Dhan Karunai School

So I started a post on the school, but am only now going to finish it! Here’s the youtube link again to the video created by the famous Danny and Fish who came to stay in November-December.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8bf4_mImV0

So the school is just over the road from the Illam main building- it is separate but intertwined, with teachers coming over to make their tea in the Illams’ kitchen, and a head teacher, Glory, has been working with Dhan for a long time.

So Mr Ragavan! A very charming funny man who will apologise for his weak English, but he is  probably the clearest communicator here as well as second best with English next to Khader Sir (not meaning to put them in rankings or anything!)  It seems to me that he did not enjoy school; in fact he said he dropped out early.

 Ragavan speaking in the outdoor classrooms :)

 Prayer in the morning before school, Khader here for republic day.

 

Teachers.... Glory not in this sadly, I think she took the photo

Some musings………

The education here is very memorization focused, and children hesitate to express ideas. There is a lot packed into the curriculum over the year in each of the 7 subjects everyone has to take by the 10^th standard (botany, zoology, chemistry, physics, math’s, English, Tamil) so it seems to me that nothing is learnt very in-depth, some of the older girls are tackling things like……

1) Change this sentence to use the passive tense

‘The boys broke the window when they were playing’

Answer= The window was broken when the boys were playing.

(Something I don’t remember doing at school, so thank you internet!)

But they still cannot use simple correct past present and simple tense in writing or conversation. I think because they have to memorise something quickly for a test then suddenly move onto the next thing and forget the last. Or they don’t even understand what they are memorising. I think maybe it is different for the other subjects, but for English this seems to be the case to me.

Back to the primary school……….

So Ragavans’ dream was to start a school which…..

1)      provided good education,

2)      emphasized creativity and most importantly, was

3)      affordable to poor rural families.

So he did! In 2008 he started the kindy and primary school with Children aged from 3-7, with 33 children in the building; now it houses 189. And it is still growing! Next year more children will be coming in, and thanks to Danny and Fishs’ video, they have fundraised the required amount to build the new school (the old building being far too small).

So he is very interested in learning constructive and fun educational methods used in countries like NZ, (if you have any knowledge or ideas or class plans you want to pass on please let me know!). The teachers themselves learnt and trained in the old ways but are very interested in more progressive methods. From what I’ve seen they are very good teachers! And they are there for the love of the school and its ideas, as the salary here is relatively low. Of course the school still has to follow government curriculum as well, which doesn’t often fit with his ideas.

So, providing education at an affordable cost. The free government schools have a bad reputation, even though the teachers unions demand a high salary. So many people turn to private education. There are many more private schools here than government! A private school may cost 7000-10,000 rupees per year. The Dhan Karunai school is only 2,700/year. For the last four years the school has been funded by the Karunai Illam trust and Dhan. But over this time it has been difficult to balance the books because it was never sure how much funding they could plan for the next year. The 2011 school year has been the first where the school has reached their fourth goal, of being financially self sustaining. I think it’s an amazing feat for four years!

They have achieved this with an interesting system, whereby the fees of children from poor families are sponsored by wealthy families (wealthy children have been admitted for the last 3 years). This means that 15% of the children are from very poor families who would otherwise not been able to afford good education. Also, Ragavan said that these poor families are encouraged to take on paying more of the fees themselves over the years, from what I understand a way of stimulating the whole families economic well-being.

Long term vision: once this school and educational modal has proven itself to be sustainable and with high educational achievement, Ragavan hopes that the model will be taken on and implemented elsewhere by the government. Great!