On the morning of the 17th, Srilakshmi and I set out on foot looking for anything that would catch our attention. Observing people and interacting with them, in general, has always interested me. But this time around, I wanted to be able to interact with people in order to be able to make them comfortable enough so they would be able divulge what exactly it was that they did in their school/ profession, why they did what they did, what it took for them to get to where they were, and many such things. 

          Our walk took us to St Joseph's School – a yellow-coloured, small, plain, but neatly maintained building. St Joseph's is a private unaided English-medium school located near the Hosa Road Junction. We walked in, a little apprehensive about whether we would be disrupting classes. When we arrived, the principal wasn't available for permission, so we talked to a few teachers and they showed us to a class of bubbly fifteen year olds. The Std X was joined in by Stds IX and VII for a while during our interaction with them.  

The first thing I noticed, perhaps due to the different kind(s) of curriculum I was myself familiar to, was that the girls and boys were made to sit separately in the class – an unwritten part of the curriculum to differentiate between the two sexes. When asked about this, the students giggled, almost as if to taunt the irrelevance of my question. When I persisted, they said that they preferred sitting like this. When asked why, the boys and girls began hurling ridiculous comments at each other’s camps. According to their responses, it seemed like this was mostly because of the naïve sense of superiority the members of each sex thought they had over the other, a typical phase I have often observed most children to go through. A young lady, who was once a student of the same school, and had come back as a teacher on the request of her principal because the school was facing a dearth of teachers, explained to us that it was important that such a distinction be maintained keeping in mind the society that they catered to – most students were children of government employees, weavers, or carpenters. I further noticed that the boys were particularly very outspoken as compared to the girls. When I asked the girls why they were shy, whether they had been told to remain quite, they responded with shy “No’s”, but still remained mostly reserved in their replies.

I asked them if they enjoyed being in school, and they unanimously responded with a strong “Yes”. When asked why, most replied that it was because they felt wonderful to have gained “knowledge” (on further probing, we felt that they used this term interchangeably with ‘facts’ or ‘bits of information’). This school-gained information clearly seemed to make them feel more empowered than those who were not “educated” in the children’s sense of the term.

But what was most heartening about our interaction with the students was that though they cherished being in school and thought it put them a notch above those who hadn’t ever attended school, they also keenly understood many of their school’s shortcomings, and critiqued it eagerly. For example, one particularly enthusiastic boy listed out all factors that he thought were the school’s drawbacks: it lacked computer facilities, a playground large enough for sports, had a dearth of teachers, didn’t cater to what they perceived to be the “extra-curricular” interests of students, and, as one girl put it, their academic syllabus didn’t make them think much. We ran a cursory glance across the children’s Social Studies, Chemistry, and English textbooks, and made a casual inference regarding how the questions at the end of each chapter could have been more comprehensive rather than appealing only to the ‘fact-gathering’ sensibility.

When we asked students what activities they would have liked to be included in the curriculum, and whether they would enjoy it if one of their carpenter or weaver parents came over and taught them the art, they said they would definitely be interested in such activities, that working with hands would surely help them in future. It should be mentioned here that they thought of this “help” mostly in terms of improving their job opportunities.

   

          After our interaction with the children, we spoke to the principal, who had arrived by then. The interaction with him was rather short, and more of an explanatory one as to why we had come over. During our explanations, there cropped up an awkward moment when he asked us what good we would do anyone, or how we would help them, after having carried out such observations. Of course, we did not have a direct reply to that question, but we told him that we hoped to enter the field as educators in the near future, analyze better and actually improve situations.

          Yes, that’s the hope!