Affordable Private Schools in Hyderabad - The New Little Scholars School
Walk into any government or Affordable Private School (APS) in India and you are likely to hear the same thing: “HO…”, “HO…”, “USE…”, “USE…”, “HOUSE”, “HOUSE”. “Again...HO”, “HO…”. This will continue an average of five times for a list of ten words. The class work is then to write the ten words in their notebooks three times. Followed by homework to copy that same list in a different notebook two more times. Not once is a definition of the word, or the Hindu/Telugu translation even mentioned. You can find it referred to as “RR”, robot recall, in my classroom observation notes from the New Little Scholars School in Hyderabad, India, where I am working for the year as part of the IDEX Fellowship in Social Enterprise.
One cannot blame teachers in this ecosystem for subscribing to RR however, as it is how every teacher is conditioned to teach, it is how they were taught a generation ago, and their parents the generation before that. Does, then, this pedagogy have any hope for change?
Luckily, there are a handful of progressive-thinking school owners who have started APS all over Hyderabad, and are attempting to transition from RR to a higher quality education where students are taught to understand, comprehend, and most importantly, think. How is this happening you ask? As any good Social Enterprise Fellow would say, with the help of the social business sector of course! But in this case it is actually true. As more APS emerge in the education sector, so do service providers that cater to their needs. Teacher training that steers away from RR, for example, is a highly demanded service for these school owners. The New Little Scholars Schools has been using Empathy Learning Systems (http://www.empathylearning.com/) for about two years now. Imrana, the LKG teacher at the school, told me post an afternoon of Genki singing, that the training has made her feel much more confident in her ability to teach her students properly.
The Teacher Foundation (www.teacherfoundation.org), Butterfly Fields (http://www.butterflyfields.com), Aloha (http://www.alohaindia.com), and Escuela Nueva (http://www.escuelanueva.org) are other examples of social businesses bringing new curriculum and pedagogy to the sector. Outside of training and curriculum development there are service providers for setting up sustainable libraries, Escuela Nueva and Pratham Books (http://www.prathambooks.org); computer labs, Empathy; career and life skills development, Junior Achievement (http://www.ja.org), and a rating system to begin making the APS market more competitive, Gray Matters Capital (http://www.graymatterscap.com/affordable-private-school-initiative).
But what is driving APS owners to invest in teacher training, curriculum tools, and technology towards higher quality education? Why not continue to teach by RR and produce students without a deeper capacity to think for themselves? Because these schools are social enterprises in their own. They are in an increasingly competitive market and driven by consumer needs and demands. Even if uneducated themselves, parents, their consumers, know that they want their children to be competent in English and have the skills necessary to become doctors and engineers. And they know that trained teachers, library books, a computer lab, and science fairs are the type of things that will get their children there.
So the New Little Scholars invests in Imrana, encourages student participation in Design for Change (http://www.designforchangecontest.com), and battles Reliance Network tirelessly in an effort to get Internet in the computer lab, to give parents the quality education they demand and become the best social business they can be.
~Ilana
