Vidyodaya Model School, Gudalur

Deep within the Gudalur valley, bounded by the Mudumalai, Wyanad and Bandipur tiger reserves, the Viswa Bharati Vidyodaya Trust has developed a school which is attracting the neglected children of Adivasi tribes into primary education “What use is your education to us? It will only take away our children. Your schools talk about changing the environment for the better, but is this not the best? We want to preserve it just as it was given to us by our ancestors. Who will be here to protect the trees, the streams, fish, the elephant and deer when we are gone?” These words spoken by a Paniya tribal leader 25 years ago prompted the promotion of the Vidyodaya School and Viswa Bharati Vidyodaya (VBV) Trust in Gudalur, Tamil Nadu. Gudalur town (pop. 40,000) is situated in the Gudalur valley, bounded by the Mudumalai, Wyanad and Bandipur tiger reserves. An estimated 20,000 Adivasi (scheduled tribe) population including the Paniya, Kurumba, Kattunaicker and Irular tribes live in 320 hamlets within a 50-km radius of the town, some of them inside the tiger reserves. Tea and coffee have been cultivated in the Gudalur valley for the past two centuries. The plantations, however, have had an adverse effect on the Adivasi people, drawing them out of their forest habitats on to the margins of large estates. Moreover in the 1980s, a Central government declaration which transformed their natural habitats into ‘national forests’, deprived the Adivasi communities of ownership of their traditional land, food, water, medicinal herbs and even their spirits and sacred groves. “This alienation of the Adivasis resulted in the children of this community suffering discrimination and neglect within the traditional school system which wasn’t at all interested in their rich cultural heritage. The Vidyodaya School was started in 1991 to address the educational neglect and socio-economic backwardness of this community,” recalls B. Ramdas, managing trustee of VBV Trust. Currently, the Vidyodaya School has 100 K-V children mentored by eight teachers. HISTORY The promoters of Vidyodaya are Gudalur-born Ramdas, a former lawyer-turned-educationist, and his wife Rama Shastri, a medical technology graduate of Madras University. Disillusioned with living in increasingly crowded Chennai, the duo accepted an assignment in Pondicherry to work in a school for ostracised children of a leprosy-stricken community. After almost a decade and having acquired considerable teaching experience, Ramdas and Rama returned to their native Gudalur and began home schooling their own two children together with several tribal children on their ancestral family farm. With the home-schooled children refusing to attend the local government school, in 1993 Rama and Ramdas registered the Viswa Bharati Vidyodaya Trust which formally promoted the Vidyodaya School, an alternative education institution with its own grassroots pedagogy and development philosophy. UNIQUE PEDAGOGY Developing a curriculum and pedagogy to teach Adivasi children was a challenge because Ramdas and Rama’s experience had been with middle class, urban children. Each of the Adivasi tribes spoke a different language, none of them connected with Tamil which is the medium of instruction in government…