The Light of the Future
What would you do if you were a 10 year old girl, that spends all here days grazing cattle and with no time and no access to education.
What would you do if the village you were born was so remote that nobody had ever thought that people over there might need an education.
What would you do if the education option you are provided with, are not at all resonating with your needs in the rural areas?
The ‘Rural Night School Program’ was started by Barefoot College in India 1975 on an experimental basis and has been since then successfully developing all over Rajsthan (140 schools) and other remote areas of India ( Uttarkhand, Bihar, Jarkhand) as many as 450 rural night schools.
The axiom is that socio economic development cannot be effective if not upheld to from the local community and without the down to top approach that implies that local people are involved in the structuring of ad hoc programs made to respond to their own needs;
Education is the same. If imposed from the top down only people clinging to the dream of rural emancipation and urban migration would make use of it’s opportunities. government schools are mostly attended by only one male member of rural families, who will hopefully move to a city to an underpaid government job and hopefully “emancipate” the family from their rural endowment and supposedly underachievement. That entails the education of a class of people who will eventually leave the village to migrate to the overpopulated cities for a middle class neighborhood if lucky or to pen of the overpopulated city slums omitted into the crowds of impersonal consumerism and individualism that the urban environment moulds human beings into.
I don t know when did the idea that living and working and resonating with nature has become negative and the symbol o backwardness!!
Agriculture and farmers are feeding the world, they are extracting the means of livelihood from nature daily, and the comfort of urban life would have not been possible without their precious work.
So my question is: when is this urban-centric philosophy has embodied the power structure of human greed? rural areas have become the slaves of the urban, and WHY??????
Rural education is something entirely different. It underlies a fundamental love and respect for the rural communities, their means of livelihood their ways of living the community and the fundamental importance of maintaining that bond with nature that has been lost in the power games of urban revolution;
A kid who is growing up through the informal education of local community has much more wisdom and is more likely to dwell well in his environment than a kid who has always lived within a city box.
Local teaching for local livelihood, to cherish the antique traditions that fed humanity throughout history.
The answer to the future shortage of food, water, education in the future lies within the wisdom of local communities.
“May we have the foresight to know where we’re going, the hindsight to know where we’ve been, and the insight to know when we’ve gone too far.” (Irish saying)
sustainAble thinking 