It is hoped that through the work of Talimi Haq School, extremely valuable action experience and learning would be generated – about the education of very deprived children.
What should the school seek to do – replicate the education provided by the existing schools that others go to ? Why are they not there in the school in the first place ? What is the future confronting these children ? How much can they hope for , or someone interested in them hope for? What can their parents do for them ? And for how long ? The likely future personal circumstances of all such children, are severely limited within certain specific limits, not very different from that of their parents, and their parents before them, and so on, all of whom were illiterate. Is this acceptable ? If this is accepted as inevitable and unchangeable, is there yet something education can seek to do ? In terms of personal qualities, capabilities, skills, values, character, the lack of all of which is also a principal feature of the blighted environment, and something that is negatively socialising the children.
Society has consigned such children to become delinquents, anti-socials, criminals, hoodlums. Working with children so that they grow up and contribute to the sustenance of a better community environment is a specific, locally rooted practical goal that any intervention should address. The educational effort has also to be seen in the light of the social, economic and environmental situation in the neighbourhood.
More fundamentally, in a context where there is a complete vacuum in terms of committed and honest local ownership and capability for community development and slum improvement - as a result of which the local environment sinks into ever-more degradation - what could be sought to be instilled in such terms through education of the poor children of this milieu?
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