Nerds Only: A report on Vikramshila's school in Bigha, West Bengal

My work at Vikramshila has mostly consisted of documenting a variety of Vikramshila programs. All of my reports have been positive, and I was encouraged to drift into NGO-ese from time to time: but, nevertheless, the schools and camps I visited were founded on a fantastic educational philosophy that I think can serve as a model for development in areas beyond education. The following is a severely abridged (but still long) version of the report I wrote about the Vikramshila school in Bigha.

A little background information is in order; Bigha is a village of about 5,000 in West Bengal, known as the rice bowl of India. The Bigha school is owned by members of the community, and managed in partnership with Vikramshila. Vikramshila provides resources, technical support, pays the meager teacher salaries, and works as a facilitator.

The final goal of the school is to demonstrate that quality eudcation is possible, and that it can have a dramatic impact on a community. Government services in much of rural India are pretty poor; for example, the local government school has 600 kids and 2 teachers, one of whom rarely shows up. But the success of the Bigha School has created a public pressure to activate government services. The idea is not to become a parllel system, but to be an example of who education might look if the government were doing it right.

Any reader who gets all the way through this thing gets two gold stars.

Foundational Principles
Two interconnceted principles lay at the heart of the Bigha school project, what I will refer to as relevance and participation.

Relevance is closely connected to the constructivist school of educational philosophy that begins with John Dewey. Constructivists hold that the goal of education should not be to provide students with a particular set of skills, or with knowledge of a certain canon of writers and ideas. Instead, students should pursue their development as critical thinkers, acquiring skills and conceptual tools that let them make sense of the world around them. This, of course, precludes any universal, standardized curriculum, since each student will interact with a different part of the world, and will do so in unique ways. In order to provide a constructivist education—an education that prepares students for life—a curriculum must be tailored to the student and his or her experience; in short, it must be relevant to them on a personal level.

In the Indian educational system, too frequently, the curriculum has little or nothing to do with life in a rural village. As a result, many children drop out before completing primary school. Of those who do successfully complete their education, almost all abandon the countryside for urban centres, a testament to the kind of life for which the Indian educational system prepares its pupils.

Creating a relevant curriculum means many different things, but in all instances the child’s cultural background as well as their prior knowledge base must be taken as a starting point for learning. Consider a child learning to read. Upon entering school, each student brings along a large body of linguistic knowledge. Traditional reading pedagogies treat written letters and words as abstract entities, isolated from their relationship to spoken language. This approach dismisses the valuable background knowledge that students bring to the classroom.

A reading curriculum looks significantly different if that background knowledge is treated as a springboard for further language acquisition. Here, teachers focus on maintaining the connection between written and spoken language—that letters are phonetic symbols which represent words when they are combined. These reading techniques have proven to be effective, in part because the curriculum involves students as active participants.

The emphasis on curricular relevance is even more important when students begin reading complete sentences and passages of text. Effective readers are constantly performing the tasks of metacognition—the process of monitoring one’s own comprehension. This process requires readers to actively make meaning from the text, rather than passively receiving it. Teachers can model these skills by asking questions and leading activities which cause children to reflect on what they have read.

Monitoring one’s own comprehension simply described as asking the question, “does this make sense to me?” Whether or not a lesson or text “makes sense” to a student will of course depend on his or her prior knowledge and experience. We can see that active learning, performing metacognition, and linking material in the classroom to prior experience are parallel and mutually reinforcing processes. And they all follow from the attempt to make learning relevant to the lives of students.

Relevance can also mean integration of issues from the students’ homes and communities into class work. Medical and agricultural technologies commonly used in rural India are often poorly understood by recipients as well as practitioners. An understanding of scientific principles is fundamental for achieving control over one’s existence, and to avoid relying solely on the advice of experts. In Bigha, the school’s science curriculum is perhaps the most dramatic way that life and learning have been linked, and that the community is gaining control of scientific processes and procedures that affect their lives.

Participation is simply the involvement of all stakeholders in the management of the school. Parent and community members are those who stand to benefit the most from an effective and dynamic school; and yet, in most cases, they are often the people with the least say in how the school operates. Effective community participation ensures that teachers and administrators are held accountable for the education they provide. And since parents have such a strong interest in the success of the school, they are likely to spend a lot of time and energy addressing concerns and solving problems. Furthermore, the process of organizing, of making community decisions, of thinking critically and creatively about how to improve life in the village gives people experience as dynamic community members, and provides a site where other social agreements can form.

Participation and relevance reinforce one another. Participation is necessary to ensure that the curriculum is truly relevant—only members of the community know enough about their daily lives to determine what material the school ought to cover.

In turn, relevance is necessary to ensure participation. Students confronted with a curriculum totally detached from their daily lives are likely to drop out, and parents are likely to let them. If, on the other hand, a community sees the school as a resource benefiting children and the community as a whole, they will be willing to work to preserve and enhance that resource.

Taken together, curricular relevance and community participation can result in the elimination of the barrier between school and community. If the curriculum is relevant, then what is learned in school will constantly flow out into the community; if there is community participation, issues pertinent to the lives of students will make their way into the school. When this loop is established, a school has become a centre for community dialogue about issues important to the community, and a site where individuals can arrive at solutions to problems. The kind of school that I am describing can become a site where communities can crystallize.

Schools are particularly apt to become community centres. If a school is truly rooted in the fabric of a community, then the process of questioning and making sense of the world around us expands beyond the classroom to the community at large. As Krishna Kumar has pointed out, metacognition as a tool for successful reading is fundamentally the same as an active and critical examination of societal structures and practices. Both rely on individuals constantly asking the question, “does this make sense to me?” And when children are engaging critically with issues that are relevant to their daily live, the divide between critical thinking in life and in learning disappears. When parents and community members are involved in this process, the school has become a site for self-reflection and social change.

The next section will examine how the principles of relevance and participation are implemented in the Bigha school: and how feedback loops between school and community have been created as a result, breaking down traditional barriers between life and learning.

Agriculture
Local history is an important element of the relevant curriculum of the Bigha school. In one project, students researched the agricultural practices of Bigha and how those practices have changed over the years. While cataloging the varieties of rice planted in the village, students made a small but intriguing discovery. 30 years ago, all of the rice varieties had names in Bengali. Today, each variety is denoted by a code: IR followed by some two-digit number. Students began asking why the names of rice varieties had changed. When farmers realized they didn’t know the answer, they joined the exploration.

Teachers at the school managed to figure out that the old varieties of rice were very old, and had been replaced in the ‘70s by the high-yield varieties (or HYVs) of the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution was hailed as a triumph of modern technology—yield per acre increased dramatically, and it is estimated that the world would not currently be able to feed its population without this advance. However, the HYVs brought with them a host of other changes to agricultural practice. HYVs are only more successful than traditional strands if chemical fertilizers and pesticides are used. This use of chemical fertilizer also allowed farmers to forego crop rotation, since soil nutrients could be presumably replenished with the fertilizers. Furthermore, the seeds are much more difficult to store than traditional varieties, which mean farmers must shell out money for seed every year to MNCs.

Farmers began thinking about why the switch from traditional to HYVs occurred. They also noticed, thanks to new record keeping techniques introduced with the help of the school that average profit had been falling steadily. Although yield was indeed higher than during pre-Green Revolution years, the compromise was a steady decline in soil quality. This decline translates to increased costs for farmers, who must use more fertilizer every year. While crop rotation could help preserve soil quality, under Green Revolution techniques, crop rotation is unfeasible; when a farmer must spend so much money on fertilizer, he needs to farm as much land as possible to make up for the additional costs.

Farmers in the village expressed interest in finding new ways to farm. Vikramshila contacted an NGO specializing in agricultural issues called The Service Centre to provide technical support ant information. The school started a model garden to demonstrate crop rotation techniques, which include growing non-rice crops like mustard in off years to put nitrogen and other nutrients back into the soil. Perhaps for the first time, farmers in Bigha had options in front of them, and had access to information to help them choose the best method for their circumstance. Provided with this information about the different types of rice varieties and agricultural techniques, all the farmers in Bigha have decided to stop using fertilizers, and have introduced organic fertilizers and crop rotation. A full 80% have stopped using pesticides.

When I asked the men at a farmers meeting whether organic or chemical farming were easier, one man replied that chemical fertilizer was easier, and paid better. But, he said, after years of watching his profits fall, he realized that he couldn’t risk completely destroying the soil for short-term gains. Organic farming, which is more labor intensive and less profitable, is sustainable in the long term.

Currently, the farmers have yet to abandon the HYVs, but Vikramshila and the Service Centre have begun the conversation about switching back to traditional varieties of rice, which respond better to organic farming techniques.

The story of the rice varieties in Bigha is a prime example of the loops between life and learning that occur when a school’s curriculum is relevant to daily life and involves participation from many members of the community. A school project about local history (and thus directly relevant to the students’ lives) initiated a conversation with the village’s farmers. They, in turn, became intrigued by the topic. The students and farmers posed a question (“why do all the varieties of rice now have numbers for names?”) which became the centrepiece of a new phase of the curriculum, which ultimately led to a shift in farming techniques.

Gender
One objective of Vikramshila has been to encourage the participation of women in the school and the community at large. Without official data, I can only speculate about the magnitude of the school’s gender effect; however, organizers and community members alike report that the enrollment of girls in the school has led to an increase in the average age of marriage and, as a result, the average age of a mother when she has her first child. Previously, even if a child were to complete primary school, there was no further educational option. The Eco Club and adolescent girls group provide an opportunity for girls to continue learning, thus delaying the time when a girl’s family decides that it is time for her to be married off. Furthermore, the adolescent girl’s group addresses basic issues of reproductive health. According to organizers, women in the village have repeated requested such information because they feel that they frequently do not have ultimate control over the number of children they have.

When I asked a group of teenage girls in Big, what they enjoyed about being members of the Village School’s Eco Group, one girl responded that she liked sharing knowledge about health and the environment with family and neighbors, and gave her esteem in the eyes of her community members. This, she said, is a “tremendous feeling.” Having the power to engage in inquiry about her world provides both self-satisfaction and respect from members of the community. Through the club, they have attended various trainings in Kolkata on various topics—from disposal and use of human waste products to the production of toothpaste and detergent from local plants. The Eco Club members have also recently undertaken a reforestation project.

This kind of education-—where students are partners in the process of learning, where the curriculum is tailored to and based in the lives of the students, and where the goal of education is overall empowerment—-is what Paulo Friere in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed calls liberating: and, therefore, humanizing. The process of learning itself is beneficial, because it conveys to individuals their capacity to engage the world through inquiry.

However, while the school has benefited the women of Bigha to some extent, organizers lament that women’s direct participation in the school has been essentially zero. None of the school’s teachers are women, nor are any of the participants in the farmers meetings or parents meetings. The community’s ownership of the school that I have been describing has, in truth, been mostly male ownership. While Vikramshila organizers hope that the school continues to open opportunities for village’s women, the community’s male leaders have thus far not recognized women’s empowerment as a goal.

Conclusion
One issue that I have not addressed in this assessment of the Bigha school is Vikramshila’s role. While many efforts have been made to ensure community ownership and participation, the fact remains that an NGO came into the village from outside, with outside money, and began the process of opening the school. On the one hand, we can view the school as a neutral space where learning and community organizing can occur. On the other hand, organizers at Vikramshila certainly have values and goals for the school that are not always matched by the values and goals of residents of Bigha. Is the community development in Bigha change from within, or change from with out?

We must conclude, I believe, that both processes are occurring simultaneously, and are in fact always in tension with one another. It is important to realize that Bigha is not homogenous—different individuals and groups in the community have different aims. It would be a mistake to ask whether Vikramshila was acting with or against the interests of the typical resident of Bigha, since such a person does not exist. It would be misguided to let Vikramshila speak as the voice of Bigha; but so too would it be inaccurate, for example, to listen only to the concerns of Bigha’s men, who dominate not only the management of the Bigha school but local politics as well. At a meeting with the girls of the Eco Club, I asked how long the girls wanted to continue their participating. One girl answered, “I want to continue until I die!”

“But girls stop coming after they are married, don’t they?” I asked. One of the girls, who had recently been married, said that she came to the group whenever she stayed at her mother’s house, but that her in-laws, with whom she lives, do not permit her to attend. She seemed to have no intention to thwart the demands of her husband’s family, but she had no desire to comply with societal norms when they weren’t enforced, either.

It seems to me that the restrictions that this young woman’s in-laws put upon her are unequivocally oppressive; and yet, I realize that she would not describe her social status in those terms. But the Bigha school has provided her a place in which she has had the ability to pursue her own self-actualization; the eco group has provided her with knowledge and skills which have generated self-confidence and respect among her community members.

So: does this model of education and social change involve the imposition of foreign feminist values onto a place where they have no meaning? Any intervention in a community by an NGO presumably rests upon a set of values and beliefs about what is good, and what constitutes progress. The Bigha school has been successful because Vikramshila and community members have found areas of agreement, and worked on those. It turns out that these areas are far more common than issues of disagreement—if the converse had been true, I suppose that no school would have formed in the first place. Beginning with the principles of curricular relevance and community participation ensures that development occurs with constant reference to the traditions and values of the people who live in Bigha. Having control over one’s life in this way, having the space to ask the question, “does this make sense to me?” is insulation against imposing a narrow set of structures and processes on villagers in the name of progress.