Educated to being Un-Educated!!

I grew up attending a very well-to-do school, completed my graduation in a top-class University and have two letters CA prefixed to my name too - so I can safely call myself "educated" in all aspects, can I?

For folks who have read my old blogs, are well aware that I stay in a small hamlet now and for those of you who are reading my blog for the first time, I stay on a farm in a small village of Karnataka.

So what triggered this blog - yesterday my husband received this call from a guy in our village stating that some outsider was ploughing around 10 acres of land near our village. This plot of 10 acres is situated right next to our village where the cattle of the village graze. It is a rocky terrain with no water access and very slight chances of a successful borewell. This whole area around this plot is called as "Baare" by the villagers. Historically, this was the grazing land for cattle which belonged to the village as a whole. No individual was the owner for this ever!

Then, who was this outsider who was ploughing this, you ask? Well, one Mr.V has landed in our village claiming that he was granted this plot by the Government as compensatory land for the submersion of his land due to construction of Gorur Dam in 1986.

Not getting into the nitty-gritty of this situation, the whole purpose of narrating this story of Mr.V was to bring to focus the importance of having all age group in a community.
Luckily, my village demographics is very diverse - we have people who were well educated and have moved to the cities and who visit their ancestral house for festivals, we have the old generation of grandmas and grandpas living in the village always, and then we also have the generation between the age group of 30-50 because most of these folks have not completed their formal education. They have passed matriculation at the most I guess. So, with no better opportunities, they were forced to stay back in their ancestral village and look after their agricultural lands. Because of this staying back, we also have children in the village! I can safely say that we are a full house in terms of demographic diversity.

How is this connected to Mr.V's story, then? We were able to look into this Mr.V's papers and stand together as a village and demand him to go to court to claim this land as we had sturdy young population too in our group. If not, we had to expect the generation above 60 to look into this matter and could not expect much results as these people in our village are in the phase where they say - "Oh, we are in the last leg of our life, why should we now worry about those 10 acres! Let Mr.V plough that land anyways."

A similar situation happened in our neighboring village called Madenur, where the contractor who was alloted the jobwork to repair their roads, dug up the old road which was quite tenable and then realised that that road is not in his contract. He just left the road in worse condition than before and those folks just could not do anything, any guesses why!? That entire road houses families whose children are very well educated in the formal sense and are all settled outside the country or in big metropolis cities of India. The folks who stay there are whom I call Ajjis and Thathas - they are all aged above 70 for sure. Who would stand up and shout at the contractor when only such demography exists. The contractor so easily slid away!

This is a mirror depiction of the current state of all our villages. And when India is for sure 70-30 in terms of land ratio split between cities and villages - imagine how 70% of our land is left to the vultures to feast on with no guarding eyes or concerned hearts!

This time I will end my blog at this juncture so that you all spend sometime to think about the state of our villages and how they are being exploited due to dearth of 'chowkidhaars'!!!

Road of Responsibility...

It has been few weeks since I have started to visit our village Government school to teach the children whatever little English I know. And through this, I try to share my knowledge of the world and expand their mindsets too!
In this process, while I might have not taught them too much, they have taught me tonnes of things to which my awareness had not ventured before.

This school is a true depiction of a rural Indian Government Lower Primary School - there are only 9 kids in the entire school as most of the village children go to nearby private schools (called 'convents' in the village) and the school has only one teacher for all of them, by school I mean a single room building.

The first day of my visit came as a shock to my urban-grown private-school educated self because for me a school means a big building with a huge play ground, numerous classrooms, different teachers for each class and subject and a class full of at least 35-40 children.

Putting all this aside, I started to write this blog because I have started to notice the trending attitude of parents who presume their responsibilities towards molding their children ends with them sending the kids to school. The school has to fit this never-fully fitting shoes of responsibility of  molding the children to responsible, sensible and decent adults with just 6 hours everyday.

I have been observing the children of the government school and their families. The mother's schedule in the morning is to cook breakfast for the child and bathe them and send them off to school. In the evening, once the child comes back, their duty is to ensure they complete their homeworks, prepare for any upcoming examinations, prepare dinner and put them to sleep. Does this mean that the role of a mother is limited to only preparing meals and maintaining the schedule of their child? What happened to all the great stories where they emphasised that the child is molded majorly by the mother and her upbringing? Let me clarify that I am not penning this blog down to blame the parents and demean their parenting skills. I am writing this more with a questionable mindset which wants to examine the present education system and the family dynamics.

With the formal education being given such high value, the mothers in the village who majorly have not crossed middle school, have devalued their own roles in their child's life. They have labeled themselves as unworthy of grooming a child and depend irrationally on the sole teacher to carve and guide their child's future.

Out of my own experience and personal story, I say that irrespective of the mother being formally educated or not, a mother plays a godlike role in every child's life. The child's character, personality is immensely influenced by the family and more so by the mother.
While the rural mothers have devalued their roles, the fathers simply choose to be absent from their child's life in entirety. I hardly see fathers in the village be a part in their child's life except maybe to take them to cities during festivals and buy them new clothes. The only mention of fathers I have had from the kids so far is - "My father brought these new bangles for me or my father got me this new bottle". Except this I have not heard a single child say that her/his father played this game together or that the father narrated this story to them last night.

What has happened to the role of a mother and father in the rural setting is all thanks to the monstrous role of formal education stealthily becoming a larger influence than one's own family!

I have started a very tiny step in my village by trying to break this image of formal education and get back the parents role in their children's lives. I urge each one of you who reads this blog to give this topic further thought and take a step in any way possible and make a tiny difference in your child's or any child for that matter and make all the adults around a child realise that they also play a huge role in a child's life just as much as a teacher in the school does.

A child who can read ABCD or add up 2 and 3 or recite Twinkle Twinkle Star is not guaranteed to become an emphatic and sensible adult by themselves. They all need to see those qualities - especially creativity, sensibility, ability to help without expecting anything in return, in us adults who surround them outside of those 6 hours that they spend in the school.

Spend an hour narrating a story to a child, get the kids in your apartment block together and sing a song with them, put all the kids of your street together and take them for a hike to a nearby nature spot, help the kids around you to identify the local birds in your area, help them to see the beauty in life and not just read out ABCD from a book!