Management of Civilizational Excellence - II School Education: A Pillar of Excellence

Pradip N. Khandwalla

Former L&T Professor and Director, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad

(Based on my book ‘Fast Forward toward Civilizational Greatness: Agenda for India’, 2017, Ahmedabad: AMA and AHRD)

History is a race between education and catastrophe – H.G. Wells, British novelist

In our times, good school education is perhaps the foremost pillar for creating and sustaining society level excellence involving relatively high levels of creativity, compassion, and competence. At the minimum, good school education provides foundational knowledge and skills, and instils values and character traits such as rational thinking, kindness towards others, especially the disadvantaged, civic sense and integrity. Through good school education children acquire a much better understanding about themselves, their society, and indeed the world, and thereby grow up to become better citizens. Good school education is indispensable for crafting a modern excellent society. Bad school education on the other hand, as Wells has pointed out, can be a passage to catastrophe.

All over the world there are fine schools. In this article I focus on a few such schools in India, partly because of greater familiarity, and partly to dispel the belief that all school education in India is lousy. My intention is to demonstrate that in India, despite the generally poor to mediocre quality of school education, there are shining stars whose examples can help multiply their numbers. In the educational space, if in India something has worked well in one setting, it should be possible to replicate that quality elsewhere, as in the over 1240 central schools (kendriya vidyalayas). My hope is that what I have to say about schooling  will be relevant also to many other developing countries.

Four Fine Schools

Amidst a desert of mediocrity and worse, there are glimmering oases of educational excellence at the school level. Let me describe a few.

New Era School: I went to this Gujarati medium school in Mumbai for 4 years during the 1950s. But it left a lasting impact on my persona. It was founded and run by a visionary, Maganbhai Vyas, who believed in holistic education. Mahatma Gandhi and Gurudev Tagore were the icons. Gandhian values were truth, non-violence, service to the disadvantaged, simple living and high thinking, and manual work. Tagore’s values were efflorescence of the arts and literature. Both were India’s foremost titans. They differed but got along famously. Mahatma Gandhi called Tagore ‘Gurudev’ (‘Gurugod’) and Tagore called Gandhiji ‘Mahatma’ (‘Great Soul’). Tagore’s and Gandhi’s values were in bloom at the school.

I do not recall rote learning, and we could ask questions to the teachers. We had an assembly of all the students and teachers every day, and quite frequently a guest was called to address the assembly. These included Gandhians like Ravishankar Maharaj, poets and educationists like Sneharashmi, eminent professionals, politicians like Acharya Kriplani and so forth. This way we were exposed to a variety of role models. In the assembly, a classically oriented song, or a bhajan was sung by a teacher or a student. Once a week, a senior student compiled news and read them out in the assembly. Once a year, the teachers did not teach. Instead, senior students took classes at junior levels. Class leaders were elected, not nominated by the class teacher.

Every Friday, prayers of all the major religions were recited. Students contributed small sums of money that was used for the uplift of students in rural areas. Every class gave a two to three hours long cultural program once a year. Students participated heavily in the design of the cultural program. I remember acting as the prince in the play called Cinderella. Once a year students were taken to a camp site for two or three days, usually to a village, and they did shramdan  (gift of labour)  there, such as building a small water channel. Students were frequently sent outdoors to do such things as sweep garbage thrown on the street, or enjoy the rain and sing songs of Varsha Ritu (monsoon), or taken to the nearby Hanging Gardens on Malabar Hill to enjoy nature and study bird and plant life. Learning of painting and classical music as well as physical training exercises were compulsory. There were sessions for spinning yarn Gandhian style. Dancing and swimming and horse riding were also taught. Once a week an educative film was shown and discussed. Scrapbooks were encouraged.

I asked Anjali, my wife, who had done all her schooling in New Era: “What was your most memorable moment in school?” She said that she was in the school camp at Avidha, a village in Gujarat. Ravishankar Maharaj, the great Gandhian was also present. At one meal Anjali found herself sitting next to him. There was water scarcity in Gujarat that year and Maharaj asked her, “How much water do you use for bathing?” “Several buckets. When I am bathing I sing and I keep on bathing. I don’t keep count.” Ravishankar Maharaj explained to her the importance of water for life, especially where it is scarce, and softly said, “Do not waste water. Decide on how many buckets of water you want to use and do not exceed that.” That gentle lesson had abided with her for the rest of her life!

Rishi Valley School: Rishi Valley School is an Indian boarding school in the state of Andhra Pradesh. It was founded by the seer Jiddu Krishnamurti in 1926. Krishnamurti was a great and iconoclastic thinker. One famous quote of his was “Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself”. He was against all dogma. His quest was the psychological emancipation of humankind. He stressed meditative insight.

The school has a holistic approach to education. Community service and extracurricular activities are part of a student's schooling, as are discussions, assemblies, and club meetings. The school curriculum includes developing an appreciation for the environment, art and music and athletics, in addition to traditional subjects. The school runs the Rishi Valley Institute for Educational Resources (RIVER) program, a rural school (Rural Education Centre) and a health center (Rural Health Centre). Rishi Valley's setting is spectacular - some 375 acres of a valley, surrounded by hills and tiny villages. The school accepts students from the fourth through the twelfth grades (ages nine to eighteen). Education World has ranked the boarding school as the best residential school in India.

I spoke to Siddharth Das, a designer, who had studied at Rishi Valley School during 1984-91, and also had taught there for a term. He had some interesting things to say about how the school had shaped him. First, since fees were based on parental income, there was a large diversity in the  backgrounds of the students. Deserving poor students got admission as readily as those of rich parents. Social background was not an issue for any student. Second, the school encouraged excellence in whatever one wanted to do, not competition. Much responsibility was reposed in the students, and they acted from a sense of responsibility rather than doing better than someone else. There were no examinations until the 9th standard, and no punishments. Most of the alumni have done well in whatever vocation they have taken up. Third, several core values were instilled into the students, such as decency and cleanliness. Once a month, students removed the litter in batches and cleaned up the kitchen. Fourth, the relationship between the students was as fellow human beings, not as adversaries or just schoolmates.”

Jnana Prabodhini: The third school I want to describe is Jnana Prabodhini in Pune, Maharashtra. Jnana Prabodhini is another idealistic institution of learning that has aimed at all round development of its students. It was founded in 1962. The founder was Vinayak Pendse, Ph.D. (Psychology), with degrees also in science and economics. Filled with patriotic fervour, he had fought for India’s freedom. He also was an educationist, a journalist, and had a stint with Rashtriya Swayamsevak  Sangh (RSS). He was particularly inspired by Swami Vivekananda, a visionary of religious tolerance, service to humanity, and the re-awakening of ancient Indian spirituality.

Pendse believed that to accelerate the progress of India, inspired and intelligent individuals were needed who would use their intelligence to awaken society and transform India into a developed country. He therefore introduced intelligence tests for selecting entrants to the school.

Jnana Prabodhini’s mission has been to develop leadership through education in all non-political walks of life. The main idea is that such leadership could create conditions for social change. A core belief is that there is no conflict between science and spirituality, and both can be combined to build the Indian nation. Secondly, although grounded in Hindu spirituality, Jnana Prabodhini is open to all and to all shades of thought, and this openness is aimed at generating Indian renaissance.

To augment its revenues, Jnana Prabodhini also runs a number of industrial enterprises! It runs a lathe factory courtesy a gift from the Kirloskars (a business house), a publication unit that publishes the literature of National Council of Education, Research and Training (NCERT), an elevators manufacturing unit, a capacitors manufacturing unit, and a raw sugar (khandsari) manufacturing unit!

I talked to Dr. Pranav Mahajan, an alumnus of Jnana Prabodhini School. He shared his experiences of the school, “We students came from many different social strata…. but we were pretty grounded in Indian reality. We often were taken on trips, but usually by public transport. On these trips we saw how disadvantaged poor people were. I remember visiting the hut of a tribal. The entire family lived in a single room of 10 feet by 10 feet, along with a tied up buffalo and a cooking place! We had gone to teach tribal children for about a week.

“A good part of the learning was experiential learning. For example, we used to sell firecrackers as a small contribution to the school’s finances. We were taught resourcefulness – each team of students would be given, say, Rs.50, and asked to double the amount in 4 hours! My team thought of making powa, an Indian savoury, and selling it to people. Such experiences were joyful, and we felt resourceful with a sense of achievement. We also learnt the value of time and deadlines. We were also trained in leadership. An assignment would be given to a group of students and a student from a higher standard would be deputed to lead it. The assignment had to be done without the help of teachers. There was no rote learning – the classes were interactive. Seniors who had passed out often came and talked to us about the professional work they were involved in…..Once a week there was a period in which outside speakers were brought in to share their thoughts, a protagonist and an antagonist….. “The central values of the school were: be useful to the country, reliability, integrity, truthfulness, and leading a meaningful life. Hindutva was emphasized but of Swami Vivekananda’s enlightened variety – the Swami was our icon. We were not exposed to any biases against any other religion. I remember a ceremony at which recitations were made from the scriptures of each of four major religions.”

The Doon School: The school was founded in 1935 by Santosh Ranjan Das, a Kolkata lawyer who had his schooling in an English boarding school. On returning to India, he rose to eminence in British India.  He set up this all boys’ boarding school on a 75 acre campus in Dehra Dun beside the foothills of the Himalayas, so that wealthy Indians would not have to send their sons to Eton or Harrow for their schooling.  Indeed, the initial headmasters were from Eton or Harrow. From the beginning the aim was to groom students to be selfless leaders.

It is still a classy school, with fees of around Rs. 12 lacs a year (higher for foreign students) and teachers salaries range from around Rs. 1200000 to Rs. 3000000 a year. There are around 500 students and around 70 teachers.  Only students from the age of 12 to 18 are admitted. As its website puts it, “The mission of The Doon School is to develop exceptional boys into ethical, wise, and just citizens who can serve a meritocratic India. The school’s vision is to become one of the world’s great schools.” It stresses secular and democratic values, creativity and analytical thinking, the development of life skills and personality, integrity, compassion and discipline.

To foster extra-curricular activities, there are over 15 clubs, such as for debating, adventure, astronomy, trekking in the Himalayas, business, social development, economics, music, art etc. There is also an auditorium and an Art and Media school, and the students publish a news periodical. There is vigorous training for leadership. There is a ‘house system’ of dividing the student body up into houses to build bonds across standards, with student prefects to keep order and assist the house faculty head. There is an elected school captain, and a school council representative of student and teachers which meets monthly to discuss issues and help the administration. Two things are compulsory: trekking in the foothills, and social service in four impact areas: children and youth, environmental protection and preservation, homelessness and hunger, and education and literacy. Fatehpur Village was one of the outcomes of such social service. In 2014 25 social service projects were going on. The school also has a Summer Leadership Programme, open to both the sexes.

Has the school succeeded in producing leaders? The alumni include former PM Rajiv Gandhi and his politician sons Rahul Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi, CMs of Indian states like Kamal Nath, several ministers like Jyotirday Scindia, eminent media personalities like Prannoy Roy, Vikram Chandra and Aroon Purie, eminent economists like Swaminathan Aiyar, eminent historians like Ramachandra Guha, novelist Vikram Seth, fashion designer Tarun Tahiliani, the poet, prince, pundit and politician Karan Singh, the social activist Bunker Roy, Abhinav Bindra an Olympics gold winner in shooting, and a Jnanapith winner Amitav Ghosh. novelist.

Each of the four schools is unique, and has found interesting ways of making students well-rounded. The stress on marks and grades is modest. Instead, being creative, humane, and a competent person are stressed, although in different ways. The purposes are diverse. Jnana Prabodhini aims to groom nation builders; The Doon School aims to groom leaders; New Era and Rishi Valley aim to groom fine citizens and decent human beings. There is strong commitment to the school’s core values I nspired by such titans as Gandhi, Tagore, Vivekananda and Jiddu Krishnamurti.

It is true that the resource endowments of these four schools are beyond most of the 1.5 million   schools in India. But what prevents local schools with scant resources from having Gandhi or some other icon that inspires teachers and students; having students do some manual work in the school premises or nearby areas to instill in them the dignity of labour; or having students interview some outstanding local persons, especially those that have shone in different professions and invite them to interact with the student body; having a daily assembly of the students and teachers to discuss issues, having devotional and patriotic songs sung; teach the arts; have the students engage in some form of local social service like helping the aged to cross roads, give them some company, remove local garbage and keep the streets clean, visit the homes of the poor to learn how they live and interact with the children and perhaps adopt some to share what the students are learning in school; and on and on. These do not require expensive resources. Besides, most children that are older now possess a mobile which can provide so much information. Unfortunately, greedy and short-sighted parents and teachers focus on text-book learning and cramming to get good marks, and thus miss out on many low cost opportunities to provide an educational experience that moulds children into fine citizens.

Large-scale Attempts at Improving Learning of School Children

I want to share two unusual attempts at spreading widely good school education. First is the Activity Based Learning or ABL that brought learning light to the students of thousands of poor education government schools. The second is Educomp.

ABL: There is a learning system, utilized at the primary school level in thousands of government schools in India that enhances achievement motivation and inquisitiveness through another route, namely, competing against one’s own past performance. This system is called Activity Based Learning or ABL, founded by an IAS officer. It was inspired by the pedagogy used by Rishi Valley School in India and by Madam Montessori’s ideas about the student being its own best teacher. Madam Montessori was an Italian doctor and educator whose pioneering work on children’s education has been globally influential.

The principles of the Montessori method of teaching are: 1. Have mixed age classrooms, so that younger children can learn from their elders. 2. Students can choose what activity to pursue from within a list of options. 3. Ideally 3 hour blocks of time should be provided to the children so that they can explore more and master an activity. 4. Students discover concepts by working with materials rather than by being given instruction by the teacher. 5. Freedom of movement for children within the classroom. 6. Specialized educational materials developed for the children, and a trained Montessori teacher.

In a remarkable experiment originating in India’s state of Tamil Nadu, ABL has revolutionized learning in tens of thousands of primary schools, mostly government schools, in a number of Indian states. ABL abjures rote learning and draws on the principles of the Montessori Method of education. In this method the responsibility for learning is that of the child and the teacher is a facilitator. It unleashes the child’s innate learning appetite and creativity and develops them further. ABL uses child-friendly educational aids to promote self-learning and the method allows the child to study according to his/her aptitude and skill. The curriculum is divided into study cards for English, regional language, mathematics, science and social science. When a child finishes a group of cards, he/she completes one ‘milestone’. Activities in each milestone include games, rhymes, drawing, and songs to teach a letter or a word, form a sentence, do math and science, or understand a concept. The child takes up an exam card only after completing all the milestones in a subject. In other words, evaluation is at the child’s convenience, not the teacher’s.

A baseline survey was done in Tamil Nadu in 2007-2008 to assess the effectiveness of ABL by comparing learning and outcomes before ABL was adopted and a year later. The average achievement of children increased significantly in all the subjects. Gaps in achievement between genders, locations and social groups were narrowed down. Compared to before introducing ABL, the children asked many more questions, and instead of sitting in parallel rows, they were usually found sitting and interacting in circles.

ABL has been extended to several states in India, though with mixed results. In schools and states where teachers were properly trained in ABL pedagogy, the children’s academic performance improved; where ABL was mechanically or incompetently applied or misapplied, the results were neutral.

Educomp: Educomp, an educational enterprise operating from Delhi, and started by Shantanu Prakash, an alumnus of IIMA, has been able to deliver multi-media enriched education digitally to over 1 million children in over 45000 government as well as private schools’ classrooms. This program is delivered via the internet with audio-visual aids and animation. The content is in English as well as in India’s regional languages.  Educomp has developed a digital library of thousands of multimedia modules for assisting teachers. Multimedia education has several features:  audio-visual aids, animation, additional learning facilities, interactive facility and two-way communication between teachers and students, questions to probe comprehension by the students, and assistance to teachers to make learning truly exciting.

As an example, take the third battle of Panipat in 1761 in which the Marathas lost and Ahmed Shah  of the Durrani Empire in Afghanistan won. In history, it is stated as a dry fact. But with multimedia it is possible to re-create visually the two armies facing each other, and with supplementary information students can understand much better the composition of the two armies (infantry, cavalry, archers, guns, number of cannons) and their fighting strategies, especially that Durrani had a much larger highly mobile cavalry. They can get to know the leadership dissensions in the Maratha army leadership, the desperation of the Marathas because they had brought along some 200000 non-combatants (women, attendants etc.) who had to be fed, and diminished the resources of the Marathas, and so forth. The whole battle becomes a puzzle to be solved as to why the Marathas lost so badly, and the students would relish this.  They may also pose uncomfortable questions like why Indian rulers have usually been defeated by much smaller invading armies? What kind of training did Indian armies have compared to that of the invaders? Were there underlying cultural and social   reasons for these losses? Educamp helps make learning not only fun, but strengthens the ability of the students to ask ‘why’ and indulge in what the Japanese call ‘root cause analysis’.

Such education as provided by ABL and Educomp offers much hope for bypassing decades of pathetic schooling, and alongside the computer and telecom revolutions, it can provide deeper learning and creativity-enhancing education at relatively low cost to practically all the school children of India.

A Post-school Youth Empowerment for Greatness Program

Can we empower millions of deprived young students, both male and female, to play nation building, change agent roles in a developing country like India? I believe we can through a youth empowerment program. Through such a program, despite a large and highly diverse society and social inequalities, the youth would think first of the nation and its good. It must mould their characters so that they become excellent citizens. It must give to them needed change agent skills and strengthen their motivation to bring about beneficial change in society that is compatible with the chief values enshrined in the nation’s constitution – such as equality of opportunity, freedom of belief and action within the boundaries of the law, democratic functioning, secularism, gender equality, protecting the environment, and justice.

What I have in mind is this: Annually, everyone between the ages of 18 and 21, who has at least a matriculation qualification, can be selectively offered enrolment in a one year residential program of empowerment. The matriculation qualification would ensure that the person joins the program with literacy and a fair bit of basic knowledge about the sciences, geography, history, civics, etc. There could be other screens for this voluntary program, such as tests to measure aptitude, personality, character, and cognitive and physical competence. Those who join should get a stipend of Rs. 1000 per month and all living expenses paid.

The curriculum should include topics like communication efficiency, what is it to be a good citizen, a basic understanding of how the country’s economic, social and political systems work, the chief characteristics of the country’s society and how it is changing. It should also include training in  physical fitness, lessons in self-defense, proficiency in some art or craft or vocation to enable the ‘graduate’ to earn a living, how to start a micro-enterprise and operate it, how to get the needed finance etc. Further, it should impart an understanding of  how to improve the quality of life of one’s family, how to eliminate bad habits in one’s community, the linkage between nature and human society and the basics of sustainable development, leadership, and beneficial change agentry training. It should enhance the mental abilities of the participants through greater proficiency in logical analysis of problems and in brainstorming for finding creative solutions. Some exposure to the major arts and literary works, as well as to important scientific discoveries would make the participants more  well-rounded. Some training in  ethical reasoning, inculcation of compassion for the disadvantaged, and exposure to role models of humaneness, innovativeness, and performance excellence would contribute to the participants becoming torchbearers of advance towards civilizational excellence.

My rough calculation is that the problem would cost about Rs. 20000 crores a year, less than 1% of the revenues of the Government of India. Creating the requisite infrastructure might cost an additional Rs. 20000 crores. In five years the program would groom some 5 million effective and committed change agents who could transform India. Is the program not worth the national resurgence it could create?