The class syndrome

Yohan's Xmas tree in the making

I usually sit there reading my book, how much ever long the flight is. It is not my cup of tea to chat with my co passenger, I am too introverted. But when I sat there and read a 7th grade text book in a flight and my co passenger made his curiosity obvious, I would not be the one to say no to a short chat either. So I explained to him what Teach For India is and what I was doing. I was just returning from my summer vacation and I was reading the text books I needed to teach the next academic year, so that I could prepare my long term plans for the year.

My co passenger found it all very interesting and was more curious to know what kind of kids I taught. So I gave him the profile of my kids. When he asked me why don't we provide them with vocational training rather than teaching them Math and English, I explained to him that there is nothing wrong with these kids' IQ or capabilities and given the right education they will come into the mainstream. That's when he shocked me by asking why do you want to bring them into the mainstream. Then he went on to explain that there is already a lack of opportunity, scarcity of jobs in the market. By bringing more people into the mainstream we are only making it more difficult to everyone. Now there will be more people fighting for the same jobs. If these kids learn Math and English they will not be interested in doing what their parents were doing and those jobs also need getting done.

I was fuming by then and still tried to reason with him telling that what we are doing is trying to create a level playing field, where no one is having an undue advantage just because he or she was born into an affluent family. If the people who are forced to do menial jobs disappear, then technology will have to take some part of their work. For the rest the dignity of labour and the wages will improve, so no one will feel bad about of doing them any more. 

He just wouldn't rest his case even when we were walking out of the flight. At the end of it he looked almost angry at me. I don't get angry with anyone very fast. But he had managed to tick me off. I asked him about his kids and he told me he has 2, one is 8 years old and the other 4. I told him that I am very sorry that his kids will have a tough time getting a job, as we are so damn bend up on making the kids of the rickshaw drivers and vegetable vendors also capable of being Engineers, Doctors and much more. I walked away wondering whether it was that same thought which made him feel so angry about what I was doing. 

RTE and my blue aluminum lunch box

Ankita's 'I want to be a teacher' poster

I have more questions than answers. But I will start with a small snippet from my yet to be written autobiography. 

May be more than half the 2nd standard has done the migration from aluminum to steel lunch boxes. I am talking about the year 1980 -1981, no one brought plastic lunch boxes to school at those times. I still carried my blue aluminum lunch box. That lunch box might have given me a feeling that I didn't belong to the majority who carried steel lunch boxes. I don't remember now, but it is quite possible that I sat and had lunch with others who had aluminum lunch boxes. I do remember my lunch box every time I see any car in a particular metallic blue colour and get a sinking feeling in my tummy even now.

Some might think otherwise, but kids are a gang who is acutely aware of class division. So when we place the kids from a low income background with the ones from high income background, do we expect automatic integration of both. I don't think anyone is naive enough to think that it will be easy to integrate them when the 25% low income students are welcomed into the high income schools. But how difficult would that be, do we have an idea?

I have met and interviewed an awesome lady who has started a school in which she takes half of the students from affluent background and the other half from the other spectrum. She has started the school 4 years back. But she agreed regretfully that she is still struggling with the problem of integration. The rich kids and poor kids hung around separately from each other and she just didn't have an idea how to solve it. Remember these are kids of parents who are fully aware of the noble intentions of the school and have decided to send their kids to this school possibly because of that or at least irrespective of that. 

Now when the rich schools are forced to take poor kids, with all the resistance from the rich parents, will there be any integration at all? Are the poor kids going to be treated differently than the rich kids? Are they going to be segregated? Shouldn't someone really figure out the psychological aspects of this move before we push forward with this in the next academic year? 

As I said in the beginning, I have only questions. May be someone out there has the answers! Do you?