The first story in this book, which has over 110 stories, hooked me. It describes a meeting that starts at 6 pm as sunlight fades and goes on late into the evening. About 70 parents have arrived for a meeting with the school headmaster and teachers. A young teacher who is good at public speaking starts the meeting. Many speeches are made. The room, now dark, is lit with petromax. One parent reports that a toilet for girls is being built, another promises to ensure that a teacher is hired. There is a demand for computers. One man breaks down and says that he has moved his children from a private school because this is “their school”.

Clearly Behar is overwhelmed by this experience. This is a story dated 2010 when he moved from a corporate career to head the Azim Premji Foundation, and recounted in a newspaper column. The parents were quarrymen and labourers and the school was in Kanive Koppalu, a village of 310 families in Mandya district in Karnataka.

At the end of his column, he reflects: why does it seem so difficult to bring everything together in this country of 1.3 million government schools (the largest public school system in the world). His insight -- it has to be local. He also credits the policy decision of School Development and Monitoring Committees (SDMC) that allowed this to happen.

A Matter of the Heart, a travel book that chronicles Behar’s experiences at work at the Azim Premji Foundation, is a compilation of all his columns. Behar is “Ziddi” in his own words and wants to make education work for India and many of the protagonists in his columns are very ordinary people, mostly Government school teachers doing extraordinary things. They are “ziddi” too. Behar finds them unaware of what they are doing and compares them to an elite marathon runner who runs 40 kilometers frequently like it is most normal. 

Many of them are innovating and employing pedagogy that any elite urban school would envy. But they are doing so in hostile geographies, with very little support or resources and for children of parents from marginalised communities. They handle learners of multiple grades in one class and often these children speak a dialect and don’t understand the language being spoken in class.

Behar understands how complex a job a teacher has and feels that they are central to education and argues for agency for them. His foundation is helping building an ecosystem that will support them. He points out how ill-trained they are for what they have to do – all it takes to become a primary school teacher is to pass grade twelve and train for a two year DEd diploma. “Will you hand over a bunch of children to your 18-year-old?” he asks rhetorically.

However, even these teachers have accomplished what most of us cannot not do with our RWA. In a village in Gulbarga there is a school on stilts. On probing, he finds that an aanganwadi worker and a lone school teacher who started a school in a temporary structure had got that school built after battling with the panchayat for land for three whole years. The panchayat was not willing to give land because children going to a school would be from another tribe. After much to and fro they gave them a piece of land prone to flooding so the duo built it on stilts!

The teachers not only fight for a school building, they solve social issues like making bridges between castes in the village, innovate pedagogy, convince local business men to contribute for resources, they have also voluntarily formed learning groups and meet frequently over the weekends and school holidays. They often have to travel very long distances in buses or by cycle to get to these meetings.

In these forums they watch constitutional assembly debates and discuss it, watch an Iranian movie set in a village and directed by Abbas Kiarostami, make inexpensive teaching learning material for maths and some have even made well scripted, well edited locally relevant short movies.

There are 15 such forums in two districts in Rajasthan alone. Each story also has innovative titles often inspired by movies – for instance “Gangs of Malpura”. Did all this just happen organically? No, the foundation has vision of 25 years for change to manifest and has already worked for a decade investing in the network to support education. It also works with the Government structure created to support training and education.

There are several communities that the foundation has created. Bal-Mela is one of them. In one story, Behar is visiting a mela where 35 schools from 35 villages were participating. He stops at a stall, marvels at the knowledge that a 12-year-old has about soils and how confidently he speaks. The exhibits cover a wide range of subjects and all made from inexpensive material and the children speak spontaneously and are not spewing what they learnt by rote. The village community had hosted the mela which included making meals for all the children and teachers. You get to understand that there have been 34 melas involving 400 schools in that district in Karnataka.

The author has the knack of quickly sliding into a meaningful conversation with just about anybody. One instance is when he offers to carry the luggage of an elderly woman at the Rudrapur station and walks with her. At other times, when he enters a classroom, he introduces himself as Mahatma Gandhi or Narendra Modi and children crack up and open up. So he gets to host class discussions on a variety of topics and also share his experiences. From these talks he knows what has been going on in class. He doesn’t let go there. He then learns from the teacher about what, why and how they do.

The columns have a human story in the place, history, recent happenings, demography and also end with a reflection. Sometimes these insights become a full research report. Behar credits his colleagues in the foundation with extraordinary research capability. Once he asks a parent what was the purpose of sending the child to school and the answer he gets is: “There is no respect in this world without education!” This results in the commission of a field study titled – Education Expectations, Aspirations and Structural Constraints (Azim Premji University). Over 25 percent of the parents conveyed the importance of education for broader social issues other than earning and an overwhelming 96 per cent percent said it is equally important for both boys and girls!

Some teachers take on even more. Gomathi, a primary school teacher in Puducherry has translated the entire National Education Policy (NEP) framework of 486 pages into Tamil so that more teachers could get involved. During the pandemic he visited a village where the teachers were engaging children in a large temple ground in small groups because they did not want them to have a gap. In a school in the forest in the mountains, there were two children who had lost their mother. The father, a daily wage labourer had to travel to work many times and Afzal and Anjum just went home with the teacher. The teachers reached out to children who did not come to school. They took care of the baby siblings that the children brought to school. And even with all this, they got the children to learn. Two teachers in Chohthan in Barmer learnt English so that the children could speak English.

The parents too are often very involved. In a village school, in Khamaria in Raipur, there is a discussion on how to make the school architecture a learning space like for example marking angles that children would see as a door opens. The villagers had got this idea from a trip they had made to a Government school 75 kilometers away in a tractor trolley!

As you go through the book, you begin to get the idea that there is a complex web to support schools. In one of the pieces, Behar talks about how history was being explored among the Cluster Resource Persons (CRPs) in Surpur in 2014. CRPs are Government school teachers who provide support to a cluster of eight to ten schools. This discussion was between 12 CRPs in the district. He observes that they talked about methods of history, sources, importance of local history (which is not available in a textbook), the geography that shaped the history and the discomfort that they felt in discussing recent history. This is the ideal that any history curriculum designer would hope for.

Privatopia does not work

There are six sections in the book. In the second section all the columns are about what public education should be. The author cites research to say that “Privatopia” does not work in any country and India by far has the largest private education sector in the world. He makes a case for what is needed to make public education successful. One recommendation is for a separate “Academic cadre” in administration.

He states that education is political. His own politics is evident when he makes a jibe about people saying plastic surgery was invented in India using Lord Ganesh as an example. This, I felt was a lacunae in Behar’s education like most people my generation. India has a huge heritage in maths and science and there is abundant evidence. Vaisheshika Sutra by Rishi Kanada and Sushruta Samhita by Sushruta are examples. In fact NCERT has two volumes of well-researched books on Indian Knowledge Systems in diverse fields. Even when Behar philosophises on what the purpose of education is, the Indian perspectives are missing.

But nevertheless this journey has changed Behar as a person deeply. He himself cites an example. One afternoon in a school in Barmer, in blazing hot sun, he notices a girl sitting on the verandah. Some goats wander in and she gets up and pumps water that collects in a puddle and the goats slurp. “Water is so precious here and you gave so much to them” he says. “They were thirsty” she replies. After the girl went away, the English teacher who was also forced to teach maths remarked “Maths nahi padaa saka to pyaar-mohabat se jeena to sika sakthe hain”.  This experience moves Behar and when he gets back to Bangalore, he sees the two stray abandoned horses near his home through the girl’s eyes and tries to find them a home.

Most stories in this book are human stories and the writer is a master crafter. He also travels 100 days in a year to some of the most backward districts in the country. He has poured his soul into this book and it is a good read for anyone. It is a must read for anyone mildly concerned with education. It will leave one with a heart full of hope and possibilities.

(The reviewer, a former technology journalist, is Global Perspectives facilitator at Prakriti School)

Check out the book on Amazon

About the Book

A Matter of the Heart: Education in India

Anurag Behar

Westland Nonfiction

₹599 ; 392 pages

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