The Link #27 - School in a Box – a visitor’s view

School in a Box refers to the simple, self-contained (literally “in a box”) teaching and learning materials, adapted to the local culture, pioneered at the Rishi Valley Education Centre for primary schools in neighbouring villages.

The situation of rural schools in India was not brilliant in 1987 when Padmanabha and Rama Rao came to Rishi Valley, supported by a government grant, to study the state of primary education in the area. Their mandate was to find innovative approaches that would address the issues in rural schools.

Just as seed will grow in fertile ground, the Rishi Valley Education Centre (RVEC) provided the rich soil in which the innovative ideas of the young couple would find root. Inspired by Krishnamurti’s¹ values about holistic education, respect for children’s need to be actors of their destiny, and the role of relationship and compassion in daily life, the two pedagogues, together with the motivated teachers and staff, went to work to elaborate what is today a most successful story of quality education and community development.

In 1987, all rural children were supposedly in government schools. The study that P. and R. Rao did at the time showed that there was a mismatch between the actual situation and what was written on paper. Given the difference in levels of learning, language, and economic status, many children were simply left out, ignored by the teacher to fall by the wayside. It is against this background that RVEC set up two village schools on the grounds of the existing Rishi Valley School. It was decided that they would begin by creating one school per year. Teachers were recruited from the local community and trained by RVEC. Schools were to be in villages with no government school nearby, as they did not want to take over the responsibility of the government.

How was this to be done? To motivate children through good pedagogy, it was felt that learning materials needed to be based on the local culture. Why not use mother’s stories to teach reading, rather than some abstract and unfamiliar text? Workshops were organized with interested mothers to discuss their children’s schooling; eventually mothers began offering stories, songs and rhymes. The local tradition of leather puppets could also be called upon to translate the oral, then the written, into action and play.

It was a thrill for young teachers to see the excitement and enthusiasm of small children when they were able to make the connection between their mother’s oral stories, the written word, and being able to put all this into action with the puppets. It also gave them more confidence in reading. Action research revealed the importance of making use of all of the senses: touch, smell, vision, etc. to learn the shapes of words, for example, and to give cultural meaning to their content. Through this method, children are able to master reading very quickly and are in this way encouraged to continue. This is very important in a poor rural setting where immediate results are essential in an economy of ‘survival’.

The teachers also use their senses and creativity as well as their critical faculties as they design the materials for the curriculum. This active investment in the actual content of learning gives them a unique role in the school and the community. The design of the materials had to be sensitive to the desired government school curriculum outcomes. A group of teachers were brought together by Rishi Valley Institute for Educational Resources (RIVER), and they began designing the curriculum by referring to various resource books and by using the parts of the local textbooks that they felt would be useful.

Schools based on the ‘joy of learning’ can sometimes be considered incompatible with academic achievement. RIVER had therefore to work all the harder to make sure that the children would meet the criteria to be able to pass on to the 6th grade and do well in the entrance exams. It is largely for this reason that children are introduced to textbooks in 5th grade, the last year of primary school. An increasing number of children continue in government schools until 7th grade; some go to college and even university. Many of the girls get married at 15, have children and work in the fields.

How has School in a Box changed village culture?

The presence of the village school has considerably improved the quality of life there. The involvement of parents and elders with the school has united villagers around an essential element in their lives: the education of their children. As their children become literate, some of the parents are motivated to learn to read and some mothers committees take on teaching each other. One of the most important indicators of the increase in quality of village life is the reduction of child labor. School in a Box is a kind of safeguard for children to enjoy their childhoods, at least until they are 10 years old.

The school serves also as a resource for health care. Mothers are asked to bathe their children at least every second day. The Rishi Valley Ayurvedic Health Centre trains health workers who go to villages and use the school as a resource for teaching healthy living habits, cleanliness, and giving out basic medical kits for the prevention of illness. They also encourage villagers to create herbal gardens and grow the plants that can be used to heal a number of illnesses, such as colds, intestinal problems, and skin diseases.

Environmental education is also on the curriculum. Children become ecologically aware; they have a school garden where they learn to cultivate fruit and vegetables for their own use. Growing papayas provides a special boost for nutrition, and the importance of clean drinking water has become common knowledge. School is a place where children can play and where generations meet and grandmothers tell stories. School has become the heart of village culture.

Is School in a Box transferable to other situations and cultures?

Now, 19 years down the road, RIVER has considerable experience in ‘transferability’ thanks to rigorous work, action research, and the important human dimension that goes beyond the concrete results of School in a Box. UNICEF was a major partner that helped open up the work with larger groups and with other partners. The RIVER methodology in turn has enriched their own approaches to education and has given them extra strength to come up with new structures. In the scaling-up phase, new partners began to emerge and take interest in the RIVER methodology. Visits by organizations such as the World Bank, the European Commission, and the Government of India opened up new horizons for transferability. In India, with the government’s funding of improvements in basic education, different groups were encouraged to explore the School in a Box methodology and RIVER was called upon to collaborate with a number of other States. To note only a few examples:

Tribal Schools in Andhra Pradesh: In 1996, three nodal agencies – the Integrated Tribal Development Agency, UNICEF, and RVEC – collaborated in planning, cocoordinating and implementing an ambitious program in these districts. In two years, 2,200 schools scattered over the two districts of Paderu and Rampachodavaram were established, and a new version of the teaching-learning material was produced in collaboration with tribal teachers.

Kerala: Thirty multi-grade centers in remote and educationally backward areas of Kasargode, Mallapuram, and Wayanad Districts have recently grown to almost 700, as expansion plans continue. At last count, 1,600 schools were using this program.

Chennai Corporation Schools: This was the first major project in an urban situation. RIVER supported the Corporation teachers in designing multi-grade materials and building the capacity of the teachers in RIVER strategy. Around 2,000 children have come to experience a child-friendly learning methodology. Already the teachers give examples of children returning from private schools to government schools after seeing a tangible change in the classroom climate.

The first overseas project was in Ethiopia. A Rural Education Project modeled on the RIVER approach was initiated in southern Ethiopia to educate local children and bring them to a level of permanent literacy. The visiting team from Rishi Valley (Mr. and Mrs. Rao) went to Ethiopia for one week and found many similarities with the rural situation in India: small farmers, very slow transportation, often no roads into the villages. After this initial visit from RIVER, a core group of educationists from Ethiopia and administrators from the sponsoring group in North America visited Rishi Valley for a planning session. Other countries are showing interest in this kind of collaboration, e.g. Colombia, Brazil, Bangladesh, and Cambodia.

What are the challenges of transferring School in a Box to other countries?

According to P. Rao, it takes hard work to prove that this innovative methodology does work, but motivated teachers can be found in every State, in every country. RIVER sets up ‘designer workshops’ with teachers, designers of materials, folk singers, local artists, and community members to adapt the materials to the local language and cultural situation. This designing work goes on for 20 days so that the entire system is in the local language and is not a copy of the Rishi Valley version. Then the materials are experimented with in the State or country and the ‘transcreation’ process begins. Initially there were 15 and then 45 schools, slowly expanding in one year to 75 and then 125, and scaling up to 1,000 schools in two years. The Government of India is now following this route.

Another important feature of this approach is that it is not possible to pervert its initial community-based focus. Even if bureaucrats would want to apply the method across the board, it is not possible. The School in a Box methodology is programmed for a local context, with built-in checks and balances, and teachers have a strong feeling of ownership for the materials. Yet, as demonstrated above, and despite the local approach, the methodology is highly replicable in other cultural contexts.

Kathleen Kelley-Laine, 2006

¹ For Krishnamurti the term “freedom”, with its sense of “liberation from inner and outer compulsions”, is a necessary condition of goodness: “It is only in individual freedom that love and goodness can flower; and the right kind of education alone can offer this freedom. Neither conformity to the present society nor the promise of a future Utopia can ever give to the individual that insight without which he is constantly creating problems.” (Education and the Significance of Life, pg. 28) The “partnership” can only become egalitarian if it is non-authoritarian. (Radhika Herzberger)