Abstract:

In the autumn of 2018, the author was invited to Karnataka, India to chair a committee tasked with building an elementary school for standards one through five. This experience led to an ethnography, a portion of which is covered in this presentation, outlining the forces at play when embarking upon an educational enterprise in this part of the world. The differing viewpoints concerning the construction, curriculum, and features of the school gave the author a nuanced view of bureaucracy, personal agendas, and somewhat unusual features deemed important in this developing country. This project was further complicated by torrential rains, the collapse of a dormitory, and the global Covid-19 pandemic leaving the future of the elementary school in question.

The project started with an initial meeting of the group in which the members were charged with the task of developing the school. Progress was made with the determination of the school’s location and a visit to the proposed building site.

The author then met with the architect, an acquaintance of his from pervious visits to India. A school building was inspected, and the committee decided to, with minor modifications, have a copy of the example school built on the chosen property.

The first issue of disagreement was the inclusion of a swimming pool. Influential members of the committee argued that having a swimming pool at the new school would be a draw for parents to send their children there. This meant a more robust number of students and therefore more income. Opposing voices argued that since the new elementary school was governed by a parent 6-12 school with an existing pool another pool was redundant.

A series of visits to other schools in the state led to disharmony in the committee with one group delving into the curriculum of the school while another faction searched for the campus pool to examine.

Approximately ten months after the return of the author to the United States an unusually intense monsoon season and subsequent flooding caused the collapse of a dormitory on the campus of the parent school. This caused all work on the new school to halt.

Six months later COVID-19 forced the residential parent school to stop in person learning, send students home, and start again with online learning.
An uncertain future for the elementary school exists at this moment in time.

Keywords:

International, Education, Ethnography, Social.