with many more schools to enhance community participation. This program is called “Unmeelita - making education a community movement”. I’d like to give the statistics regarding government schools in our area -we have 185 primary, 118 higher primary and 18 high schools in H.D Kote taluk. As you can see there are much fewer high schools. Typically there are 70-80 children in the primary school, but the number of children in higher primary and high schools reduces a lot due to drop-outs. As soon as girls reach maturity they drop out. Parents do not want to send their girl child to schools with male teachers. High school being far in terms of physical location tend to be out of reach for many girl children. When children move from 5th standard to higher primary they drop out. Boys not enjoying or interested in schooling drop out. We wanted to reduce to number of drop-outs. We thought we could do this through the SDMCs already existing in many communities. So we wanted to strengthen the SDMC without creating more parallel structures. The other objective of this project was to increase the role of children in the education. We tried to address this by including more activities and opportunities for children to express themselves and their talents like singing, dancing, painting and other art forms. Typically in rural area children do not have many opportunities to explore their talents so this is a much needed activity.

While working with the community we came across many parents who were not involved in the schools. They said that they did not know what to do since they are not involved in this process. These days the government is more open to communities being involved with their school. Inspite of this many parents felt that they don’t have any stake in this process. Since education is not a priority in their day to day life the fruits are not immediately visible. This reduced their involvement further. We felt that the community needs to get more aware of their possible control or involvement in the running of the school. If some authority in running and management of the school is given, the community will participate. The community should be instrumental in solving the school's problems. A sense of belonging is achieved by solving problems of the school.

Another aspect is this. We felt that some accountability factor needs to be established. Who is accountable if the child cannot read or write? The child should be looked in the context of the family and the society. Strengths of the community and children should be gotten into the school. All the stake holders like gram panchayat members must be involved in the development and management of the school. Information is lacking in the villages and this is something that needs to be done. We felt these issues could be addressed via posters and street plays. The rights of a child, looking at child as an asset, girl child’s education and various other social issues can be addressed using posters, role plays. The plays are organized between 5-9 pm so that all in the community are present and can see them.