“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
While volunteering with Teach for India earlier this year, I posed this question to a class of 13-year-old boys at a public school in Chhatarpur, Delhi. The next hour was filled with the sound of 15 pens putting ideas to ink.
It was only later, while grading their work, that I realized the potential miscommunication when I asked. What I expected to be an essay full of their dream profession turned out to be quite the opposite — in a good way.
Hardik wanted to be a “good person”, Suryansh wanted to grow up to “end poverty”, while Yuvraj expressed his desire to be “someone with superpowers to make sure that not just the village boys. Sisters are sent to school.”
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Shaheen Mistry, founder of Teach for India, tells me that education must transcend the boundaries of the classroom. The sole goal of academics is not to perfect one’s ABCs, his vision reveals. Instead, it should create a gap in the psyche of children, thereby raising a generation of changemakers in the making.
With this objective in mind, Shaheen pioneered Teach for India in 2009 – a movement aimed at educational equality. Currently, there are 50 million children in low-income communities across the country who are being indirectly affected by non-financial education. Ripple effect of benefits.
Ensuring a level playing field in education
Almas Mukri was 11 years old when she was first introduced to the TFI classroom. Spent years hating math — “The school I went to was very strict. The teacher would teach sums without asking us if we understood the concept. ” — Almas blames a weak attitude for her disinterest in the subject.
But in 6th grade, at her new school, things changed. She sings of a deep friendship with a subject she once hated. And two are still going strong. The proof is in his students who look forward to their math class every day.
In her role as a Teach for India Fellow, Almas is completing a circle of excellence. “I try to make my students love math the way I was helped. brother (TFI Fellow) will hold additional classes to simplify the concepts. He would make me redo the amounts until I got it right. The fact that someone was trying so hard for me made me work harder.
Almas is one of the 1,000 fellows who are part of the Teach For India network that is reexamining learning paradigms in schools across the country.
As Shaheen opens up about her journey to start this radical idea, she credits her experiences with Akanksha – a non-profit she started in 1989 to enable access to high-quality education for children from India’s low-income communities. “My time at Akanska helped me see the power of education in children’s lives. Not only did they graduate and get good jobs, but it had a profound impact on their value systems,” she says.
She illustrates this observation with an example. “Many of the children Akanska helped support their families, they started making a difference in their communities and started raising their voices against social issues.” These children were not only using education to reach the next educational milestone, but were using it to influence the collective consciousness.
“We started to realize that every child has potential and wanted to find a way to unleash that potential,” she smiles. The question was how to do it. And her answer arrived one day in the form of a visit from four Teach for America volunteers.
Conversations with young people introduced Shaheen to the goals he was considering. “They spoke of education as a mission. They believed that educational inequality was unfair and needed to be changed. Inspired, Shaheen met with Wendy Cope, former CEO of Teach For America, to understand the nuances of the model.
What started as an empirical idea to bring education to the minority areas of India has now turned into a revolution. Which is helping millions of children to make their dreams come true.
Teach for India: Where education goes above and beyond
At one of their Christmas parties, held for disabled children, Shaheen saw a little girl refusing to eat vanilla ice cream. She intended to take him home.
“But it will melt,” Shaheen explained to him gently.
“I want to share it with my younger brother,” argued the girl.
Ice cream was rare in the community. And if nothing could happen to the little boy at home, the girl didn’t think she deserved it either. The mindset, Shaheen discovered, wasn’t just for ice cream, but deeply ingrained in education.
According to the 2011 census, 8.4 million children between the ages of 5 and 17 in India are out of school. Further research revealed that poverty and having to work to supplement family income were the main barriers.
Growing up and having the privilege of attending ten schools in five countries, Shaheen was no stranger to the fact that education is considered a luxury by India’s large population. Shaheen, who knows about her luck when talking about academics, says, ‘Why can’t every child be lucky?’ From asking a question to launching a revolutionary idea – Teach for India – that answers it, she sees her journey as a testament to her resolve to ensure that education is no longer a distant dream.
“Today, our classrooms still see children struggling with various dimensions of poverty. But when you stop thinking of them as something to be fixed and instead empower children to change for others outside of themselves, it will change the way we see them. It’s about leaving a legacy in a world that is kind and compassionate to all people.”
Elaborating on how Teach for India has expanded and diversified, Shaheen says the platform has different verticals. These include the Fellowship wing — where talented and dedicated individuals are placed in low-income government schools where they support the school through curriculum and ed-tech; Online learning programs for pre-service teachers, educators and school leaders conducted through Firki, InnovateD, a platform to train and support entrepreneurs seeking to build effective organizations in education, Firki, InnovateD, and TFIx, an incubator for education entrepreneurs across India. Start your own context-based versions of Teach For India’s Fellowship to serve vulnerable children in your area.
‘Our classrooms are microcosms of society’
Each hand aims at the target which is the need of the hour. “The work isn’t glamorous, it’s hard,” Shaheen insists, “but what sets each fellow apart is their willingness to navigate larger-than-life challenges in their classrooms, which are almost a microcosm of society—you see abused children, hungry You will find people who are sleeping, whose parents are unemployed, and who have no money. A medical condition they are fighting.”
The kind of education and support children need goes beyond theory. “Our friends, some of whom are in their twenties, are willing to do whatever it takes to help these kids. And that’s where real leadership comes from; that means putting someone where you are, a little further if you are. That means serving the kids who need you. Yes,” Shaheen emphasized, stressing that they have strong reporting channels, child protection policies, opportunities to report violence, and rigorous training for teachers and children on POSH (sexual harassment of women in the workplace). (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013.
As we come to the end of our chat, there is no need to repeat the radical revolution that Shaheen has been teaching for India. I can see it first hand as 15 essays, titled, ‘What I want to be’. My assessment is complete and I must admit, none have failed to surprise me with its wit and spirit.
sources
Number of out-of-school children drops significantly: By Press Information Bureau, published on 27 March 2018.
Edited by Arunav Banerjee; Image source: Teach for India