Anniversary Special Comment

All children need equal opportunityShukla Bose”Art for art‚s sake” and “education for life and not a living” are lofty pronouncements that most of us have heard as we grew up. But sadly, we represent only 20 percent of the population of this potentially great nation. For the rest of the population, education is just a gateway into the jobs market. My real brush with this reality began when a few class X students of some Bangalore Municipal Corporation schools where we run classes, told me that they would prefer to write the school-leaving SSLC exam and fail ‚ rather than pass ‚ which was an endeavour that our non-government organisation Parikrma, had embarked upon with great energy and passion. The reason: passing SSLC actually disqualified them from getting a factory job! And they couldn‚t dream beyond a factory job‚¦I am not a specialist in academics nor a trained social worker. My only claim to experience is several years of running organisations and making them viable and profitable. So when I decided to quit corporate life while I still considered myself young and energetic, it was with great trepidation that I approached educationists for advice on how to start up a school for abandoned, neglected street and slum children in the garden city of Bangalore. What I received was a volley of negatives ‚ what could not be done and what was not possible. My response was that if educationists themselves believed that the education system devised by them could not equip students from marginalised sections of society to break out of their poverty cycle, then why the elaborate farce of getting them to school? What appalled me was that I encountered so many doyens of education who seemed to believe that providing minimal, rock-bottom quality education to the children of the poor was more than enough because they had never had it before. My argument to them was ‚ and still is ‚ precisely for this reason, deprived children should be given much more attention in terms of inputs to enable them to catch up with mainstream children. This provokes the counter-argument of scalability behind which many specialists and for that matter, the government, hide to justify lack of quality in public education. Yet the moot point is, should we scale down inputs to broaden reach or scale up quality to guarantee impact and create a snowball effect? Anyone who says that both are possible, needs to do a reality check and question why it hasn‚t happened for half a century. The more I spoke to specialists the more determined I became to do it differently. It was this shared passion of a few believers to deliver comparable quality education to the children of the poor and disadvantaged that prompted the promotion of Parikrma Humanity Foundation 18 months ago. Currently the foundation runs three schools in Bangalore with an aggregate enrollment of 480 slum and orphaned children. These are English medium ICSE affiliated schools for children who about a year…