Search for school takes a model turn

A couple’s quest for a good school for their kids gives Rajasthan a unique teaching centre

Amit Bhattacharya | TNN

Back in the 1970s, Doon School alumnus, J P Singh, had a peculiar problem. He just couldn't find a school where his three children could get an “appropriate” education. “My wife, Faith, and I didn't want them to go to an elite public school like I did, because children in such schools don't get to know the real world,” says the scion of a well-known Rajput family.

The Jaipur-based Singh and his English wife, who had by then set up apparel brand Anokhi, sought an environment where their kids could learn at their own pace. “We didn't want lessons stuffed down their throat,” says Singh.

The couple found what they were looking for at Neel Bagh, a unique school in rural Andhra Pradesh being run by a pioneering British educationist, David Horsburgh. But Neel Bagh, located in Srinivasapur taluk of AP, took in just local children. So Horsburgh made the Singhs an offer — if they start a small school of their own, he could train the teachers for it.

Thus in a section of an apparel factory in Jaipur, with three children of well-off parents and the rest working class kids, started a small experiment in alternative education that was named Digantar. The name, meaning a change in direction, was chosen by the school's founders and its only teachers, Rohit Dhankar and Reena Das. “We started in 1978 and eventually had 25 children of various ages. The two of us taught all subjects from Class I to X,” says Dhankar.

Dhankar and Das, who got married around that time, adapted and developed Horsburgh's pedagogy of free learning — the school had no system of examinations (except after classes V, VIII and X, as required by the state government) and the teacher's role was that of a facilitator who helped children become independent learners. “It turned out to be a crucible where our teaching techniques were tested and refined,” says Dhankar.

The school ran till 1986, by which time all three Singh children had passed Class X and had gone to England for further studies. By this time, the teacher couple had realized that their methods had great potential to help rural children. Singh then donated a piece of his land at Todi Ramzanipura, around 20km from Jaipur, and chipped in with an initial grant for the building. So in 1988, with a grant from the Union HRD ministry, Digantar's experiment to bring quality education to rural children got under way.

It wasn’t easy convincing the villagers. Says Dhankar, “The standard reply we got was: ‘We don’t send girls to school in our community; schools don’t teach anything anyway’.” But the couple’s commitment and the school’s unique pedagogy slowly brought results. Today, there are long admission queues at the four Digantar schools that operate in the rural hamlet of Kho Nagoriyan (population around 10,000), where roughly 80% of inhabitants are Muslim and the rest mostly Dalits. “When we started in 1988, female literacy here was 2%. In 1992, we conducted a survey that found 91% of girls in the age group 5-14 didn’t go to school. In 2008, this figure is down to 12%,” says Das.

The schools’ children, most of them firstgeneration learners, do surprisingly well at examinations conducted by the state board. “Hardly anyone ever fails. Most of our students get above average marks in these tests though there’s hardly anyone who has an exceptional score,” says Dhankar. That’s remarkable for a system that lays no stress on examinations. In fact, competition of any kind is discouraged.

But Digantar’s story isn’t just about numbers. Its alternative teaching methods produce confident individuals who are slowly bringing about attitudinal changes in their communities. For instance, Rehana, Nasreen and Arjina, students of Class XI at Digantar’s school in Bandhyali village, are the first girls in their village to reach the Plus 2 level. All three have warded off family pressure to marry and convinced their parents to allow them to continue studies. “We constantly interact with the community in order to build trust,” says Das.

Digantar's activities have spread much beyond the four schools. It’s now a major resource centre for training of teachers coming from across the country, has a project for improving teaching techniques in 75 government schools, conducts research in early reading processes, helps the government with its flagship SSA programme, develops curriculum for government schools, brings out Shiksha Vimarsh, an acclaimed journal on education, and also collaborates in running a Master’s programme in elementary education at TISS in Mumbai.

The “directional change” that two teachers decided to take in 1978, is now showing the direction to a model of quality education for the deprived.