Mahesh Paudyal
As a travel enthusiast, student lover, event-hunter, learning writer, storyteller, educator, teachers’ trainer, students’ counsellor and textbook writer, I have travelled to many schools in Nepal over the past two decades. The ‘romanticism’ is intact, and I won’t probably be able to do away with it as long as I am fairly mobile. The range of students I have interacted with starts from pre-school kids to at least MPhil students. I consider this an experience ripe enough to make me a ‘recalcitrant gazer of schools’. This gaze has brought home many encouraging inferences, but there are some darker sides whose number is equally alarming. In this article, I attempt to draw the stakeholders’ attention to one of the grimmest aspects of our schools.
As parents, we take a long, long time to decide which school best suits our precious children. We examine the schools like examining the perfect shoes for ourselves—calculating colour, size, shape, durability, comfort, cost, originality, and what not! What we end up buying is often guided by ‘un-shoeing’ lures, like a recent advertising from a renowned celebrity, or ‘buy one get one free’ promise, or anything as funny as that.
One thing we have been boasting of these days—especially after the advent of the republican system in 2005— is the dramatic rise in the number of schools. This, we believe, is a corresponding index of the rise in the number of literate people, taking the number above 77% of the total population. The schools, especially the pre-schools and kindergartens are so plenty that one in every twenty houses along a street is an institution of sort. But this translucence comes to one’s notice only upon a very careful observation, for schools have stopped being spacious, clearly visible structures with wide lawns or playgrounds outside. Until some decades ago, schools served a dual purpose as a centre of education and a centre of public gathering for community meetings, festival organisation, sports or other activities. The archetypal image we, the people born at least before 2000 AD have about a school is like this: a wide fenced or open space, an airy, sunny and green landscape with a flower garden and a ‘window’ that allows direct and unimpeded interaction with the outside world. This ideal Rousseauean arcadia of young learners has become a residual memory. The ideal image is becoming a fairy tale, especially when ‘there’s no space; there’s no space’ has become the cry of the day, especially in the urban locations.
Rise in literacy and lack of space have a paradoxical relationship. Innumerable pre-schools, middle schools, +2 colleges and in some rare instances even undergraduate colleges run in a small space, hardly a floor in a medium-size house that would otherwise accommodate only a family of four. Lack of available space, compounded by the promoters’ attempt to save rent money could be the reasons, but it is a fact as an egg is an egg.
We have hardly surmised at how big a cost our toddlers are learning their ‘ABC’ here, and what their seniors are enduring in crammed, smothering ‘schools’ that hardly have motherly schooling infrastructure and environment. Spaciousness of the schools is so integral to learning that ignoring it is akin to denying our kids their birth-right claim to happiness. As early as in 1977, environmental psychologist and educator Harold M. Proshansky had regretted the burgeoning of urban universities in the United States that dismally lacked the ideal, non-physical infrastructure like privacy and territoriality where the students could feel free to choose their behaviours. He also added to the list things like attractiveness, neatness, greenery etc. so that students could start identifying their extended selves with the university premise. At ours, the problem becomes visible right from the ‘play-group’ destination, where there is no space to play in.
Space is not a negligible appendage. It is the space where the kid dramatizes the acquired knowledge and internalizes it. It is the space where the codified world is simulated. It is the space where a theory is tested. It is the space where the abstract codes of ‘dancing’ are actually performed; where the ‘shrutis’ become ‘surs’, and finally melodies.
Lack of such space means crowding, both physical and mental. Physical crowding is understandable. Mental crowding means absence of the opportunity to pronounce a student’s distinctiveness, and the obligation to fight with stress multiplied by noise, smells, cries and many unwelcome activities. And learning in a stressful atmosphere is not learning at all.
Can the single floor of a house built exclusively for a nuclear family of four to six members serve as a ‘school’? On top of that, most houses in congested cities like Kathmandu do not have patios or front-yards. The backyards have long been forgotten. Ground floors might fare comparatively better (still not to qualify to be called ‘schools’) but think of the upper floors! No patio, no balcony, no enough lighting! And a road of street passing by, leaving behind a booty of unwelcome noise and smoke! There are tenant families living upstairs and downstairs and the ‘school’ is sandwiched in the middle. These families ‘murder’ every piece of music the children croon, and translate their juvenile utterances as ‘noise’, ‘disturbance’ and ‘nuisance’. The occasional, guiltless and unpremeditated ‘mischief’, which are indeed responses to joyous stimuli or threats to emotional security, separation distress or potential loss of a secure base, are often interpreted as deliberate ‘naughty’ acts, and the doers are deemed worthy of punishment. In your absence, and at the hand of amateur grade teachers, your child is silenced, smothered and virtually ‘muted’ in the ‘school’.
Personally speaking, your home is a much better learning place than such a ‘school’, at least for minor kids, who are hurdled to the kindergartens not because they are of learning age, but because you want to get rid of them at least at day time to have some time for yourself, or you are under pressure from your neighbours, who launch their kids into school vans every morning, and wave proud ‘bye-byes’ while you go round and around following your child, giggling, shouting and ‘doing nothing’. In fact, you are doing the ‘best’ for your child, who needs such affective, emotional nurturing. But who will appreciate it this way?
A worse picture emerges, if we add a consideration of hostels and dormitories ‘designed’ for resident students. Rented houses, crammed city, crowded streets, ‘elastic’ capacity of accommodating ‘any number’ of boarders who are nothing but a source of easy money! Imagine. The problem aggravates as children grow from the ages of ‘inward pull’ (pull towards their mothers or caregivers, generally from age 0 to 5 years) to an age of outward attraction (6 to 11), social affiliations (12-17), self-identity (17 and above), as Louis Chawla classified ages. Many psychologists, including attachment theorists like John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth share this view. At different stages, children demand more of private as well as socializing spaces, in want of which, they react explicitly or implicitly, resulting in mild neurotic conditions, homesickness, depression, sexual perversion, smoking, drug abuse, gang fights etc. Smaller the space, higher is the danger. Needless to say, many of our high schools and plus-two colleges are already dealing with these challengers. Leaving such children under the gaze of a moustached DI (Disciplinary In-charge) will do them no good.
Some people might argue that spacious schools also lend the students more space to be delinquent. But that is not too. If a student shows delinquent behaviour in a state-of-the-art setting, the cause of his or her delinquency should be sought elsewhere: in parental conflict, in emotional injuries in childhood, in negative peer influences, in some kind of genetic anomalies, in personality disorder or such other things, which call for a different research.
Under such suffocating and compelling circumstances, parents ‘hurl’ their diamonds into ‘concentration camps’ and hope, their kids will grow up as happy kids. This is not probably going to happen. The psychological damage this lack of space and privacy will invite is something that needs to be gauged through a transactional research, for which we have neither time nor patience. It can, however, be predicated that such schooling with injure the kids’ emotional response system, whose impacts might be visible, over time, as lack of confidence or other kinds of personality disorders hinted above. But this need empirical research for verification. What crowding can result in animals, especially rabbits was observed by many researchers, who noticed aberrant behaviours including odd eating habits, cannibalism, sexual perversion etc. If that is true for rabbits, we cannot ignore its viability in human kids. Can we?
One solution, I envision, lies in defining the minimum infrastructural requirements for running a school, making ‘space’ one of the key components. Space-to-student ratio should be defined, and populating the space with lifelike ambience should receive vital attention. The state should focus on furnishing community schools and updating them. ‘School’s that look like concentration camps should disappear. There is nothing wrong if the number of schools in Nepal are cut down by half of their existing number. But life should return to schools and our kids should have the right to breathe the air of life in it. Else, our honk of quality education will be nothing but the cast-off skin of a snake.