Abstract:

Recent research has found that a large majority of school children in selected poor, urban and semi-urban areas of India and Saharan Africa are using budget private schools that are affordable to parents with minimum wages. In rural India, half of all school children are enrolled in private schools. The other half of the rural poor depends on government schools, where minimum infrastructure may be available, but no useful purpose is served. The current work reports our efforts to create a new paradigm for inclusive and effective education for children in rural India.

The new paradigm has two major innovations:
- It provides an alternative social institution to the government and private entrepreneurs, who have been traditional providers of education
- It provides effective education through a need based, holistic curriculum.

Under served communities cannot wait indefinitely for government to rectify the maladies in its educational system. Neither can the government prevent private entrepreneurs from demanding high fees. In MPS model, the community itself would function as an entrepreneur by adopting a ‘not for profit model’, in collaboration with other resource groups. A separate legal entity would be set up by the community to develop and manage the school infrastructure, and will provide education to the local children.

Our second major thrust is to make education effective. This involves empowering the students with knowledge, rational thinking, adaptability to technology and the ability to synchronize with the emerging knowledge society. It also includes functional skills such as environmental care, computer literacy, household repair, vocational skills, hygiene, health, first-aid etc. The core curriculum will continue to be based on the prevailing syllabus, but contextual TLM and interactive methods including activity based learning. The stress would be on learning rather than securing marks.

The first practical implementation of the proposed model, Mayurbhanj Public School, is a community school, where the community contributed its assets and actively participated to set up a local public school, in collaboration with external resource groups having domain knowledge in education and related fields, namely, Educate to Empower (E2E) Trust, Bhubaneswar and Youth Development Foundation (YDF), Bhubaneswar, Orissa.

The core responsibility of the E2E Trust includes curriculum development, teacher selection & training and ensuring best practices in the school, while core responsibility of YDF is to act as a facilitator. It was observed that initial handholding of the community by a competent facilitating group would be desirable. However the role of the facilitator is not confined to community handholding alone. It will also have an important role in school supervision, community/district/state level coordination, and networking. Further, YDF is functioning as a bridge between the E2E trust and the community and also function as a demand group for achieving excellence. Since community resources alone won’t be adequate to meet the cost of the school, YDF will also be required to aggressively pursue fund raising.

Some of the challenging tasks ahead include:
- Achieving sustainability.
- Ensuring efficient functioning and transparency in the utilization of funds and accounting.
- Establishing an educational resource hub and initiating outreach activities.
- Up-scaling and replication.

Keywords:

Alternative institution, effective education, not for profit model, functional skills, demand group, sustainability, transparency, resource hub, replication.