Snapshots of Indian education...

Our morning started with bus ride across the city to Blossom Public School.  The name is a little misleading since the school is a privated-aided school, which means all the students pay tuition, but the government of Karnatka also contributes funds to the school.  Interestingly, this sign does not identify the school as English-medium, which it is. 

The school occupies this building and the upper floors of a building a couple of doors down the street.  This entry way was used as storage, and there was a room off of it that was used to prepare the lunches.  Lunch is often one of the most important aspects for these schools as it is a meal the families did not need to provide. 

The information that the Teacher Foundation gave to us prior to our visit indicated that this school served a predominantly Muslim student body.  When asked about something connected to the beliefs of the students, the director/principal suggested that the majority of student body was not Muslim.  All the evidence, however, suggested that our original information had been correct.  When we arrived, almost all of the mothers who were dropping off students for school were dressed like the woman above on the right.  In addition, on Fridays the boys were excused from classes to attend mosque. 

We had a brief introduction from the director/principal and had the opportunity to ask questions.  This is the first school that Ayub Pasha has opened.  He trained as a journalist, but he opened this school because education was his passion.  The school began seven years ago and has been adding grades each year.  Next year, for the first time, the school will have students take the Standard 10 exam, which is the national exam that marks the end of high school.  (Some students continue on to Standard 11 and 12 to prepare for university.)  The school serves 1100 students (45-50 students per class) and has 34 teachers.  Sixty percent of the teachers are trained.  The other 40% are promising graduates who have trained on the job.  Student fees are 300 Rupees (about $5.55) a month, which is a significant investment for these families.  Pasha said the school's biggest challenge was the high expectations of the parents even though many of the parents could not provide appropriate educational support at home.  Earlier, he had said that only 30% of the parents are educated themselves.



Ashley Snell, IREX, presenting Ayub Pasha with a gift.

 While we were waiting for our tours to start, I noticed a TV monitor in the school office that was scrolling through the different classrooms in the school.  I admit that I was taken aback by this.  Our new high school has security cameras inside and outside the building, but absolutely none in the classroom.  My first thought when I saw the monitor is that U.S. teachers would never allow that sort of "Big Brother" in our classrooms.  Later during our visits to the classrooms, I got to witness the camera in action.  Three of our group were observing a geography lesson, but only two of sat down in the seats that we were offered, mostly because these were not seats made for adult-size people.  Just a few minutes into our observation, the principal came on the intercome and told the teacher to offer all of us a seat.

This is the class we observed.  It was Standard VII, and this is their classroom.  The students stay in the same classroom, while the teachers move from classroom to classroom.  This was a similar to what I knew about Chinese and Turkish classrooms.  The posters on the walls were from a science project. 

We watched part of a geography lesson on Europe.  The teacher was reading aloud from the textbook about the physical features of Europe, and the students were following along.  The lesson was entirely in English, from the text in the book to the review of the material.  The students were taking notes in their books and were asked recall questions of the material at the end of each section.  The teacher emphasized important information through a call and repeat process.  Interestingly, on the pages I saw of the textbook. the lesson did not include a map or an image of any of the physcial features that were being explained.  I know that I am fortunate with the technology I have available to me in my classroom and the ability I have to show students about what I describing.  As I sat in a desk no 6' person should ever have to sit in, I tried to imagine teaching students about something with which they have no experience and in language which is a second language and with no visual images to help with the explanation.  I admired this teacher very much for what she was trying to do.

This was the second lesson I observed.  This is a Standard II class, and the students are receiving a lesson in Hindi.  The teacher was using a call and repeat strategy, and then having the students write in their notebooks.  At this point, she was walking down the center aisle to check what the students had written and to make corrections as needed.  Keep in mind that the students are so crowded together because a couple of large adults had taken their seats in the back (us).  This classroom was in the second building.  It was on the second and third floors of this building.  The first floor was used by another business.

In this classroom, the students were receiving a lesson in Kannada, which is the language of the state of Karnataka where Bangalore is located.  This classroom had two teachers present, one teacher who stayed with these students all day and another teacher who was giving the lesson in Kanada.  We mostly just interupted this class.

The woman in yellow is the teacher who stays with the students because their age.  She could speak English, and we were able to ask her some questions.  The woman on the left was the Kanada instructor who did not speak English.  She was very gracious, even though we badly interrupted her lesson.

 

 

One of the questions that was asked at the beginning of our visit was the availability of technology.  The principal said that the school had computers that the students could use and the school had projectors that the teachers could use for a lesson.  The computers are in a separate lab, and as this picture shows the projectors were in separate rooms also.  This is a room next door to the Kannada lesson and across the hall from the Standard II Hindi lesson, but there were no desks or chairs set up in this room.  I have identical projector in my classroom, but I think that I use mine more.  Also every teacher in my building has the same projector in their classroom.  None of the classrooms in which I saw children had more than a chalk board.

 

The woman in the chador works in the office and was helping to conduct the tour.  She put on the chador because to go from the first building to this one, she had to walk on the street.  She had brought us into this room to show us the available technology, but then engaged us in a conversation about education.

 

After lunch at the hotel, we traveled to the other primary school.  This school is a government school, and the language of instruction is Kannada.  Both Hindi and English are also taught, but the lessons are conducted in Kannada.

 

 

 



 



These are the houses that are directly across from the school.  These are clearly homes of well-to-do families, and none of their children attend the school just across the street.  The children from these families attend private schools, probably private unaided schools.  The students that attend this school are from the families that cannot afford to send their children to a private school.  During our interview with the principal, she said that many of the students came from the slum area.

We arrived just as lunch was concluding, so the preschool children were down for their nap in the room off the entry way.  The school provides instruction in Standards 1-7, serves 200 students, and has 7 teachers.  All of the staff are assigned to this school by the central office, including the principal.  The principal had been at this school for eight years, and she was clearly dedicated to what she was doing.  She had arranged with a donor for the students to get fruit with their meal twice a week.  She also had arranged donors to help with the school uniforms and to provide health screenings for the students and their families.  The day we visited about half of the students and staff were gone, preparing for a presentation, because the school was being recognized as the best school in the area.

  

 

This school was laid out more how I would have expected.  The day started in the courtyard at left, with the students singing the national anthem and participating in other group activities.  The principal also said that the students read the newspaper first thing in the morning, but I was not clear about whether the students read the paper (I doubted this) or the teachers read the papers to them (I thought more likely).  The school day began at 9:10 with the assembly and concluded at 3:30.  Students attended school Monday-Saturday, with six classes per day on Monday through Friday.  Saturday was used for co-curricular and computer classes.  The hours and the days were very similar to the first school (Blossom), but Blossom could not start with an all school assembly because it did not have the space.

 



The students were singing a song for us.

This classroom was strikingly different from every other classroom that I saw all day.  This classroom looks much more like what I expect an elementary classroom to be.  The students were grouped around round tables, and a variety of visuals and student work decorated the entire room.  This is a style of instruction based on principles similar to the Montessori schools, but it is not the norm for most of India's students.

The principal was also proud of the fact that she had arranged for the school to have a computer lab, so the students could be instructed how to use computers.  The computers were arranged through donor also.

My lesson for the day?  These women (and except for Ayun Pasha, they were all women) care very strongly about they are doing, and they are doing the very best for their students, within the limits of their situations.  I think this is a universal trait of almost all teachers.

A Walk About Bangalore...

A Walk about Bangalore…

 Our introduction to Bangalore and India continued with a walking tour of the city.  I found the morning to be a lesson in perspectives. 

Day 2 in Bangalore.  Arun is standing in the center of our group.

 

Our tour guide Arun started with a short history lesson on the significance of Bangalore, beginning with a list of dates--1776, 1789, 1798, 1805, and 1815.  Recognize any?  I recognized four of the five dates from U.S. and French history but could not explain the dates' significance to India's or Bangalore's history.  Although I did know that Lord Cornwallis resurrected his military career by defeating the French in India, I had not known that he had accomplished this by defeating the King of Mysore, roughly where Bangalore is located today.

Teaching World History, I have become somewhat better at looking at events from different perspectives, but even so, too often those perspectives are still limited by the immediate actors in an event due to limited knowledge and/or the time constraints of a 180-day school year.  For example, U.S. history books rarely explain the financial problems that the British East India Company was encountering due to the start of the Industrial Revolution and the loss of the Indian cotton cloth trade or that Parliament was trying to bail out the East India Company when it granted a monopoly on importing tea into the North American colonies.  U.S. history books almost always cast Parliament’s actions as another example of Britain’s tyranny over those colonies as an explanation of the Boston Tea Party, and India is never mentioned.  In World History textbooks, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain is typically described as if the British were not part of a global network of commerce that was becoming more and more interdependent.

So I greatly appreciated our mini history lesson because it squarely placed Indian events in a global context and not in splendid isolation, and here are the explanations of the dates with which Arun started the tour:  

1776—The war for U. S. independence can also be understood in the context of the on-going conflict between France and Britain over colonial possessions, both in the Americas and in Asia.  After Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, ending the war in North America, the focus of this conflict shifted to India.  Ironically, the same man who surrendered at Yorktown was able to revive his reputation by defeating the King of Mysore and claiming India for Britain.  In addition, Mysore was one of the first governments to recognize the United States as an independent nation, in part because of Mysore’s ongoing problems with the British.

1789—Like the Americans, the King of Mysore asked the King of France for assistance in fighting the British, but due to the start of the French Revolution, King Louis XVI was unable to help the King of Mysore.

 1798—Napoleon’s defeat in Egypt also prevented him from sending assistance to the King of Mysore.

 1805—The loss at the Battle of Trafalgar further limited France’s ability to assist the King of Mysore.

 1815—Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo came at the hands of the Duke of Wellington who had served under Cornwallis in the war with Mysore.

 After this brief background on Bangalore’s past, we began with the colonial portion of the city. 

   

 Bangalore served as an administrative and military center for the British in India.  The facilities used by the British military (above) continue in use by the Indian military today.

At the center of the colonial city is a large park, which people use for recreation and exercise. We arrived after most of the morning activities. We did see one woman meditating, however, with her seven Golden Retrievers. A statue of Queen Victoria stands at one end of the park. One section of the park is specifically for children with a small train, while other areas provide gathering places for concerts and other activities.
 

Queen Victoria

A stage used for concerts and other events

The children's play area

 

The British colonial government was housed in this building. The picture shows only the central portion of this enormous building. As Arun pointed out, a large edifice can be used to inspire awe and hopefully (?) respect. Today the building houses the state of Karnataka’s High Court.

 After independence, Karnataka built an even larger building to house the state government. The construction in front of the building is for the new metro line. Bangalore, like several Indian cities, is working on constructing a rapid transit system. Bangalore's first line had opened six months before our arrival.

 

The lions at the top of the building are from the reign of Ashoka during the Mauryan empire (261-239 BCE).  Ashoka's conversion to Buddhism helped the spread of Buddhism behond India's borders.  Ashoka's edicts encouraged vegetarianism and expected religious tolerance of all religions, not just his own. 

 

On our way through the park, we stopped at this well-known juice stand. The woman has an amazing variety of juices, which she blends together for various health properties.

 

 

 A common feature of India are the dogs that live on the street. We saw a number of them as we walked through the park. The gentleman with the bike came with a bag of bread to feed the dogs, and the brown and white dog picked us up, following us around the park in hopes that we would feed it. He followed us for at least half of our circuit of the park, and did not give up on us until we got back on the bus.  

 

 

 

 Our bus picked us up at the other end of the park, where this statue of King George, Victoria’s son, stands.  His statue faces hers across the park. 

Our last stop in the colonial portion of the city was Trinity Church. The church is in regular use, as evidenced by the electronic display board for which hymns will be sung. The colonial past is also ever present with the plaques and memorials that hang on the walls around the church.

 

 

One of numerous plaques and memorials that hang on the
walls of Trinity Church, in memory of British soldiers.

 To continue our tour, we needed to cross this street of traffic.  In China, my group called it the zen of traffic (although zen is Japanese), but there is a definite mindset needed to negotiate street traffic in India.  Our group had not yet achieved that mindset at this point in the trip.  And I never achieved the fearlessness of Indian pedestrians.

 

 The structure above the street is Bangalore’s first metro line, which we used to return to our hotel.

 The rest of the tour took us through a typical neighborhood, and our second lesson in perspective.  Before we entered the neighborhood, Arun asked if we’d seen “Slumdog Millionaire,” to emphasize the point that what we were going to see was not a slum.  He was reminding us to check our preconceived ideas and to see a neighborhood of houses where families lived, where people went to work each day in offices and hotels and shops, and where children went to school.  It was still incredibly helpful to have Arun with us because of his knowledge of the neighborhood and the people who lived there.

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The streets were very narrow through this neighborhood, and while we had
several motorbikes pass us, I do not remember seeing a car in these streets.

 

Several of the homes had these geometric designs outside of the front door.  While on special holidays, the decorations would be more elaborate.  Arun said the designs themselves are merely decorative, a way to make the neighborhood more beautiful.  This was one of the more elaborate designs that we saw on our walk.

Some of the exterior doorways were more elaborate, like this one.  The red paste is applied as part of a personal regligious observance.  We saw similar applications of paste to carvings in the Hindu temple that we visited. 

Cows were another common feature of India.  I was surprised that most of the cows I saw in Bangalore were Holsteins, which are a common site in the upper midwest's dairylands.  Bangalore's temperatures were in the low to mid-80s F while we were there, which would explain why people are able to keep Holsteins there.  The garbage in this image is also a very typical sight in India.  Both Arun and Maya (the Teacher Foundation) emphasized the importance of keeping one's own home clean, but that an area like this would have been outside the boundaries of what any one householder was responsible, and so personal interests trumps what we would include under civic-mindedness.

 

Here is an example of where Arun's knowledge and understanding of this neighborhood were invaluable.  As we walked past this site, Arun stopped to talk to a woman whose family owns this property and these cows.  The family had recently torn down their old house were preparing to build a new three or four story house.  The family consisted of three bothers and their wives and children.  Each brother would have a floor in the new house and the lowest level of the house would be for parking the vehicles and as stabling for the cows.  Arun reminded us that all of the cows we saw belonged to someone, and many did have a sort of halter like the cow on the left.

We passed this Hindu temple on our way through the neighborhood.  At the end of the tour we visited another, much older, Hindu temple.  We also saw a mosque in the neighborhood, and several streets over we saw a gathering of Jains.  So while most Indians would identify themselves as Hindus, peoples of other faiths are present also.

As places like Bangalore have grown increasingly urbanized, the common grazing locations upon which cows and their owners depended have disappeared.  So now the cows 'graze' on the garbage that is thrown out.  This cow is eating the refuse from a community market that is in the next couple of streets.  One of the women from the Teacher Foundation said that they had seen cows trying to eat greens that someone was trying to sell and the cows had to be shooed away.

Some of the vegetables available in the market.

 

Another example of the diversity of the neighborhood.  This is a beef market, where Muslims can purchase beef.

And another example--which religious image best suits your personal religious beliefs--Lord Ganesh or Lord Jesus?

This was a small primary school tucked into a building just off the street.  We just walked in and were given a very brief tour of the building while the classes were going on.  Note that this is an English-medium school and included students up through Standard (or grade) 4.  Next door to the school, workmen were repairing a mosque, and half a block the other way was the Hindu temple that we visited next.

 

This is the exterior of the temple which Arun took us through.  It is a temple which has been here for centuries and continues to serve Hindu worshippers.  No pictures are allowed inside the temple, and we were allowed in because we wer with Arun.  While I would love to have pictures to show what the ceremony that we witnessed was like, I greatly appreciate the ban on photography.  I have always felt awkward touring a religious site which is a fully functioning center of worship.

Our walking tour of Bangalore was a truly amazing experience that helped give us some perspectives of India which served me well on the rest of my journey.

An Introduction to India

Our three-day stay Bangalore was intended to provide us with an introduction to India and India’s education system.  To put this in perspective, what would you include in a three-day orientation to the United States for a group of people who knew very little about the United States?  In what city would you base the orientation?  On what key features of American culture and society would you focus?  Now keep in mind, while the U.S. is very diverse, and more so today than in the past, we have only one ‘official’ language which the vast majority of the population speaks.  We only have 300 million people, although that does rank us third in the world for population size.  And our history spans a little over 400 years. 



In comparison, the Indian government recognizes 22 languages, and there are another 1600 minor languages or dialects spoken in India.  There is no one language which the vast majority of Indians speak, and so most Indians are multi-lingual by necessity.  In addition, most of the languages have their own written script  (Lonely Planet Phrasebooks: India, 8).   This diversity can be seen on India’s currency.  The front of a bill has an image of Mohandas Gandhi and the value of the bill in both in English and in Hindi (image 1).  A statement of the validity of the currency is included, again in English and in Hindi (image 2).  On the reverse side, the central image varies depending on the value of the bill, but all include the value of the bill in fifteen other languages (image 3).  Notice the variations in the scripts.  Being literate in one of these languages does not imply literacy in any of the other languages.



Image 1: A 10 Rupee Note 





Image 2



Image 3: The list on the left edge of the bill are some of India's other languages.



Indian civilization is over 4000 years old.  One of the world’s first civilizations began in the Indus River valley.  One of the world’s major religions (Hinduism) began in India over 3000 years ago.  The list of Indian contributions to literature, philosophy, architecture, mathematics, religion, science, and medicine is long.  Today, India is the world’s largest democracy and the second most populous nation in the world.  It is also one of the largest Muslim nations in the world, despite the fact that less than a quarter of the population is Muslim.  India is one of the BRICs, with increased importance in the global economy, especially in IT.

So, three days in Bangalore to introduce India AND India’s education system was ambitious, but with the help of the Teachers’ Foundation http://www.teacherfoundation.org/index.php/home.html and Dr. Narendra Pani, we had an excellent introduction.  Dr. Pani focused on the post-independence period and framed his presentation as a contrast between two competing perspectives, one based on Western ideas and one based on traditional Indian ideas.  While this is a somewhat gross oversimplification of Dr. Pani’s presentation, the Western view has emphasized the rule of law, while the traditional view has emphasized doing what is right.  To me, these two views seem to have two different conceptions of justice, one that expects people to follow the laws and one that expects people to do right by one another, or at least the ones a person knows.  Interestingly, the three books* I read before the trip all included this same tension between Western and traditional values/ideas as part of their explanation of modern India.

The discussion of India's education system was equally interesting.  The Indian government has identified education as one of a person's fundamental rights, and this designation is an indication of the focus being placed on education in India.  The problems, however, are numerous.  The public, or government, schools have a very poor reputation, and not without reason.  So parents with the financial means send their children to private schools, but the quality of the private schools varies widely.  Some of the private unaided schools provide an education comparable to the best schools anywhere in the world.  Many of the private aided schools focus on students from the lower end of the economic ladder, and many of them are English-medium schools, catering to the belief that the ability to speak English will provide children an opportunity for higher education and greater success economically.  In reality, all schools provide instruction in multiple languages, and most schools provide instruction in at least three languages--English, Hindi, and the state's language (ex. Gujarati, Kanada, Bengali, etc.).  We were reminded several times, however, that just because schools offer instruction in these languages does not mean that any of the instruction is high quality.  The quality and availability of teachers is another major concern.  Lower primary teachers are not required to have any training beyond high school to become teachers, and there is a shortage of high quality teachers across India.  The Teacher Foundation was asked to assist one state with teacher training, because the state has several thousand uncertified teachers who now need certification. 

These two introductions may not have been able to explain everything about India, but they did provide lenses that we could use to help make sense of our journeys across India.

*My pre-trip reading list:

• The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and Citizenship by Rajeswari sunder Rajan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003)
• India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking by Anand Giridharadas (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2011)
• In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce (New York: Anchor Books, 2007)