Interview with Mr. Shourabh Mukherjee, Founder, Young Men's Welfare Society (YMWS)

Class 3 in Khelaghar, Raghunatpur (South 24 Pgs.), 26 Feb. 07

Q: How did you start YMWS?

Shourabh Mukherjee: St Lawrence Evening School is just 40 years old: We started on 2nd September, in 1968! There was social unrest in West Bengal, and Father Subir Biswas had created a platform of organisations in 1970-71 for working in the long run with the refugees. We focused on primary and pre-primary education.

Q: Where did you start?

Shourabh Mukherjee: We started in my house, with 2-3 friends. We had 29 pupils. We then went to St Lawrence School, where the Principal, Father Bruylants, was very responsive. He immediately gave us 2 class-rooms, then 4, then 8, and ultimately one full building, for free. Today, 482 children join the classes from 4 P.M. with 85% attendance. They come from all the neighbouring slums. St Lawrence School give us class rooms, free electricity, play ground, and to be in such a school also give a sense of pride.

Q: Are you a former pupil of St Lawrence?

Shourabh Mukherjee: No, this school was simply in our neighbourhood. Then, evening schools became a gradual movement.

Q:Like the Rainbow School in Loreto Sealdah?

Shourabh Mukherjee: And Don Bosco, Queen of the Mission, Teetly in St Xavier (where Father Bruylants went), and many others. Now, YMWS alone is running 8 schools with 3850 pupils. Among these schools, "Children's Foundation" in Taratalla and "Young Horizons" in Barakhola (E.M. Bypass), with 900 pupils each, can be termed "Regular Schools", under ICSE board. The other 6 schools are "Community Schools", or "Khela Ghar" (named after Tagore) with 2000 pupils. These include St Lawrence Evening School, the schools at Raghunatpur and Parvatipur on the road between Diamond Harbour and Kakdwip, the Kinder Garten on Theater Road, the primary school at Karaya Road, and since April 2007, Young Horizons Evening school. This one, the latest, already has 2 classes and 75 pupils. We campaigned by going straight to the people in the neighbourhood, door to door. We add one class every year, as the pupils get older, until class 6 when they join Young Horizons or an other regular school. We plan to open one new school per year in this manner. Children's Foundation is 25 years old, and Young Horizons started in 2002, on a land given by the Government, on a recommendation of Mother Teresa.

Q: I have seen the school at Ratghunatpur 2 years ago, on the occasion of the 5-day Waldorf Education Training by Aban and Dilnawaz Bana, that you organised for the teachers. I was kindly invited, and visiting the school next to the training centre, left on me a rare and durable feeling of plenitude and wholesomeness. This was so different from so many initiatives in direction of the poor, where things or processes often look shabby, improvised, or simply missing their target, as if things for the poor should "look poor", or a little inappropriate, or a little misplaced, for some obscure reason.

Shourabh Mukherjee: I hate this…

Q: But in your school, there was no broken pipes, no forgotten utensils in dusty corners, the painting was fresh, the garden was lush and tidy, and even the chappals of the pupils were neatly arranged on the steps of the veranda. The classrooms were full of beautiful and new drawings and paintings made by the pupils and their teachers, and the children were happy and active, but not excited, obedient but not timid, and I thought, this could be a good school for my daughter. I actually made up my mind then: If you could achieve that much in Raghunatpur, I became confident that Young Horizons, which is in my neighbourhood in Kolkata, must be an equally good school. What I perceived was this: Here is a clear and sincere interest for the children, unpolluted by any other consideration. This is what parents want, isn't it? Yet nothing expensive was there: no glazed windows, plain corrugated sheets on the roof, no false ceiling, extremely simple or no furniture, and nothing conspicuous purchased from outside, except the paper, pencils and colours. Or, from an other point of view: Nothing was there to intimidate parents or children, it was actually not very different from their homes, where they also remove their shoes before entering, and which are almost always clean and tidy, probably because when your life depends on very few possessions, chaos is an unaffordable luxury.

Shourabh Mukherjee: I believe in "Cleanliness is next to Godliness". It lifts the spirit, and gradually this spirit is invoked by you. You must give the children the best opportunities, and invest in infrastructure if you believe in the future. I also like what Narayan Murthy, of Infosys, says: "Check the toilets first"! Proper toilets, drinking water, clean surroundings, are essential. Children should be happy to go to school, they should feel in security, and parents should be happy to send their children to school. There are 326 pupils in our Raghunatpur school, with 90% attendance. It is a Muslim area, and the main alternative there are Madrassas. Pupils come from far away to Raghunatpur and Parvatipur, so we provide a bus service. But we also don't want the people to be dependant on charity. We give children a small tiffin (a cup of milk, biscuits, own-grown vegetables), because they need that energy to work properly, but that's all. It is not a lunch. It is not an incentive. And it is not publicised.

Every Human Being need an element of security, you can't give this security only from charity. For ensuring the long-term security of our Community Schools, we raise money from Young Horizons and Children's Foundation, to gradually build a fund. So if tomorrow one of our donors says, "I'm sorry, I can't continue", our schools will not close. They will never close.

Q: But the fees at Young Horizons are very reasonable, even cheap. How can you do this?

Shourabh Mukherjee: We are able to do it! Every year we raise about 40 lakh from both schools combined, and this goes to a fund, from which only the interest is utilised. Our Community Schools, with 2000 pupils, need 2 lakh per month .

However, these schools are only a part of our work in this area of South-24-Parganas. We also encourage women and children to save money in "savings groups". 764 mothers are involved. We also have a programme to provide drinking water to 100 villages, and we have conducted an extensive research on the state of Education in West Bengal. Our programmes are focussed on one area, along the road, so that people can see that something is happening, and get involved.

Q: Since 10 years, you train your teachers with the Steiner-Waldorf method. How did you come to know Steiner's method of education?

Shourabh Mukherjee: I met Berndt Ruff in Delhi 10-12 years ago. I then visited Waldorf Schools in Germany, and I found a similarity with Tagore's Education: "Children must grow in an atmosphere of aspiration and freedom". We also exchange teachers every year with Waldorf Schools in the U.K. We have one policy guideline for all teachers. 76% of our teachers are graduate girls, against 59% in government schools. We have only female teachers. Our work is an on-going process, we permanently seek to improve our work. For example, we had a 2-day Workshop for the teachers with Dr. Uday Parekh of I.I.M. Ahmedabad, and coming month (September 2008) we will have one more with him for 5 days, on "Spiritual Leadership in School". Because, unless there is an element of spirituality you cannot give your best.

We are also organising a big social conference on 20th January, 2009, on the "U.N. Millenium Goals": "Can we keep the promise?". There will be a Youth Festival in Kolkata, with contribution from people of different walks of life, food rights, education, etc.

Khelaghar, Raghunatpur, 26 Feb. 07

This interview was taken on 24th August 2008 by Laurent Fournier.

Child appropriate education

Earlier I posted questions from a Steiner school parent. These were questions asked to me by a good friend of mine who I convinced to enroll his children in the Steiner school in the Philippines. Some of his questions are common among the parents in the school. Others, are unique to him.

As a result of this Q&A, Laurent and I got to thinking, what are some of the unique features of a Steiner school compared to other schools. This is an interesting question and a very common question as well. It is easy to answer, yet a bit challenging to understand.

The easy answer to the question is that Steiner schools teach in a "child-development appropriate" way. What does this mean? It is best answered through an example:

One of the key challenges for parents placing their children in a Steiner school is related to reading. When do they learn to read? In most schools today, the alphabet and reading is introduced when children are quite young, even at the pre-school level. By comparison, reading in a Steiner school is taken up around class 2 or 3, quite late by modern standards. Why is this so? Let us look at what does it take to learn to read. It needs a few basic skills but the one key skill that is absolutely necessary is that the reader can sit still for the duration of what he or she is reading. It is very difficult to read while running about and jumping. Of course that's silly, I can hear everyone say, and yet this is a reality that is often overlooked.

Let us look at a young child, between the ages of 2-7 years of age (more or less). Being a parent with children that have already passed this age, I can say, with quite a degree of certainty, that at the age, my children just wanted to run and play. Sitting still was a real struggle for them. In rural areas, we see that running and playing are the key activities of children. This would mean that sitting still, even just to have dinner, can be a real effort and exercise for them. As they grow older though, you begin to observe that on their own, they can sit for long stretches without having to run and play. Once this happens, other activities may now be possible, such as learning in a classroom setting, and learning to read.

It is with this understanding of the characteristics of the child that Steiner education brings reading as an experience at a later age. And there is another approach they have.

I remember when I was learning to read. I read sentences like: "See Dick run. Run Dick run. See Jane run. Run Jane run." and so forth. To this day, I have no idea who Dick and Jane are. In a Steiner school, children first learn to write (in Class 1). They copy what the teacher puts on the board. By the end of the year, they have a book full of short sentences that they have written themselves. Come the next year, the same approach takes place. Again they copy what the teacher writes on the board. The difference is that later in that year, they begin to read it as well. What is it they actually learn to read? They learn to read something they wrote themselves, copying what the teacher wrote. Suddenly, it makes sense. It makes sense because they were part of the process that wrote the word and they can relate to what they wrote. This is what a Steiner school means a child development appropriate education. By this age (around 7-8 years old) the child can sit still long enough and allow his or her eyes to do the "running about". In other words, around this age, it is appropriate for the child to learn to read because they have developed to such a degree that they may now sit still long enough to learn.

All subjects and presented to the children in a Steiner school in this manner. This is why we can say that a Steiner school covers all the academic requirements of any school. It just does it appropriately.

Of course, some children will be gifted and will pick up reading earlier. This is a quality unique to this child. And, based on the above description, one can also see how modern life, TV, video games, etc, can have a strong impact on the child's development.. but that is another discussion.

We all remember history class

This is short description of how history works in a Steiner school. I have posted it with the hope of encouraging discussion to understand more about Steiner education

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We all remember history class. It was that really horrible class where we had to memorize dates and famous people (with names we couldn’t spell or pronounce), and larger than life events that had happened so long ago we didn’t even feel connected. Ah yes, this is the history class we love, and love to complain about. And yet, in Steiner schools, history is a class that spans about 12 years, namely from grades one to twelve. It is deeply imbedded in stories of the lower grades, and transformed into historical events in the upper grades. It is this relationship, this transformation of history in the lower grades to the upper grades that remains a unique feature of Steiner schools. This transformation clearly illustrates how the work in the classroom meets the development of the child.
Let’s take an example of starting the history in grade four. This is not a whimsical choice. There is a specific reason for starting in grade four. In a Steiner school grade four is the first time that the child meets history as we, the parents, conventionally understand it. In grade four, the young student is introduced to ancient civilizations, the Indians, Persians, Egyptians and the numerous contributions of these civilizations to the fabric of human development. To better understand what is so special about grade four, we need to situate ourselves in another historical event.
Imagine standing on the edge of a river just 50 kilometers from Rome. Behind you is your loyal and experienced army. It is a cold January day in 49 B.C. and you have been recalled to Rome. You know the existing Roman laws prevent you from bringing your army within less then 50 kilometers; but you efficient network of spies inform you that the consuls in Rome, worried about your successes against the Gauls, have decided to incarcerate you. It is the decision of a lifetime. With a sweep of your arm, you lead your army across the river and towards Rome. “Ala jacta, est!” is what history records as your statement during that fateful moment. Ala jacta est…the die is cast. Thus Julius Ceasar crossed the Rubicon, marched onto Rome and, as they say, the rest is history.
What this story brings as a picture is an important event in the fourth graders’ life: a coming of age, an expression of him or herself; the first tentative footsteps toward freedom as an individual. Around this age (9-11), the young student feels stirring within him or her, the initial impulses of this freedom. No longer are they under the spell of the parents: they are slowly, yet surely, awakening to that impulse within them that will eventually develop into their free being.
In step with this event, therefore, the history class must reflect this. It is not a surprise, then, the history in grade four starts to look at ancient civilizations, civilizations that brought about the first transformations for humanity, be it in agriculture, science, or art. These civilizations also reflect the first steps of humanity to take control of their destiny, and not leave everything to the gods…. like a fourth grader taking the first tentative steps towards freedom and independence. What used to be one world with one history is now a world full of many “histories” reflecting a wide range of independent steps taken by humanity in the course of its development.
A key to the transformation of this experience into ninth grade history lies in the changes brought about by these ancient civilizations, changes that may be referred to as “revolutions”. Yes, there was an agricultural revolution that occurred in ancient times; there was a social revolution; there were many transformations that may be referred to as revolutions. Appropriately enough, then, the theme of history in grade nine is revolutions, as this completes the transformation begun in grade four.
In grade four, the young student begins to experience changes brought by man. But all these changes bring about great civilizations. The unspoken question is then why do these civilizations pass away? Part of this may be seen in the discussion of revolutions in grade nine; but the seed for this question is planted in grade four. Yes, man’s development has allowed great civilizations to arise; but man’s “mischief” or misuse of this development, may bring about the collapse. This picture of misguided intellect comes through a different story for the fourth grader; it comes in the shape of Loki, the Norse god who causes the ultimate destruction of Valhalla and the death of Odin. These stories do not come in history class; they will come in the literature class. Here the fourth graders will experience that such a skill, such freedom, may also be abused to the detriment of all. But it is a story and a good one at that, where the evil or wicked nature of Loki is unmistakable. And through this story, a seed is planted, a seed that will germinate for the next four years to blossom in grade nine as a question – how can all this happen? This is the opening necessary in the context of polarities, the theme for grade nine, to now bring in the history of revolutions – real, violent, modern. People die (not just the citizens of Valhalla) in revolutions. This is the result of the deeds of men as well, just like the great civilizations; but here, the contrast between different points of view, different perspectives of the truth, is inevitable. The world may be a place of transformation but it is also a place of turmoil.
Thus, over time, a question that remains incipient in grade four, now blossoms fully in grade nine and is met in the history curriculum. In grade four, the civilizations are great, beautiful, testimonies to man’s greatness and individuality; but lurking the background is the Loki in each man, the Loki that can bring about Ragnarok, the end of the world. As the independence of the young student grows, the Loki in them becomes more inquisitive, more active, probing and testing the world until confrontation with the world is inevitable. Now the light of the civilizations meets the darkness of Loki. Men must choose; men are always right; what is the truth? These are questions of the young adolescent. Revolutions that changed the world will help the young adolescent in grade nine meet these questions.
Yes, history is still about dates and places, and people. When seen in the totality of the curriculum of a Steiner school, it is possible to see the continuity of the story of man that started in grade four and is transformed in grade nine.