Fundamental right to mis-education

The last year has been a mixture of hope and despair. Hope because we made huge strides and despair because- factors beyond us frustrate us Just as we were getting ready to ensure every child went to school, the local economy comes crashing around us. The prices of all the local products - tea, coffee, pepper, ginger - have all fallen. Not the price at which you buy them in the market but the price the farmer gets. Education you know, is a luxury. And when you have to cut costs the first one to be sacrificed is education.

When one has spent the last year and half trying to get children into schools and then to keep them there without running off, this turn of events made our tasks difficult. Since May of 2000 we had started an enrolment drive. Actuai1y we had begun a survey to see what we were up against as we had decided to expand our work beyond the school to the villages. The survey ended up being a drive and we found by August that we had as many as 65% of the children in the 156 hamlets chosen for education work, enrolled in various schools. The numbers have increased much since then, but it has called for herculean efforts. How little do educational planners understand or bother about these links between economics and education.

Our survey was also revealing. Considering that Tamil-Nadu has a literacy rate of 65 %, second only to Kerala, the state of our community is abysmal [dt. abgrundtief] with a literacy rate of only 22 %!! This is for the three main tribes and excluding Mullukurumbas, who constitute less than 5% of the population and have close links with Kerala, managed to get a head start on education.

Education, as all of you know, has suddenly become fundamental right. Besides making some of us feel good that we are finally doing something fundamentally right for a change, what this means for the child and the poor parent one cannot imagine. Enrolment seems a simple matter for planners sitting in cities but for those of us who face the parent it is a nigHTMare. The child does not drop-out, but is literally thrown out of the government's schools. Would any of us imagine sending our children to these schools? Yet, we expect, no, demand, that other parents send them there !! How unfair! The message we seem to send out is that these second-rate schools are good enough for them !!