Dreaming the impossible dream

Sitting through a charged three-day conference with ministers, bureaucrats, corporate honchos, Ramon Magsaysay award-winners and TED presenters flitting in and out, I had goosebumps. From the sheer excitement of watching a “crazy dream” unfold.

Imagine if these 1,250 delegates from South Asia, mainly India, managed to really pull off the promise they were making: to make India totally literate by 2017. Or by 2018, or keep working till it is done, as one of them said.

At the Rotary South Asia Literacy Summit in Pune last fortnight, Magsaysay award-winner Shantha Sinha, whose MV Foundation has put a staggering one million children in schools, summed it up neatly: “You have to be mad, or crazy — and I am both — to take a pledge like this. But with your reach and resolve you can do it. If you could make India polio-free, you can do this too.”

The takeaway from Shanta, and Sugata Mitra, Professor of Education Technology at Newcastle University, UK and winner of the 2013 TED prize, both powerful speakers, was exciting.

As incoming Rotary International president (from Sri Lanka) RK Ravindran told the gathering, when you had as big a dream as making India and the rest of South Asia totally literate, you needed two perspectives. One was that given by the bird that was asked by two little rocks on the mountainside what was on the other side. There are houses, cities, rivers and valleys, said the bird. But the mouse said: “There is earth, grass, trees and forests.” Mitra, who conducted his famous “hole in the wall” experiment in Delhi slums 16 years ago, when he installed an internet-enabled computer in a public place to prove that with these aids a group of unsupervised children could learn anything, said, “Since then I did experiment after experiment to find the limit saying: ‘Ok, this they won’t be able to do.’ I still haven’t found it.”

Coming down heavily on a “unidirectional education system designed 200 years ago by employers who are dead, and for clerks and civil servants” that required only two things — writing legibly and some maths — he said now both these can be done by the computer.

Today, the only inexpensive way to take quality education to the remotest corners of the world, which had no access to well- trained teachers, was “by building schools in the cloud”.

Many years ago he established ‘The Granny Cloud’ model of education with British grandmothers — mostly retired school teachers who missed both teaching and children — using computers and internet giving free an hour of their time to teach children, and then beaming those classes through Skype across the world.

And with some of his money from the TED prize, he has built schools in the cloud, including in India. These have classrooms furnished with a few large screens with broadband connectivity. The children, who are visible through a glass wall — that’s the caveat, because one child in a closed room in front of a computer screen is not safe —, are allowed to explore the world and learn by themselves. Questions appropriate to their age , such as nine-year-olds asking why and how nails grow and why they have to be cut , can be asked. “In 40 minutes you’ll get evolutionary biology and a whole lot of things propping up,” points out Mitra.

He has built one such school in the cloud in Shantiniketan, West Bengal, where there is no electricity, no healthcare, no primary school. It is solar-powered with a mast that sticks out 50 feet from the ground to catch the signal — “It has all kinds of technical problems but there it is.”

He calls this model SOLE – Self organised Learning Environment – and teachers love it. But the hitch comes at Class X; when the children will have to solve the traditional question paper and the Internet will be taken away from them.

An exasperated Mitra disclosed that he has urged governments in every continent to allow internet in the exam hall, but is yet to get one ‘yes’!

Shantha, on the other hand, is happy to get children into any school. In sending one million children to school her organisation had to stop 20,000 child marriages, rescue 15,000 children from bonded labour, and thousands of trafficked children too, without any stigma being attached to them and giving them treatment for possible HIV/AIDS.

Indian education today needs activists like her who succeed because they are non-confrontationist. Grit, passion, and of course “madness” she has in plenty, but her story needs to be told and replicated because she believes in consensus, not confrontation. Rescuing children from adverse situations, or just getting them into schools is not a “soft task”, Shantha warned the enthralled audience.

Such work is ridden with conflicts because if groups of children are out of school there are hidden power structures that operate and profit from keeping them out of school. So the way to fight this huge battle is to learn from her approach — there cannot be any enemies in this programme. You won’t get far if you take an adversarial position while rescuing children from bonded labour and treat employers, parents, school teachers, or the government as callous, greedy, no-good. “Our programme starts with the assumption that everyone is an ally, a partner.”

What a fantastic and positive approach to solve problems. Bolstered by that little kink that makes you dream on impossible dreams.

“This dream to put all the children into school, make India totally literate is even crazier and more revolutionary than making India polio-free,” but, said the feisty woman, the resolve pushed away her decision to retire. “Now I am all charged up and we’ll put 20,000 more children in school.”

Imagine if we become the first country to say yes to Mitra on allowing internet in exam halls. And join hands with “crazy” Shantha to return their childhood to tens of thousands of our children, and give them hope that their tomorrow will be much better than their miserable today?

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