Global voices India: The true gift of education is more giving

Educators visit India to spread expertise and learn a more important lesson in community.

Earlier this year, I traveled to the Indian states of Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, and Kerala with educators from California State University, Fresno. We arrived there full of pedagogical advice from years of training preservice teachers, work and study in educational leadership, and the distilled essence of graduate programs we coordinated in reading, literacy, and bilingual education.

Overnight, we switched from being experts to novices, eager to learn from our hosts.

A fortnight into our trip, we broke from our visits to schools and universities and set out on a houseboat through the waterways and fishing villages in the lush backwaters of Kerala. As we sipped drinks amid picturesque waterways and fishing villages, we realized the trip was shifting our perceptions. We hadn’t anticipated feeling humbled as we observed the quiet successes in schools and classrooms. Overnight, we switched from experts to novices, eager to learn from our hosts. In school after school, college after college, we encountered principals, teachers, and students deeply committed to learning, service, and character development. Whether a tribal orphanage and residential school run by Hindu monks in the remote village of Arua or a school for privileged children of the elite in the bustling city of Hyderabad, whether we spoke to the undergraduate students in a women’s college in Cuttack or the devout nuns who managed and taught at a Catholic teachers college in the port city of Cochin, the commitment was equally apparent.

Most striking was the high value placed on education, not only as an end that would result in personal success but as a means for uplifting society as a whole. They regard education as a gift whose bounty must be shared with others, an attitude that we don’t see often enough in U.S. schools and colleges. The American emphasis on the latest standards, annual test scores, A.P. exams, the college admission process, and the fierce sense of competition they engender tend to push aside valuing education for social good.

A humanitarian lens

Students at Balashram School in Arua hail from the most impoverished families and communities in Odisha. Many are victims of a super cyclone that devastated the state in 1999 and decimated homes, farmland, and livestock, leaving these children orphaned and homeless. Others are from tribal communities who live and work on the fringes of society, making their living entirely from the forest. Most share a history of stark poverty, hunger, and disease. The children were either abandoned or given up by parents who could not provide for them.

Such children might give up hope, or they might dream of escaping the soul-sucking poverty that tore apart their families and nearly destroyed their lives. What is unexpected and astonishingly beautiful is that these children continue to hope for personal success, but that such hope is entwined with their intentions to help others. A 10-year-old tells us he will become an architect so he can return to his village and build houses for the homeless. A little girl confides that she is planning to be a gynecologist so the women of her town will no longer die in childbirth. Yet another young boy says he will become a teacher because education is a gift that will eradicate the ignorance among villagers that inevitably leads to violence.

How do these young children, from ages 4 to 14, come by such a noble worldview? From what we could see, peace and spirituality pervade the school environment. The monks, the brahmacharis (monks in training), and the teachers all model a generous attitude toward others. The school staff cares for students day and night. The school’s founder hails from the same area and has returned home to help his community. All of these figures are role models for students. Whenever calamity or disaster befalls the region, Balashram School students are the first to help those who are suffering by providing water, blankets, and meals. This urge to help is also apparent in their dealings with each other, since the older students make sure younger ones are cared for and content. There is no space here for bullying. Rather, mentoring each other is emphasized. In addition to the spiritual environment, there is rigorous academic training, a fact that impressed us all deeply. A fellow traveler describes her experience at the school:

The children and teachers we met transcend any glowing description I can offer! This was a place full of color and life and love. The children were beautiful in all ways possible. We saw very young children in kindergarten chanting and singing their English lessons. We saw teachers using technology to enhance their lessons with media. We saw studious and focused middle school students hard at the work of algebra. These children did not look as if they bore the histories of abject poverty and pain. They were thriving now! They learn three languages, they create beautiful art and dance and music. They have daily physical fitness, and we even observed a martial arts class in action. This is a place where the whole child is educated; mind, body, and soul. There was a grace and gentleness in the teachers and leaders that seems to stem from the mutual respect for all taught by the school’s founder.

The children start and end their day with prayer and meditation. They have character education classes where they debate right and wrong, and build their sense of ethics. The chant that starts their day is taken from the Sanskrit oral tradition: Let all the beings in all the worlds be happy.

Their daily chant made us reflect on how we could import this sense of community welfare and selfless service into our own programs. If a school with absolutely no parental support and very limited resources could get students to see the world from such a perspective, then what might be possible even in our underserved and under-resourced schools, where teachers and administrators often complain about lack of parental involvement and lack of resources? How might we replace bullying with this idea of the strong helping the weak?

In our schools, we try to address the problem of inequity by providing as many services and helplines as we can for those who want to better themselves. While this is laudable, where is the push for those who do become successful to give back and to help others? Perhaps if we built this emphasis into our teaching from the very outset, students would assume the same perspective, and many more students could be helped than through federal and state programs alone. As one of my colleagues puts it, “I hope to share a bit of India with my students by passing on a vision to future educators that challenges them to teach others in their lives, not just to do well, but to do good. I want them to see the full color of kindness and to understand the power and potential for good in all of their students.”

The privilege of being privileged

The next school we visited was very different from Balashram School. Located in big, busy Hyderabad, in an area known as Tech City due to the large technology concerns there, Indus School has extensive funding, substantial resources, and a clientele of extremely wealthy students, mostly children of CEOs and international businessmen. Families pay hefty fees for the school, whose serene campus has gymnasiums, swimming pools, horse riding facilities, and fully equipped labs and computer rooms. The school caters to boarding and day students.

From the start, the school grooms students to be leaders. When we visited, students were electing school officers during morning assembly, with candidates ranging from ages 10 to 16, speaking eloquently about their qualifications and their platform. In their classes, Indus School students engage in critical thinking as young as age 5. In 1st grade, for example, children were learning about transportation. While they were immersed in coloring cars and buses, the teacher asked them to think about which modes of transport were least damaging to the environment and why. Students had to think about the effects of pollution and how their choices could affect their lives and the lives of others.

Although these students are surrounded by opulence, a strong component of their education is service. Indus School teachers have adopted a nearby village school where they teach once a week. Indus students tutor lower-grade children at that school and care for a community garden, which provides vegetables and fruits for the school’s families. Students are taught to help people less fortunate by contributing their own skills and providing service however they can.

Although Indus School students are undeniably privileged and being groomed to attend Ivy League schools in preparation for executive and leadership positions, students also are learning that their privilege is a privilege, not a right. They are learning to use their privilege to help others.

Private schools and schools for the gifted in the U.S. emphasize providing more challenging courses, extracurricular activities and resources to hone students’ competitive edge. Perhaps U.S. schools could build more service programs into the curriculum so students emerge not only prepared for successful careers but prepared to work for the betterment of society. The ability to see the universal benefit of helping those less fortunate is especially important for those born to privilege.

Begging for pens

Our houseboat continued on the tranquil Kerala backwaters. The captain stopped before sunset and secured the boat to the shore that stretched out in a broad vista of emerald green rice paddies. From there, we set out in a long canoe through the narrow canals cutting through tiny fishing hamlets. Children ran along the banks, shouting at us. They were unkempt and barefoot with holes in their shirts and tattered shorts so we guessed that they were begging. But when they caught up to our canoe, we heard clearly what they were asking in English: “Madam, do you have a pen?”

When children think of education not as a punishment but as a gift, as a means to success rather than a painful exercise in futility, perhaps then they will want to spread it.

It was a shock for all of us. The last thing we were expecting them to ask was for pens, the basic tool for literacy and the symbol for education and all the opportunity it promises. It was a heartrending moment, in part because we had no pens to give them but more so because we realized the thirst for knowledge among these children. If they could have gained the education that both the Balashram School and the Indus School provide, I believe they would have used it to improve the lives of the villagers who live and work in the hamlets, bathing and washing their clothes in the waters of the canal that sustains them. When children think of education not as a punishment but as a gift, as a means to success rather than a painful exercise in futility, perhaps then they will want to spread it.

Our trip to India was bittersweet. We were inspired by how schools are transforming education by emphasizing its power to effect change and improve conditions for all. However, we also saw that far too many children, like those who begged for pens, were still unable to fully take part in the process, despite their eagerness.