| Education In theory all Indian children are entitled to a state education. In practice many don’t get one. In many isolated villages, schools will only teach to the 4th standard and older children may need to travel many kilometres for higher standards. To qualify for college or university, students need to have passed the 12th standard. The distances involved and the lack of transport, mean that few children from these villages continue with any formal education beyond these very primary stages. These small schools are very simply equipped, one or two rooms sometimes with a few benches and long desks (usually the children will just sit on the floor), a black-board and occasionally a few coloured charts and only the books or parts of books the children have managed to bring with them. (The state government does make some provision for text books to poor rural schools, but Government provision and actual text books in every pupil's hands are two very different matters.) In some schools teachers carefully paint useful information on the walls and sometimes even on the floor.
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Before the school year begins, almost all the young children, due to start school in the area, are enrolled on to the school’s records. However being enrolled does not equal attending school nor does attending school equal receiving an education. Many of the children enrolled do not actually get to the school and many of those who do will go only for the teacher to register that they have come and to eat the subsidised mid-day meal. |
After the age of five or six, children become a useful part of the house-hold’s economy, looking after smaller brothers and sisters, minding animals and helping prepare vegetables and rice to eat, thus freeing the parents for the hard work in the fields or quarries. As the children grow so does the list of tasks they will be expected to undertake until they are considered able to work along side their parents.This growing usefulness in the home or field coincides with the steady drop-out rate of pupils from schools which occurs throughout all the rural areas. By the time most of the poorer village girls have reached puberty they are no longer going to school. The drop-out rate is even faster if the girls must travel to a more distant school to do further standards, as many parents are reluctant to expose their daughters to possible harassment. |  |
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Many of the children in these isolated rural villages do not speak the language in which their teachers will attempt to deliver the curriculum. Many of the Lamanni Tribal people in this area do not speak or understand Kannada the state language, and there are many quarry working communities who speak Telgu, the language of Andhra Pradesh. The isolation imposed by distance, poor transport and caste means that these children have little opportunity of acquiring the language of their ‘teacher’, which must make the business of going to school a particularly frustrating experience, and acquiring literacy a skill beyond fathoming. Although the Government does occasionally run literacy campaigns for adults these rarely go beyond teaching people the letters of the ‘alphabet’ and how to write their names. Literacy levels in this area of Kanataka are very low and even lower in the targeted villages. Many parents remain unaware of the potential benefits of education for their children and are all too aware of the difficulties of daily existence. Birds Heal are in the process of arranging for local tuition groups with bilingual teachers who will be able to give these children the basic skills they need to make progress in the local government schools where available. |
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