PRIMARY EDUCATION

EDUCATING Ammi and Abba

The Tanzeem-e-Walidaen works at enlightening Muslim parents as a prelude to schooling their children

Mohammed Wajihuddin | TNN

In an airy first-floor room at suburban Vikhroli, around a dozen middle-aged couples are listening attentively to a bespectacled man holding forth in chaste Urdu. Ibrahim Abedi talks passionately, his speech laced liberally with Quranic commands and couplets of the revered poet Allama Mohammad Iqbal. At the end, he hammers home a basic point: “Don’t let your children go astray. Hand them over to our custody.

No, this isn’t a dharma guru’s discourse to his devoted disciples on parental care. Rather, it’s an adult education class with a difference—one which parents of poor Muslim students attend to equip themselves to deal with the vicissitudes of their first-generation-learner children’s academic lives. Conducted by the Tanzeem-e-Walidaen (Parents’ Association), a group which reaches out to needy children through their parents, its unusual inasmuch as methods go: while many NGOs work directly with disadvantaged children to keep them in class, the Tanzeem first drills some discipline into parents through motivational talks and counselling by clinical psychologists.

“There’s no point spending time and energy on kids whose parents are not motivated,’’ says Abedi, Tanzeem-e-Walidaen’s general secretary. “Since 1997, we have guided over 15,000 students. Around 75% of them have cleared the SSC exams. That means we have substantially checked the drop-out rate among the targeted group.’’

Since the Tanzeem confines its work to parents who send their wards to municipal schools, its volunteers scour civic schools in minority pockets like Bhendi Bazaar, Kurla, Govandi, Mumbra and Bhiwandi. Once the back-benchers are identified, the organisation approaches parents. Why municipal schools? Apart from the concern about poor kids dropping out and “swelling the number of unemployable and unemployed angry youth’’, there’s another reason: a municipal rule says that no child till the fourth grade will be failed, and by the time the children reach fifth grade, many of them are hopelessly unfit to be in higher grades. It is here that the Tanzeem intervenes.

The parents are first told why they need to enroll their kids in special classes conducted by the Tanzeem’s teachers. They are also told that poverty should not be an excuse to take their kids out of school. A few sessions later, parents learn that their seemingly dull kids too could excel if guided properly. Examples of successful people, who also had humble beginnings, are given. Parents are free to voice their doubts and inhibitions, if any. “At our initial meetings, we heard parents complain against teachers who failed their children,” says Ali M Shamsi, the Tanzeem’s president. “We asked the parents to evaluate their own conduct.’’

As a pilot project, the Tanzeem “raided’’ the slums of Kurla, held meetings with the parents and adopted over 200 children, incubating them for five months. “As the word spread, people started coming to us with requests to coach their children beyond the fifth grade as well,” says Sheikh Abdullah, president of the Tanzeem’s Kurla unit. “We didn’t do that but guided them to other organisations which helped them financially.’’

The result has been overwhelming. Kids who didn’t know the three Rs even in the fifth standard are showing rapid progress. “My daughter didn’t even know how to write her name when we brought her here. Now she is in college,’’ says Qamruddin Khan, a factory worker. “My other four kids were also coached and are doing well academically.

Most of the parents are poor— tailors, taxi drivers, labourers at construction sites and factory workers. “I probably wouldn’t have sent my three daughters to college had these people not convinced me. They guided me and my children at the right time,’’ says a visibly obliged Ansar Patel, a BEST employee and father of three. Patel’s elder daughter Sajeda, now a third-year BA student, recalls: “I was very inhibited and couldn’t even go out alone. Their training equipped me with the confidence to do my things on my own.’’

BACK TO SCHOOL Poverty is not an excuse to deny your kids education, parents are told