Platform Schools - Impact On Child Labor
Inderjit Khurana
Ruchika Social Service Organization
Bhubaneswar-Orissa-India
A presentation during the symposium
"Child Labor & the Globalizing Economy: Lessons from Asia/Pacific Countries"
Stanford University, California
February 7 – 9, 2001
INTRODUCTION.
The genesis, the prevalence of child1 labor, its reduction, elimination or prevention—all these are frankly beyond my ken.
I must also confess that my active involvement with education for child1 laborers way back in 1985 was not linked, at least consciously, with these issues. Primarily it was an emotional response to the deprivation suffered by these children, a deprivation of which the children themselves were not even aware.
That education however elementary, could be part of their lives, was totally absent from their mental landscape.
We did not begin with a cohesive plan with defined objectives, strategies or efficacy criteria—or even with any thought of success or failure. It was a journey that began with what my peers and my family thought of as a quixotic quest on my part; I suspect that they may even have thought of it as the usual cliched midlife crisis.
It was a journey that began, as most journeys in India begin, on the railway platform, when early one morning, together with an intrepid spirit in the person of a young PTI, we began telling stories to vagrant children on the platform . Over the years, these sessions became schools conducted within chalked boundaries in a corner of the platform, song and dance sessions amidst throngs of passengers, a supplementary nutrition program during school hours, personal hygiene and medical care for the children, advocacy amongst the children’s families and then the mainstreaming of these children into conventional schools.
Today I am asked to draw conclusions from these journeys, journeys with a host of halting and nervous steps, numerous wrong turnings and several blind alleys. So the conclusions, if such they be, are rather in the nature of empirical hind sights, subjective and relevant only to our experience.
The three most significant of these can be summarized thus:
1.Schools for working children should have absolutely ZERO barriers, whether physical ( e.g. of walls) or of day to day organization ( e.g. Of rules and regulations); and should require MINIMAL disruption of the children’s existing routines. i.e schooling in their space, their time, according to methods and with curriculum closely related to their life-experience.
2 The schooling program should incorporate transition from the Platform School with its informal, activity oriented format , to Mainstream Schools’ traditional structured methods of teaching. For this to be successful, the transition in teaching methods of the informal school to the formal school should be gradual.AND there should be a sponsorship programme thereafter which incorporates provision of books, uniforms and continuing monitoring cum counseling relating to the child1’s progress in the mainstream school.
Therefore, for our experience to have any relevance to others it is necessary to know the genesis of what today may appear as a coherent program. Let me elaborate:
We did not begin with an education program; our intention was merely to open a window to those facets of childhood denied to these children- to read stories to them and to sing songs with them. It was the children themselves who drove us in imperceptible steps, to evolve an educational program, because they wanted to read from the books we were reading to them. And so was born a classroom between chalked boundaries on the station platform. Necessity became a virtue. Lack of walls and throngs of gawking passengers attracted a host of children, initially in curiosity and later with hesitant, ginger steps into participation.
The focus of activity to this day remains storytelling, singing and dancing sessions interspersed with short bursts of lessons in language, and basic arithmetic. We find that 15 to 20 minutes is the maximum attention span for the lessons and gradually, we tailored the program accordingly.
As most of the children gathered at the station for activities relating to train arrivals, we adjusted our times to fit the train schedules, maximum part of the school time being in the interval between major express trains early in the mornings;
children can come and go as they please or as their domestic or other compulsions dictate.
It was the children who traveled on the trains as itinerant cleaners, or beggars of petty vendors, who made us design
work sheets which they could carry with them on their journeys and which would be handed over to the teacher for correction on their next return to the city.
As girls were burdened with the care of younger siblings, we encouraged them to bring their siblings to the class, which ensured equal no. of girls in each class.
It would have been absurd to rely on the standard primers of alphabet and rhyming words and number books for our teaching. Instead, the trains literally became our vehicles of learning –destination boards for letter recognition, the schedules for time reading, varying number of wheels for counting, the stations it touched for stories relating to geography and history.
So our class room curriculum took shape—Black fabric stretched across as black board, large animal and bird cutouts linked with alphabet cutouts mounted on sticks, hand puppets in absurd frolicsome modes, slates, chart papers and crayons all packed into a portable steel box;and of course the ever present trains.
What I have described so far is the initiation. The unreserved enthusiasm of the children made us think in terms of preparing these children for entry into conventional schools. These schools are mostly run by the State Govt. and follow a strictly structured way of imparting education.
On the one hand we had to engender in the child1 an image of himself as a school going person-with a bag, a uniform and perhaps a water bottle in hand; on the other hand we had to overcome the somewhat hostile environment in the schools to such children .
The physical barriers are overcome by a sponsorship program whereby public donors take on the financial responsibility for equipping a child1 for school. Although Govt. schools are ostensibly free, in actual fact substantial expense is involved; it costs us $25 per child1 to cover expenses for fees, uniform school bags, books etc
We have also to prepare the children to cope with the structured methods common to such schools. We introduced a transition course for children so as to acclimatize them to what they would encounter in the mainstream schools.
After admission, we run a program in which our counselors are virtually "loco-parentis" to these children, monitoring their progress, helping with the home work, talking to the school authorities etc.
This has enabled us to mainstream at least 6000 children into schools over the last 10 years or so, with a dropout rate of about 20%.
It is a measure of the children’s talent that their performance in schools is manifestly superior to that of their peers from more conventional backgrounds—in academics, in co-curricular activities, in articulation.
Then there is the girl child1 and the older boys who are unable or unwilling to continue their education in schools amongst much younger peers. In the case of girls, there is the added problem that
in such poor families, it is the norm for post-puberty girls not to venture out The only solution that we have been able to devise is a vocational training center combined with functional literacy and numeracy classes for such children.
This includes courses in tailoring, hotel utilities, laundering ,cooking, and hopefully soon courses in computer data entry and related disciplines.
An Extension program of "on the job" training includes trades such as that of electrician, tv repairman, refrigeration mechanic and auto repair mechanic.
Through this route we now have several examples of children who have transcended their past and have become proud citizens…Hotel workers, chefs, creche workers, self-employed craftsmen, extension workers in our own child1 help-line service; one has even made a mark in the performing arts.
I want to emphasize the catalytic role of such successes, however modest they may seem to us.
Having the written word around me perhaps since infancy, I could not imagine and, even now though mentally aware, am not reconciled to the fact that these children do not have around them, in their immediate milieu, any adults who may have gone to school themselves. They have no example to emulate, or even to know about. From such barren landscape to implant in their minds an image of themselves as school going beings is a near miracle for which the ultra sensitive antennae of the children are largely responsible, and exemplars from their own background are the only source of inspiration available to them.
Another obstacle that we continue to face is the children’s enduring suspicion of adults. They have no experience of even a
neutral contact with the adult world- the inter-face is peopled with varying degrees of hostility, violence and abuse..
Perhaps our work was made easier when we instituted weekly bathing of the children at the water taps located on the platforms. To this day Saturdays are bath days –oil for the bodies, antiseptic soaps, baths, paring of the nails—basic lessons in personal hygiene. Touching the children, patting them dry, a scrub of the face- all these helped break the barriers and established us as non-threatening adults.
For this to continue to be so, the teachers have to be strongly motivated and their teaching methods and skills regularly monitored and up-graded. Training sessions, regular experience sharing amongst the teachers have been a great help in ensuring a friendly yet mentoring role for the teachers.
Out of these sessions grew an awareness of additional needs without which our work would only have passing relevance. These are:-
community education committees as active participants in the school programs.
The teacher is the FOCAL point of this program and it is their persona, commitment, and social skills that ensure continuing fresh-ness. In this I was greatly helped by the personality and elan of my first co-worker, the young PTI that I mentioned earlier. He turned out to be a veritable pied piper. Children would naturally gravitate to him, one minute gamboling with them, the next he would be orchestrating a sing- song. Today he oversees the program of the 12 platform schools that we operate and the initial exuberance and fun continues to pervade the schools even after all these years.
Last and perhaps the most important of all: the failures, much larger than the manifest successes.
Come night and the station platforms become the play-ground of all the creatures of darkness-violence, extortion, sexual and drug abuse, trafficking, prostitution of all ages and of both genders.
We have not been able to provide any meaningful refuge from these for the children. A small beginning has been made by way of a drop-in shelter for the boys where they can drop in at any time, have a bath, sleep, catch a meal if it is mealtime; but we need to provide a larger and more permanent facility to insulate children from these hazards.
A bigger failure has been our inability to provide any protection to the girl child. Apart from the usual regrets, I as woman, feel that our work will remain unredeemed until we are able to provide a shield to the girls who are in desperate need of protection and refuge.
Our earlier efforts in this regard failed as we did not have the space and the numbers to guard against the physical onslaughts of
the pimps and the traffickers. The problem is further compounded by the reluctance of owners to lease out their premises for such usage on account of the threats posed by the vested interests.
We are working toward finding the funds to enable us to build our own premises to provide some sheltered hospice for such girls to allow them an even chance to fight their way out of the vicious cycle of sub-human existence.
How does our work impinge on issues related to child1 labor?
From the living examples of individual children whose lives we have touched we can confidently conclude that :-
1. To the extent the children stay in schools, they are kept away from the market for their labor, and with eventual mainstreaming, this can be for a considerable part of the day.
2. Once the children and their families get accustomed to the routine of the children going to school, the motivation for the children to complete their schooling gets increasingly reinforced.
3. To the extent schooling opens a window to different aspects of life, it brings awareness of possible alternate choices.
4 .And if we are able to further strengthen the linkage between schooling and the earning potential, as we are struggling to do ,we can show them a feasible route to the exercise of those alternate choices.