Vijoy Prakash

‘Broadstreaming, not Mainstreaming’ - An Approach towards Solutions for Inclusive Development was delivered at XLRI, Jamshedpur as inaugural address in the conference on ‘Solutions to Inclusive Development’ on January 29, 2010.

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Broadstreaming, Not Mainstreaming

(Excerpt from the book Creative Learning by Vijoy Prakash)

When young infants go to bed, they expect their parents to be with them. This is a good occasion to interact with them. It has been seen that songs and stories narrated to them at this time have great impact on the development of their brains. Earlier, we had folk stories for these occasions. Now, as parents are living in a nuclear situation and are generally extremely busy people, most of them do not remember these stories. As such, they are not able to make best use of these occasions. There is an urgent need to collect such stories or to write new stories and supply them to young couples.

Shampa learns Hanuman Chalisa at 3 years

Shampa was born in a middle class family. When she was a child of 3 years, her mother Sharda Sinha, a teacher educator, used to sing Hanuman Chalisa (40 couplets in the praise of Lord Hanuman), when she went to sleep. She used to start singing, when she was going to sleep and continued till she was fast asleep. As a result, Shampa learnt Hanuman Chalisa by heart, even at the age of 2 years, which is a commendable feat for any child. Today Shampa is a teacher at Teacher’s Training College, Patna. She feels that such techniques used by her mother had a great impact on her life.

(Excerpt from the book Creative Learning by Vijoy Prakash)

Family is said to be the first school, but we have done little to develop it as the first school. Swami Dayanand had identified father, mother and teacher to be the three pillars of education of a child. In Satpatha Brahman it was said,

matriman pitrimanaachryavan purusho ved
(A man is knowledgeable, if he is under the guidance of  learned mother, father, and teacher.)

Unless all pillars are equally strong, the child cannot be said to be properly educated. Today couples get married. They also have children. But, they are never trained in the methods of rearing the children. They are never told how they should steer the child in the elementary stages of learning. It has now been established that about 90% of the development of brain take place before the end of 5 years. Since couples do not know how to take care of the child, they depend mainly upon hit and trial methods. Thus, children may not attain full development of brain as per their own potential.  As such, they are not fully prepared to take advantage of the learning system, when they enter the school system.

Educating Underprivileged - Some critical concerns

Despite several alluring programmes and incentives in the form of cash and kinds, majority of underprivileged and poor children prefer not to go to school. Even if they do, they don’t continue there. Is it because they don’t understand the value of education or the interventions are not attractive enough to retain them in school? So far we thought that poor people being deprived of physical amenities may be lured by physical benefits only. But, this has not proved correct. Physical allurement have not been able to retain poorer children within four walls of schools. Our approach has been grossly misdirected. The main malaise seems to lie somewhere else. Education today is highly dominated by middle class considerations and concerns with no room for lower class aspirations and talent to be nurtured properly to fully blossom. Unless education system takes care of the peculiar nature of the psychology of the underprivileged, their needs and aspirations and the special circumstances in which a underprivileged child is born and brought up, we cannot expect to make a dent in the existing scenario.

Scientific studies have established that maximum development of brain in a child takes place before the age of 5 years. So the learning of the child would largely depend on the foundation laid during these early years. It has been found that if a child is born with good eyes but his eyes are covered for 3-4 years, then he may not be able to see all through his life even though his eyes may be physically well. This happens because the connections of neurons in respect of vision matures by the age of 3-4 years. If proper care is not taken to develop them, then these neuron connections may not develop in future.

Considering that all children are born with statistically similar physical properties of brain, environmental factors in which the child is brought up in initial years would greatly influence the nature of the development of brain. How does a underprivileged child spend his initial years of life? He is born in a family where earning largely depends on the manual work. Their parents are experts in manual jobs, so he also gets more exposure of manual activities. A child in a shepherd’s family starts going to the field with his sheep early in life. So the sensory organs pertaining to various competencies related to the rearing of sheep would get more opportunity of development. He would have better recognition of the expression of the voices of sheep at different hours of day or in times of hunger and pain. He would have better power of listening of the foot steps of sheep. All this he may learn from his parents even in the course of daily interaction. In the process of rearing he gets more chance of moving through fields and forests, so he gets more opportunity for development of his kinesthetic ability. In fact, the peculiar nature of the family background provides him with certain definite pattern of the development of his brain. He gets an initial advantage in certain skills, whereas he may not get similar advantage in other skills.

Now what happens when he is taken to the school? In the schools intellectual skills are valued more than the skills for manual work. The child who had seen in the family giving more time and energy for manual work suddenly finds that his skills pertaining to manual work is of no significance here. No one discusses there anything about sheep rearing or anything related to that. He gets a severe psychological trauma. So far he had held the values related to sheep rearing to be so important. He must have dreamt of becoming a big shepherd on becoming adult having thousand of sheep in his herd. But, now he finds that knowledge to be of no use. In the schools there is no talk of the conditions in which a child has been living before coming to the school. In fact, there is no attempt to build upon the existing knowledge acquired by the child. There is a standard theory of education of teaching from “known to unknown”. In the name of having uniform syllabi, we have same set of books for all schools and all children. That too is heavily dominated by care and concerns of urban middle class. Thus, a underprivileged child finds the atmosphere to be suffocating and disgusting and is not motivated enough to stay in the class. Even if he stays there under parents’ pressure or other circumstances, his achievement level is generally low. Let’s probe the matter a little further.