Sunil Kumar an engineer was working in Indian Oil earning a salary of Rs 40,000 till a few months ago. But he suddenly decided to leave all that and his home in Orissa and volunteer as a teacher. He wanted to be of use to the thousands of children who are virtually abandoned in schools to fend for themselves? Sunil joined Teach for India based in Mumbai for a teaching fellowship that pays him Rs 15,000 and his rent per month. Today he finds himself in a classroom, Class II B to be precise in Aryan Public School in Seelampur, one of the filthiest and most neglected areas of Delhi where a dense population lives in filthy surroundings as if there was no system of governance in place in the national capital.
The school seems like a neat place with classes up to fifth standard and is tucked away between meat shops and grocery shops in a congested road in Seelampur. Children have picked up a few sentences in English in a month, which Sunil has taught them.
Parallel to his class room is Class II A where another Teach for India volunteer Saumya is busy teaching children. Their methods are different from the one followed in the school though the books are the same. The new teachers are all excitement as they explain how in the two months they have been there, they found children coping with something that was impossible for them. They were expected to understand two pages of written text when they could not read and write anything properly. Most of the time they were copying from the text book. So he has decided to start from the beginning by teaching them to read words phonetically. Now children are more comfortable with English words, he says.
The Teach for India programme has just started operations in Delhi after launching the fellowship programme in Maharashtra since 2008. Sunil says the main problem is with schools who are not flexible with their syllabus and dont want teachers to take liberties with the teaching schedule. He says parents are coming and complaining that children are not being taught from the text books.
Teach for India gets 50 per cent of volunteers from people who have just completed college and want to work somewhere as an intern. There are several graduates from St Xavier’s College Mumbai and Delhi University besides companies like Tata Consultancy Services and Ernst and Young who have become fellows with Teach for India.
The programme offers a fellowship of two years which the volunteer has to spend in a given school. The other volunteers are those who have either quit their jobs or have got permission from their offices to volunteer during service. While Indian Oil does not have such a programme, there are companies which not only pay a portion of the salary to workers but allow them to rejoin after a period of two years. Teach for India has as its head Shaheen Mistri, the founder of the Akanksha Foundation, a non-profit organization with a mission to impact the lives of less privileged children.
Akanksha works primarily in the field of education, addressing non formal education through the Akanksha centre model and also formal education by initiating school reform. Over the past 19 years, the organisation has expanded from 15 children in one centre to over 3,500 children across Mumbai and Pune. Mistri is an Ashoka Fellow and what started as a passion to serve less privileged children around her after her own education abroad has led to a movement that has as its model the Teach for America programme.
Father Agnel School which has branches in Maharashtra and Delhi recently tied up with IIT and is working towards a tie up with MIT for introducing innovation in learning in the school. The school which is also one of the less expensive schools in the metros, recently started an innovation lab in performing arts with European experts. Can the children of Seelampur Aryan Public School or a government school in an urban slum anywhere dream of such things?
