COMMENTARY
Education lessons for us, courtesy of India
By Tommy Thompson
WHERE THERE WAS ONCE NO HOPE, NOW THERE IS LEARNING
When students returned to St. Andrew the Apostle Elementary School in Algiers, just across the Mississippi from New Orleans, the staff had to open up the cafeteria despite the lack of a working refrigerator. The principal told the students not to worry, they'd somehow find them food to eat. "This is a family," Sybil Skansi told a CBS/AP reporter. "This is a place you can call home now."
Some unexpected truths are emerging out of the many human-interest, return-to-school stories coming out of the Gulf Coast:
Algiers has its share of intergenerational poverty — the members of the so-called "underclass" so famously rediscovered by the media when Katrina blew in. Is there a way to bring the spirit of education to all American children born into a legacy of low expectations?
I recently had the experience of seeing how far a "just do it" approach to education can go when I was asked by Marquette University to serve as a jurist in selecting a winner for the $1 million Opus prize for a globally outstanding charity. The charity we selected, based around India's Mumbai area, has opened hundreds of schools and educated thousands of children in classrooms without the benefit of chalkboards, computers, roofs, walls — or often, seating (other than mats spread out over dirt floors).
As bad as things are in New Orleans, India has an underclass like no other. Children labor in factories and as rag pickers. Women often find themselves cut off from any economic activity that would give them a smidgen of independence. Whole classes of people are doomed by illiteracy to a life of labor.
An Indian-born Jesuit priest, Father Trevor Miranda, grew in determination to change this landscape by illuminating Indian slums and villages with the light of learning. Armed with degrees in business and law, he combined his social vision and administrative talents to set up a "pavement school" for shoeshine boys and porters near a train station. The result was a model of a small, mobile, resource-light classroom replicated to teach 10,000 children in almost 500 such "schools." This program — Reach Education Action Programme (but more commonly known as "Footpath University") — uses any available home, office or temple.
Some classes are preschools, some "bridge" schools to get marginalized children out of the labor market and prepare them for regular schooling, and some work closely with local schools to offer study classes aimed at keeping children from dropping out. Another REAP program sets up self-help groups for women, helping them to collect micro-savings to invest in small businesses.
In evaluating this project, I saw a lot of lessons for Americans.
One is that we need not fear faith-based institutions as potential juggernauts of intolerance. Despite the fact that Father Miranda is a Catholic priest, his staff is made up of Hindus and Muslims. He makes a point of having a powerful REAP presence at religious festivals of all sorts.
Another lesson is that we don't need to bring to bear the economics of scale of another Great Society to change America. REAP shows that powerful forces for social change can be big and small at the same time — as big as one region of India, and as small as a single classroom.
REAP also restored for me the luster of a word, "empowerment," worn thin by overuse in Washington. REAP uses literacy to empower young people to become teachers, to empower women who transform their families and communities, and empower children — many of whom will go on to become teachers themselves.
The final lesson is that we should not get hung up if a school doesn't have every single item in place. Americans once knew this in the days of the one-room schoolhouse, where discipline, pride and a hunger to learn came first.
Of course, functional cafeterias are welcomed, textbooks are essential, and we are just beginning to learn the myriad ways in which computers can transform the way we learn. But we would do well to keep in mind that learning doesn't spring out of a pocketbook. It begins in the heart.
Tommy Thompson is the former governor of Wisconsin and secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Readers may write to him at: Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, Robert S. Strauss Building, 1333 New Hampshire Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20036.
