Anna and I were on a visit to the rural areas of Pondicherry, just before we were bidding farewell to our two years of stay in Pondicherry. We stopped at this site to watch the harvesting of paddy. It held our attention as men and women were gathering the paddy and the hay and the cattle were grazing on the harvested field for their fodder.
Another family too stopped to watch this sight with their two pre-school aged children. The younger one said to her mother: 'I always thought that we got our rice from the super market. Actually it comes from the field'.
This is the disadvantage which our children of modern times grow up with. They will not ordinarily see a diary farm, agricultural farm, a cycle factory, mango or banana plantations, etc. They would of course be net surfers, computer literate, movie watchers, shopping mall fans....
Our children can grow up benefiting from the advances in technology and information processing. But they can be oblivious of realities of life and the milieu of the 'other' India where people live differently.
A family friend is engaged in arranging visits of school going students from Europe to visit India during winter months to spend about one month in a rural school, to give the expatriate students an experience of another context and setting, where their counter parts grow up. Some of these students come back later to spend longer time in rural India as volunteers in the schools. They value this learning experience. For some of them, it has been a valuable transforming experience.
Children need a wider exposure to realities of life and opportunities of learning first hand. A family friend mentioned to me that their children, when give a choice would prefer to visit a children's home, where socially disadvantaged children are looked after, rather than go to an amusement park in the shopping mall.
I wish more and more families would offer a holistic formative education to their children!
M.C.Mathew(text and photo)
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