Education
INDIA '97:
a step away from
the 21st century,
- over 49% of the worlds illiterates are in India;
- of these 64.3% are female;
- The average amount of schooling per Indian adult is a mere 3 years;
- And to make matters worse, India is one of the few countries in the world with no national laws on compulsory primary education
“When we have to work to fill our stomachs, where do we have time for luxuries such as going to school?”
There is still reverence for learning in the Indian villages. But the sight of
- the educated umemployed whiling away their time in tea shops;
- the every day occurance of young people ashamed to do manual work because they are ‘educated’;
- The knowledge that a school leaving certificate often means that a young person after 10 years of schooling can just about manage Class 4 textbooks;
act as powerfull disincentives for the poor to invest their children’s time into learning. Learning is now not considered a way out of poverty: it is seen as a handicap; something that not even allow their children to earn the few rupees that they do. And as a result, the poor, the very people who could benefit the most from education are the ones who have the least time for it.
SAMUHA believes...
...that while literacy may not itself lead to development meaningful development cannot take place without the means to lean....
SAMUHA articulates this belief through a resource group that it has set up to work excluxively to make learning meaningful. The resource group is called SUVIDYA
‘Su’ is a prefix that signifies ‘good’, while ‘Vidya’ means ‘education’. And SUVIDYA defines good education to mean experiential learning: it promotes maths and science laboratories, and Kannada (the local language) kits.
