Teacher Stories
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David Keen interacts with
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David Keen, Dunedin College of Education, New Zealand, participated in the 1998-99 India Study Tour.
No amount of armchair
travel, no diligence of bookborne preparation, can prepare the neophyte
for the reality of India. I was privileged to be one of twenty-one
participants in the Asia Education Foundation's India trip in January
1999. Initiation into India's realities came swiftly to me on the
outward flight from Singapore to Chennai. Not long into the flight
my Indian traveling companion opened up a conversation. He was a
telephone salesman from Mumbai (Bombay), heading home after a trip
to Hong Kong to purchase stock. A devout Muslim, he had passed the
previous half-hour, in mid-flight, in devotional reading and prayer.
Obedient to the disciplines of the Ramadan fast he had touched no
food since sunrise. Now, it being mid-evening, he was ready for
vegetable curry, and more than ready to tell me of his home and
family, of his work, and of
his India rich in its multifaceted spirituality. The in-flight meal
was a foretaste of my next three weeks of Indian experience, shattering
in its impact on the senses, generous in its welcome, eloquent in
its conversations, fascinating in its synthesis of modern technology,
ancient belief and spiritual commitment.
It was fortuitous that my first Indian contact should have been a Mumbai-ite. Among a tour party that traveled almost the length of India, from Tamil Nadu and Kerala to Delhi I was one of a lucky sub-group scheduled to spend four days in Mumbai, hosted by the Bombay Teachers' College. How my western preconceptions regarding India, preconceptions nurtured in part by outdated school resource materials, were rebuked by experiences during those four days! Expecting an unnerving flight into Mumbai in a third-world machine, I found the planes ran to time and the service was superb. Once grounded, I was confronted with the diversity of areas surrounding the airport - no Indian with whom I talked denied the enormity of the land's socio-economic problems fuelled, as they are, by a population explosion that outpaces the adaptive capacity of the infrastructure. My Indian friends, however, would never allow conversation to remain in the negative; they were full of hope, and buoyed by a proper pride in what had been achieved during the fifty years since independence in 1947.
India's crowning achievement during this period, in their eyes, has been the success of its democracy. They see the land's paramount challenge, for the next fifty years, as lying in the area of education. In spite of geographic size and diversity, cultural and linguistic plurality, regional loyalties, the heritage of caste and the constraints of illiteracy, democracy has taken root in India's sub-continent. A grafting of Hinduism's broadly tolerant heritage on to imported British Westminster traditions has produced a unique cultivar. Like the gopuram of a Hindu temple, reaching skywards and embellished in joyous profusion with every shared symbol of experience, India's vast parliament embodies both the hopes and complexity of the nation.
That complexity creates both the problems and the dynamism of India's education. At Bombay Teachers' College the trainee teachers learn to make carefully crafted educational resources out of old junk, in preparation for working in under-resourced rural areas. Meanwhile, in the large, sophisticated schools of the city, children enjoy a broad curricular grounding with a strong emphasis on moral education, are well-drilled in mathematics, and learn up to three or more languages, for example, the mother tongue, Hindi and English. Teenage students move between linguistic and conceptual frontiers with poise and grace. Rich in the diversity of their cultural traditions, they are adept at metaphor. In easy-flowing figures, their speech conveys an optimism which they are eager to share. In the words of farewell from a Mumbai student: "Aim for the moon: if you miss, you will fall among the stars". India does not wish to hide its problems from us, but it does wish us to share the joy with which it is seeking, and finding, solutions.
Further information on
the TICFA program is available from:
Ms Kristi Sheldon, Manager, In-Country Programs
k.sheldon@asialink.unimelb.edu.au
Mr Aaron O'Shannessy, Project Officer, In-County Programs
a.oshannessy@asialink.unimelb.edu.au
Asia Education Foundation
Sidney Myer Asia Centre
The University of Melbourne
Parkville Victoria 3010 Australia
Telephone: 03 8344 4800
Facsimile: 03 9347 1768