Our Teachers

Talimi Haq School (established in 1998) is a grassroots experiment, towards building youth leadership for all-round community development, in Priya Manna Basti, a century-old jute workers' settlement in Shibpur, Howrah (India).

Among the thinkers, teachers, writers, scholars, activists and initiatives we have been inspired by are:

Leo Tolstoy

Rabindranath Tagore

MK Gandhi

Paulo Friere

Shinichi Suzuki

J Krishnamurti

Sylvia Ashton-Warner

John Holt

Jonathan Kozol

Howard Gardner

Abecedarian Project

HighScope Perry Preschool Program

Essential viewing

Everyone concerned about children and their raising and education must watch this three-part doumentary on the human brain.

Accessible here.

Born Genius



Make me a Genius



Accidental Genius

Changing Education Paradigms

Learning landscapes

by Anil Bhattarai
from The Kathmandu Post

It is slowly sinking in among a small but growing number of people that the current education system is highly dysfunctional and is not adequate to address the social and ecological challenges of our time. However, very little thought has gone into exploring the reorganisation of educational process and how physical landscapes of schools could be actively incorporated in teaching-learning process.

Last week I suggested that a creative parent could engage a kid in the learning process both at home as well as outside -- such as while taking her to school, working in the kitchen garden, exploring neighbourhoods, or even while watching television. Often all it requires is asking them questions or telling them stories. Many in fact do that without realising it.

One of the pervasive myths of modern times has been that learning takes place mostly in classrooms. This myth is most prominently played out in the way the teachers near-exclusively focus on textbooks in classrooms. Exams are conducted to test the ability of students to memorise textbooks, and exam marks are taken as exclusive indicator of educational progress.

Perhaps this is the reason why both teachers and parents do not see spaces outside the classroom as sites of learning. Most schools get away with largely barren, monocultured, landscapes precisely because of this. The school grounds are either empty or littered with waste papers and plastics. Classrooms are hot in summer and cold in winter. In cities, classrooms lack natural light. The ventilation is bad. In private schools, the imperative to make quick-bucks often leads to cutting down on necessary investment for learning-friendly classrooms. In state-managed schools, the classrooms are built with minimal regard for the need of those who spend long hours in them - the students. Contractors need to make quick bucks, and the politicians and bureaucrats need some cuts.

This is also the result of lack of creativity on the part of teachers. Schools - private, community-managed, and state-managed - could create classrooms and the larger school landscapes as meaningful sites of learning.

Once as a teaching assistant for a course on globalisation at the University of Toronto, I asked students to, first, make a list of items in the classroom - the overhead projector, the desks, benches, their own laptops, their school bags, pens, among others. And then, I asked them to read their “made in’’ labels. Well, expectedly, most items were made in China.

This was followed by speculative discussions on the process through which some of those items were assembled and transported. The raw materials that made up some parts of their laptops perhaps came from African countries, container-shipped to China. Large fleets of oil tankers and vast networks of pipes transported petroleum that fuelled the factories and transportation system in China. These materials were worked on by Chinese workers from the Chinese hinterlands. Once manufactured, the stuffs were then shipped around the world. Thus, just by examining the flow of materials involved in the making of a laptop, we were able to map out the globalisation process.

With an innovative teacher, this could be done right from day care centres for infants and toddlers onwards. Let me be clear here: I am not suggesting teaching globalisation to an infant, or toddler or even to a six-year old. What I am suggesting is the landscape - both inside the classroom as well as within the school boundary - could be meaningful sites for the learning process.

Infants and toddlers learn through sensory experiences - through seeing, touching, feeling, moving and remaking of objects. In the name of learning, most of our schools deprive small kids from these experiences as they are made to sit still and listen to their teachers. Classrooms of toddlers and infants are often cluttered with desks and benches that hinder their mobility. They have very little to explore.

For higher-age kids, schools can create landscapes that impart both functional skills such as maths, reading and writing as well as make them explorers of the world around them. As an aspiring ecological designer, I have always been fascinated by patterns in nature - in the shapes and sizes of trees, the leaves, the way water flows, or the patterns on land. For one, teaching numbers could be easily done outside the classrooms. Teachers could ask their kids to collect dry leaves from trees and ask them to do basic counting. They can ask them to make a pile of stones and count them. They can teach addition and subtraction by making different piles and either adding to or taking out some stones. Or ask why certain grass has certain number of petals in their flowers. The empty school grounds could be lined up with new tree saplings. The students could count the number of saplings. They can group them into different varieties - such as fruits, vegetables or herbs. They can measure their growth periodically.

When it comes to organising landscapes for learning, mind often is the limit. One can teach about science by exploring those landscapes. One can teach about society through them. Why do people plant fruits? Who has land large enough to plant them? What do people make out of those fruits or vegetables? Who gets to eat? How is food prepared? Who prepares them at home?
Or we can teach the science of gravity by walking students in the ground and throwing a stone up. Or we can teach them biology by exploring how plants grow, fruits ripe or rot, or by showing them how diverse the natural world is. Well there are many more questions that students can explore while learning from landscapes. By near-exclusively focusing on textbook rote learning, most of our schools have not been able to see making and remaking of landscapes as important parts of teaching and learning process. Let’s also not forget: teachers will be surprised how much they themselves could learn in this process.

Image: Courtesy SCEPTrE Fellows

The long road to the Right to Education

On Pedagogy

V Ramaswamy

Ayodhya, 6th December 1992, was a turning point in my life. The enforced curfews forced me to think and feel. The Muslim question in India, and the associated question of my own existential relation to my Muslim fellow-citizens, in flesh and blood, in my own city, and through my life and work – all these questions entered my being, and determined the course of my life in the subsequent years. This was not simply an intellectual matter, though, of course, the objective social, cultural, economic and political aspects also began to get fore-grounded in my thinking and observations. But it was fundamentally a personal, ethical and subjective matter, and one of attention to my own thought process, my conditioned subjectivity, and attention to the attitudes, expressions, views and actions of the different communities I was part of. It was also an innate yearning for union and partnership.

From 1996, I happened to engage with the question of Muslim bastis in Howrah, and in metropolitan Kolkata at large. For here, the nexus of poverty and environmental degradation appeared to have a significant impact, through gastro-intestinal and water-borne diseases, on infant and maternal mortality and morbidity. Thus began an action-research endeavour, which also had the support of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, towards understanding this, and trying to do something positive in that context. This was initiated through a state govt project, and then subsequently continued independently by me and my colleagues, through Howrah Pilot Project, a grassroots action organization, which we established in 1997.

The Right to Housing and Pedagogy

But there was another dimension to this whole process, as far as I was concerned. And that is the housing question, of Calcutta’s labouring poor. The question of the city’s squatters and slum-dwellers. My journey, of intellectual, civic and activist engagement with the labouring poor of metropolitan Kolkata began in 1984, when I began working with squatters facing imminent evictions, and joined the Chhinnamul Sramajibi Adhikar Samiti. I had wanted to work on pedagogy. As it turned out, through the journey and the quest for action to transform the cityscape, I arrived only at pedagogy. But that was in the cause of transformative action grassroots action.

The only solution, as I saw it, was community-led redevelopment of bastis, with enabling policy, legal and institutional efforts from the state. That required, most of all, community organizations in bastis, possessing the required awareness, capabilities, motivation, commitment, integrity, sustenance and ownership. Ownership of the vision, strategy and programme, of community action. The value of the land on which the basti-dwellers live is the only resource available in the system for redressing the immense social and human development gap between the basti-dwellers and the city mainstream. Based on this vision, a proposal was made for the city of Calcutta, for comprehensive renewal of blighted inner city neighbourhoods, in the canal-side area of Beliaghata-Manicktala.

But something like this required the action, across the spectrum of stakeholders, and with a bottom-up thrust and vision, through which a real transformation could be achieved, in the social and physical landscape of my city.

That is what I have been seeking. That is what I wanted to be engaged in. Something affecting the city I lived in, affecting my life, and the lives of people around me.

I arrived in Priya Manna Basti, in Howrah, in 1996 and shortly after that decided to personally work towards physical redevelopment, beginning with 1 basti plot. That was indeed foolhardy on my part. But since then I have been educated in the nitty-grittys of poverty and environmental degradation, thika tenancy, illegal building construction, illegal electricity, crime, party functioning and party affiliation, and on daily life in general in basti neighbourhoods.

I deduced that at the very heart of empowered community organizations must be empowered individuals. Achieving this empowerment, at the level of even 1 person – who then has a small nucleus around her - is exactly the process that has to be achieved at a mass scale, with its catalytic and critical mass effects. This is not a mechanical process, it is essentially a human, pedagogical process.

I mean “pedagogy” as in the title of Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Of course, pedagogy is also closely related to the question of education. Dr Siddiqui’s work in this field, about educating a backward minority, and the educational scenario of Kolkata’s Urdu-speaking minority – anyone concerned about this city, and anyone committed to transforming this city towards greater equity and social and economic justice, cannot ignore this work. Sohel Firdos has also undertaken a survey of poor houselholds in PM Basti in Howrah in 2005. That gives us a clear and insightful report on the nature of poverty in our city. Sohel has also undertaken an analysis of the politics of provision of civic amenities in Kolkata. Zakir Hussain too has written about education and slumdwellers in Kolkata.

What we need today is a programme to rescue the tattered fabric and poisoned ethos of this city, on a war-footing.

The road to city renewal

Dr Siddiqui is a genial and gentle person. But looking at the facts, even he is compelled to conclude that what we see is strategic deprivation of a community at large. And reading his analysis of Urdu-medium school system in Kolkata, one cannot but see what’s happening here as a form of ethnic cleansing, in this case ethnic crippling, through depriving a community of education. How it cripples and poisons, I have seen, in PM Basti.

Building leadership, capabilities and ownership among slum youth, through pedagogy, must lie at the core of any action plan. The focus of slum community youth action must be elementary education, and early intervention with poor children. These schools run by slum youth, for poor children, would be centres of pedagogy, the nucleus of slum transformation. They would be involved in pre-primary and primary education, adolescent girl intervention, back-to-school drives with school drop-outs, and literacy for child workers, illiterate youth and women. Not as funded NGOs, but as efforts emerging from the slum community.

If I were given the mandate and the power to define public policy and investment in the interests of Kolkata’s bastis and the city’s labouring poor – I would desist. For I do not, in all honesty, see anything coming out of that. It is like asking for the laws og gravity to be reversed. Substantive improvement in this specific local context, cannot but be from the bottom upwards. The existing conditions, and the long decades of neglect and toxification, the institutional vacuum and lack of capabilities, all make the notion of public policy a delusion. Bottom-up is slow. But its results are certain and enduring and strong. This can mean that with a 15-25 year perspective, one can really transform current reality. Which is the kind of time a phased physical renewal programme would anyway require. But no physical renewal programme has to contend with the Kolkata basti context. I don’t think something like that has been attempted in human history. And looking at the infrastructure side, and thinking at a city-wide and metropolitan scale, basti redevelopment can enable a radical physical transformation of the city.

The top-down would come, it would come subsequently. But public policy must first be preceded by public action, action in the public domain. By the public, by the people. Who see politics as engagement, together with basti-dwellers, in action in favour of the city’s labouring poor. For their rights, as equal citizens. And thus build the civil society of the city.

This city is waiting, for the vision of the empowerment of its marginalized citizens, to be owned in a meaningful sense, by its citizens.

See the city from here

The renowned Scottish town planner, Sir Patrick Geddes, had conceptualized something called an Outlook Tower, which he advocated for every city, so as to enable it to plan the city and its region. Howrah Pilot Project is also a kind of outlook tower, not looking out, out there, but looking in, from “there”, to the grassroots. Howrah Pilot Project is a live laboratory, of community action in the context of chronic poverty.

Image: from Joan Wink's Critical pedagogy: Notes from the real world.

Commencement address

A commencement address by Wendell Berry to graduates of the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbour, Maine, June 1989.

IT IS CONVENTIONAL AT GRADUATION EXERCISES to congratulate the graduates. Though I am honored beyond expression by your invitation to speak to you today, and though my good wishes for your future could not be more fervent, I think I will refrain from congratulations. This, after all, is your commencement, and a beginning is the wrong time for congratulations. Also I know enough by now of the performance of my own generation that I look at your generation with some skepticism and some anxiety. I hope that if fifty years, having looked back at the lives that you are now commencing, your children and grandchildren will congratulate you.

What I want to attempt today is to say something useful about the problems and the opportunities that lie ahead of your generation and mine. I know how desirable it is that I should briefly, and I intend to do so.

To ward the end of As You Like It, Orlando says: "I can live no longer by thinking." He is ready to marry Rosalind. It is time for incarnation. Having though too much, he is at one of the limits of human experience, or human sanity.

If his does put on flesh, we know, he must sooner or later arrive at the opposite limit, at which he will say, "I can live no longer without thinking."

Thought - even consciousness - seems to live between these limits: the abstract and the particular, the word and the flesh.

All public movements of thought quickly produce a language that works as a code, useless to the extent that it is abstract. It is readily evident, for example, that you can't conduct a relationship with another person in terms of the rhetoric of the civil rights movement or the women's movement - as useful as those rhetorics may initially have been to personal relationships.

The same is true of the environment movement. The favorite adjective of this movement now seems to be "planetary". This word is used, properly enough, to refer to the interdependence of places, and to the recognition, which is desirable and growing, that no place on the earth can be completely healthy until all places are.

But the word "planetary" also refers to an abstract anxiety or an abstract passion that is desperate and useless exactly to the extent that it is abstract. How, after all, can anybody - and particular body - do anything to heal a planet."

Nobody can do anything to heal a planet. The suggestion that anybody could do so is preposterous. The heroes of abstraction keep galloping in on their white horses to save the planet - and they keep falling off in front of the grandstand.

What we need, obviously, is a more intelligent - which is to stay, a more accurate - description of the problem. The description of a problem as "planetary" arouses a motivation for which, of necessity, there is no employment. The adjective "planetary" describes a problem in such a way that it cannot be solved.

In fact, though we now have serious problems nearly everywhere on the planet, we have no problem that can accurately be described as "planetary". And , short of the total annihilation of the human race, there is planetary solution.

There are also no national, state, or county problems, and no national, state or county solutions.

That will-o-the-wisp of the large-scale solution to the large-scale problem, so dear to government and universities and corporations, serves mostly to distract people from the small, private problems that they may in fact have the power to solve.

The problems, if we describe them accurately, are all private and small. Or they are so initially.

The problems are our lives. In the "developed" countries, at least, the large problems occur because all of us are living either partly wrong or almost entirely wrong. It was not just the greed of corporation shareholders and the hubris of corporate executives that put the fate of Prince William Sound into one ship; it was also our demand that energy should be cheap and plentiful.

Our economies of community and household are wrong. The answer to the human problems of ecology are to be found in economy. The answer to the problems of economy are to be found in culture and in character.

To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers.

The "planetary" versions - the heroic versions - of our problems have attracted great intelligence. But these problems, as they are caused and suffered in our lives, our households and our communities, have attracted very little intelligence.

There are some notable exceptions. A few people have learned to do a few things better. But it is discouraging to reflect that, though we have been talking about most of our problems for decades, we are still mainly talking about them. We have failed to produce the necessary examples of better ways. The civil rights movement has not given us better communities. The women's movement has not given us better marriages or better households. The environment movement has not changed our parasitic relationship to nature.

The reason, apparently, is that a change of principles or of talk or of thought is impotent, on its own, to change life.

For the most part, the subcultures, the countercultures, the dissenters, and the opponents continue mindlessly - or perhaps just helplessly - to follow the pattern of the dominant society in its extravagance its wastefulness, its dependences, and its addictions.

The old problem remains: How do you get intelligence our of an institution or an organization?

My small community in Kentucky has lived and dwindled for a century at least under the influence of four kinds of organization; governments, corporations, schools, and churches - all of which are distant (either actually or in interest), centralized, and consequently abstract in their concerns.

Governments and corporations (except for employees) have no presence in our community at all, which is perhaps fortunate for us, but we nevertheless feel the indifference or the contempt of governments and corporations for such communities as ours.

We have had no school of our own for nearly thirty years. The school systems takes our young people, prepares them for "the world on tomorrow," which it does not expect to take place in any area, and gives back expert (that is, extremely generalized) ideas.

The church is present in the town. We have two churches. But both have been used by their denominations, for half a century at least, to provide training and income for student ministers, who do not stay long enough even to become disillusioned.

For a long time, then, the minds that have most influenced our town have not been of the town, and so have not tried even to perceive, much less to honor, the good possibilities that are there. They have not wondered on what terms a good and conserving life might be lived there.

In this, my community is not unique, but is like almost every other neighborhood in our country and in the "developed" world.

The question that must be addressed, therefore, is not how to care for the planet, but how to care for each of the planet's millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one of which is in some precious and exciting way different from all the others.

Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence - that is, to the wish to preserve all of its humble households and neighborhoods.

What can accomplish this reduction?

I will say again, without overweening hope, but with certainly nonetheless, that only love can do it. Only love can bring intelligence out of the institutions and organizations, where it aggrandizes itself, into the presence of the work that must be done.

Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe or the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, " the least of these my brethren."

Love is not, by its own desire, heroic only when compelled to be. it exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded.

The older love becomes, the more clearly it understands its involvement in partiality, imperfection, suffering, and mortality. Even so, it longs for incarnation. It can live no longer by thinking.

And yet, to put on flesh and do the flesh's work, it must think.

In his essay on Kipling, George Orwell wrote: "All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us how are |enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our |enlightenment', demands that the robbery shall continue."

This statement of Orwell is clearly applicable to our situation now, all we need to do is change a few nouns: The religion and the environmentalism of the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. . . .We all live by robbing nature. . . . but our standard of living. . . demands that the robbery shall continue.

We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make.

The treat obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependent upon what is wrong.

But that is the addict's excuse, and we know that it will not do.

How dependent, in fact, are we? How dependent are our neighborhoods and communities? How may our dependencies be reduced? To answer these questions will require better thoughts and better deeds to than we have been capable of so far.

I am not trying to mislead you, or myself, about the gravity of our station. I think that we have hardly begun to grasp the seriousness of the mess we are in.

Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources. We persist in land use methods that reduce the potentially infinite power of soil fertility to a finite quantity - which we then proceed to waste as if it were an infinite quantity. We have an economy that depends, not upon the quality and quantity of necessary goods and services, but on the moods of a few stockbrokers. We believe that democratic freedom can be preserved by people ignorant of the history of democracy, and indifferent to the responsibilities of freedom.

Our leaders have been for many years as oblivious of the realities and dangers of their time as were George III and Lord North. They believe that the difference between war and peace is still the overriding political - when, in fact. the difference is diminished to the point of insignificance. How would you describe the difference between modern war ands modern industry - between, say, strip mining and bombing, or between chemical warfare and chemical manufacturing? The difference seems to be only that in war the victimization of human is directly intentional and in industry it is "accepted" as a "trade-off"

Were the catastrophes of Love Canal, Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Exxon Valdez episodes of war of peace? They were, in fact, peacetime, acts of aggression, international to the extent that the risks were known and ignored.

We are involved everywhere in a war against the world, against our freedom, and indeed against our existence.

Our industrial accidents, so-called, should be looked upon as revenges of Nature. We forget that Nature is necessarily party to all our enterprises, and that she imposes conditions of her own.

Now she is plainly saying to us: "If you put the fates of whole communities or cities or regions or ecosystems at risk in single ships or factories or power plants, then I will furnish the drunk or the fool or the imbecile who will make the necessary small mistake."

And so, graduates, my advise to you is simply my hoped for us all:

Beware the justice of Nature.

Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature. or in defiance of Nature.

Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibility on a gigantric scale.

Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.

Put the interest of the community first.

Love you neighbors - not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.

Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is gift to us.

So far as you are able, make your lives independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.

Find work, if you can, that does not no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.


Wendell Berry is an American man of letters, academic, cultural and economic critic, and farmer.