In my enumeration of reasons for the high illiteracy rate of India, I have not yet mentioned two of the very main factors why there are still so many people in India who cannot read and write: the caste system and poverty.
I have written a lot about the caste system, that it still remains a part of the thinking in society and how much discrimination happens still today just because a person is born with a certain social status that can make him or her even ‘untouchable’ to some others. Of course, this also creates problems in schools.
When someone from one of the lowest castes goes to admit his or her children to school, it can very well happen that the teacher, principal or official sitting there asks ‘Why do you want your children to go to school? It is not necessary!’ and often they are just denied the right to admit children in schools. Especially in schools which are privately run, people of lower castes have to face this problem. And schools run by the government often have very less value of education. Teachers don’t come, simply don’t give classes or the school building is used as a cowshed or storage space.
Even in schools where children of lower castes are admitted, there is often a lot of discrimination from the side of fellow students, teachers and even the school management. There are problems in the classes, in breaks and in lunch times when higher caste students refuse to eat food made by lower caste people or refuse to eat together with their classmates of lower castes. This can really make a child lose the fun of going to school, don’t you think?
Not only students, even teachers are discriminated in schools. Below you see a video about a teacher of the untouchable caste. She teaches in a primary school and as the only teacher does not get a chair to sit on. Otherwise none of the other teachers could use that chair anymore because she, the untouchable woman, sat down on it. She either stands or sits with the children on the floor, the whole day long. Why would any person of this caste become teacher and what do these children learn for their life?
Even if there is a school where this is not a problem of castes, poor families of all castes have to face another difficulty: how are they going to pay for the school fees, the school books and the uniform? There is the problem of poverty again. But how are poor people going to come out of their poverty if they cannot go to school, learn and get a better job? Or how should they learn how to improve the efficiency of their farming or the quality of what they produce or sell?
When the government started their campaigns to improve education in India, they said their aim would be to have one school in each square kilometer. This doesn’t seem to have worked out that well. I know it is getting better, there has been a lot done in the last ten years. More schools have been built and the literacy rate of India has increased, even though the population has increased so much that we still have more illiterate people in number than before.
One interesting statistics however showed that if you look at an area of 10 square kilometers, there are more religious places and temples than schools. If there are 2 schools, there are 14 religious places which are probably also more frequently visited. What does this mean? Do people still put religion over education? As I always say, we need more schools than temples to be built!
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I am so happy to see the children of your school all eating together and not separated by their casts. I love your concept and your philosophy!
Isn’t it horrible that in so many countries of the world there are still people who die of hunger while we live in so much abundance here and throw away tons of food every day!For poor families it is a vicious circle: They don’t have money to send their children to school but only with education they could get money to get out of poverty. This means it is up to us to help them with the first step until they can sustain themselves.
Most of the communities in the entire Indian sub-continent(such as Bengali) succumbed in ‘Culture of Poverty'(Oscar Lewis), irrespective of class or economic strata, lives in pavement or apartment. Nobody is at all feel regret ed or ashamed of the deep-rooted corruption, decaying general quality of life, worst Politico-administrative system, weak mother language, continuous absorption of common social space (mental as well as physical, both). We are becoming fathers