Visit Report to Mahatma Gandhi Residential School

                                                Kukkundoor, Karkala, Udupi district

                                                                July 5, 2003

                                    Participants: Srikanth Voorakaranam, Karnum Shashidhar (Asha-Bangalore)

                                                            Compiled by Srikanth

The visit was done at the request of Chuck Meduri. The Colorado chapter is considering the proposal that was received from Sushma Verappa (who recently also made the Asha Akshar films) last year.

 

Summary:

 

Background:

The Kisan Sabha, as the name suggests, was started with the motive to empower land tenants through awareness about their rights. This was against the background of an ineffective Land Reforms Act. From organising kisan sabhas at the taluk and district levels, the group took up literacy campaigns as it realised that literacy was the prime reason for the farmers being victimised.  In 1991, the Mahatma Gandhi Residential High School (MGRS) was started to cater to those boys who discontinued school after their 7th class to go and work in hotels, etc. The school provides a residential setting for education to about 90 boys from class VIII to class X.

 

The Visit:

Kukkundoor is a convenient overnight journey (about 8.5 hours) from Bangalore. KSRTC as well as several private bus companies ply the route (a fairly busy one, apparently, given that Dharmasthala, a famous pilgrimage center falls en-route, a couple of hours before Karkala).

 

While Bangalore was feeling the pinch from the scanty rainfall, the South Kannada region was going through it’s typical yearly heavy rains at this time of the year. We reached Karkala at 6AM amidst a steady drizzle (which portended a gloomy day in store weather-wise) and checked into a hotel for a short nap, and shower, and then set off for the school which was about 7 kms away (on the Udupi road) noting that the auto driver seemed to know the school without us having to give any more information other than the name. We first met with the headmaster, Mr. Achar, with you we interacted significantly during the course of the day.

 

Infrastructure:

The school was earlier housed in the Kisan Sabha premises. A large hall was used in the mornings as a classroom at times when the Sabha did not have other activities going on, and at night as a residential facility. This proved to be a substantial inconvenience, resulting in the move to the current premises some years back. 

 

The current structure has two long corridors on either side. The left side houses the headmaster’s room, a staff room and three classrooms. The right corridor has two large halls, which serve as the residential places for the children. Connecting them at the far end is a hall that is used as the dining room, behind that is a hall with the kitchen (to manage cooking for 100 people every day is a non-trivial task). New construction was going on the first floor (above the current residence halls). The plan is to build 2 additional rooms to serve as a laboratory and a library. The school has a large ground attached to it. Trees planted under a gram panchayat program line the ground on either side. A large well partly meets the water requirement on the premises.

There is also a charming circular non-walled structure with a tiled roof that is used as an open-air classroom in the middle of the trees. A small room houses a single computer, which they use more as a tool for demystifying technology by allowing children the touch and feel of a computer.

 

The land on which the school is constructed is given by the government at a token rent. The ownership can stay with the school as long as it continues to use it for the purpose intended.

 

Academics:

The school has been maintaining a 100% pass percentage for several years now, and has received recognition from the district education department for the same. Glancing through the marks sheets for the students maintained by the school, it looked as if the performance of the students is also good on a comparative note. Roughly, our schools can be classified into 4 levels: Level 1 is where the pass percentages are pretty ordinary. In level 2, schools get to a stage where the pass percentages are good but the marks secured by the children are ordinary (just above meeting the passing levels). In level 3, pass percentages are accompanied by fairly good marks and very reasonable learning levels. Level 4 is where not only the quantitative indices are good, but also the quality of learning is also good. A majority of our rural schools would fall in the first and second levels.

 

MGRS would probably fall in level 3. Where they can do better is in subjects like Math and English. The math teacher stressed on the fact that the accumulated drawbacks during the primary level schooling has a major effect on how the children perceive math and perform in it during the high school level. Beyond a point, it becomes difficult to overcome these within the time available (in this context it is pertinent to point out the Nali Kali method of teaching that the Rishi Valley schools have pioneered, and which the Govt. of Karnataka adopted district-wide in a few districts. In this method, the primary school teaching of a subject is broken down into a number of constituent units. Children proceed through these units at their own pace-spending as much time on a unit as is needed to get good understanding of it, and only then moving on to the next. The teacher assists each child in the unit where it perceives difficulty. This system allows for the provision that different children could be in different levels of learning within the same class and avoids straitjacketing of all children into the same compartment at any point of time. Accumulated deficiencies have a lesser chance of getting carried over in this methodology).

 

Extra-Curriculars:

Due importance is given to extra curriculars. As one enters the school, one is greeted by about 40-50 paintings on a large wall, each drawn by a different child. The quality of some of the work was really impressive. Most pictures depicted a home setting. Children also take part in some science fairs where they made a few models. Every year, they are also taken on an outing (the last one being to a national park close by where they cleaned the place of plastics). They have a fairly large collection of children’s books (mostly in Kannada), though they could use a newer complement because many of these seem to be aged.

 

Different committees are formed among children themselves to introduce them to their real-life equivalents. For instance, elections are held to elect the representatives of the children (accompanied by some campaigning, agenda etc). There is also a legal committee, which adjudicates on issues that come up occasionally. Children also take turns with different tasks that need to get done on a daily basis, such as cleaning, tending to the garden and handling the library etc. The children also are seemed to be very proficient at Yoga (from the photographs we got to see). They have daily Yoga sessions that start the day at 5:30 AM in the morning.

 

Teachers

Many of the teachers seem to have been around for more than a few years, a positive sign given that teacher attrition typically places a big burden on school managements in ensuring a sense of continuity. The salary paid to them is reasonable by rural standards. Due to the time constraints (and also because we didn’t want to keep them at school on a Saturday afternoon), we could speak with only the Mathematics teacher.

 

Interaction with the Children

We spent some time with children of each of the three classes and it was a lively interaction that spanned different subjects like Math, Science, English and Geography, and other aspects like public speaking, cooperation rather than competition among peers and homesickness! (One big problem they face with children of class VIII is the home-sickness that children experience, although there is an effort to make the children feel as at-home as possible. Every year, there is typically a small dropout rate because of this).

 

A blackboard outside the school is used to record the day’s main news stories. Children falling sick in other schools in the district on the first day of the noon-meal program of the Govt. of Karnataka was the main story and most children seemed to be aware of this. Favorite vocation that the children wanted to pursue seemed to be Diploma in Engineering (one of the school’s alumni did this, and is currently working at an Indian partner of Toyota, and has recently been selected for training in Japan. This underscores the importance of good role models within the community that other children could look up to and aspire for).

 

What was noteworthy was that the children insisted that I speak in English with them in one class. In another, they wanted to be spoken to in Hindi (with Karnum’s familiarity with Kannada providing effective communication when translation was required). In class X, one of the children, Manjunath, read out an entire lesson in English, and then gave the entire translation in Kannada. Very impressive! He wanted to become an English teacher, but couldn’t exactly articulate why. This is more a reflection of the children’s lack of exposure to English speaking rather than unfamiliarity with the language (given that just minutes back he reeled off the English lesson with ease and also translated it with felicity).

 

It is pertinent to highlight Prof. Krishna Kumar’s essay, Two Worlds (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/asha-upe/files/TwoWorlds.htm) in this connection. It is a brilliant analysis of the unequal opportunity structures that the modern society bestows upon its children based on their familiarity with the English language. While it is inarguable that the children of English medium schools lose out on their level of understanding, and correlating it with the everyday society around them as a result of over-reliance on an alien language, children of local language medium schools suffer deprivation because of being at the other end of the spectrum (because of the unequal future opportunity structure), a comparative shortage of good books (fiction as well as scientific) in the local languages and the need to make a switch to the English language scientific and math terminology at the college level and in competitive exams like CET(Common Entrance test for admission to professional courses in Karnataka). Mr. Achar pointed out that the science books this year had small boxes where they provide the local language terms and the English term equivalence-a positive move.

 

What is probably needed is a healthy intermediate balance. Govt. schools in India are moving to introduce English as a subject in earlier classes (in Karnataka, the plan is to start it from class III instead of class V, but that hasn’t materialized yet). As I write this report, there is a news item on TV which talks about a move by the Chattisgarh govt. to introduce English from class I, but the biggest constraint they are facing is the poor knowledge of the teachers themselves of the language, hence they are starting off with first providing training and exposure to the teachers about the language.

 

On the spoken part, it is also relevant to point out the audio tape method that the Auroville education resource center has used with good effect to teach rural children English using Tamil as the basis (http://www.ashanet.org/yale/html/Auroville_files/EducationEndeavours.htm). We need such bold experiments in our education system, rather than the run of the mill stuff that ends up being neither here nor there, and a colossal waste of the human resources if one were to consider the amount of time children spend in school typically and the return generated in terms of the amount and quality of learning.

 

We went through an exercise of identifying all the states neighbouring Karnataka on the India map on the wall. The children identified and pointed out all 5 of them (including tiny Goa that escaped my attention ;-)). There was also a level of comfort in identifying where some of the other countries of the world were located. We traced the path that Columbus was supposed to have taken to come to India but ended up going to the Americas instead (something the children found amusing).

 

We then did a small math exercise on simple Geometric series where each day the number of lotuses in a lake double, and if the lake is half full at the end of 49 days, how many days will it take for the lake to be completely full. There was a little uncertainty in coming up with the right answer. A similar problem on arithmetic series where the number of lotuses increase by 1 every day led to the correct answer of 98 with relative ease (talking later with the headmaster, I referred to the importance of incorporating the visual aspect of Mathematics in learning. A lot of times, the numbers are just too abstract to be of any real meaning for the children. Where they learn to see the correlation of number to real visuals, the learning becomes easy and permanent. This is probably something that needs real attention at our primary school-level. The Montessori material that we saw previously used by CWC in Kundapur was quite good on this front).

 

Future Plans:

The school aims to stabilize around the current scale and complete the infrastructure development that is currently going on. Sushma mentioned the need and possibility of starting a similar effort aimed at girl children, but that will materialize only when sustained support is identified.

 

Overall Impressions:

The school is doing several things right. For instance, maintaining a record (names, addresses etc) of all children who went through their school, and encouraging continued correspondence with them afterwards. (We went through the correspondence dating back more than 6 years, and some of them are quite touching). Also, they put in effort to provide pointers to children about the educational opportunities available after they complete class X. This is again something I wish all our projects also did on a sustained basis.

 

Over the years, they've managed to tap into local/ Govt. resources where possible (the connections that the founders had, including Mr. Veerappa Moily, probably helped facilitate this, in addition to the good performance of the school itself). (For e.g. land is donated by the govt. for a nominal cost even though it is not an aided school). They get some support from the Nitte Trust and from the backward castes department towards part of food expenses). One major source of funding for the last 6 years, the Dorabji Tata Trust, is ending/has ended this year so finding a replacement for that is important. Till the time they get to be a govt.-aided school (there is apparently a long backlog of schools awaiting such recognition, so it might be a while for this to happen, although you could suggest that they start the process), they will still need support to cover the operational expenses on a sustained basis.

 

We saw a degree of openness between the children and teachers-a good sign (somewhat rare in our education system). For instance, after our interaction with the children in their classes, we were sitting in the headmaster’s room when a couple of them came in to speak to us openly irrespective of the fact that the headmaster is also present in the room.

 

Rural children have a particular charm and innocence that are becoming increasingly scarce commodities among their urban counterparts. The Kukkundoor visit lived up to the expectations on this count. We made our way back to Bangalore that night.

 

Miscellaneous:

One of the side-benefits of a site visit is that oftentimes there are several places worth seeing in the neighborhood. Karkala has 2 outstanding temples: the Chaturmukha Basadi (a structure dating 500 years back, identical on all the 4 sides, with huge stone pillars, and containing idols of 3 Jain Theerthankaras) and the Gomateswara temple (with a 41ft statue of Bahubali) against the backdrop of the Western Ghats. Mr. Achar very graciously took upon the role of a guide in this quite fabulous tour.