Five-year-old V. Devi circles the letters she knows from a Tamil newspaper. She sits cross-legged on the floor, immersed in her work, not bothered, it seems, by a runny nose or the other children.
Nearby, eight-year-old M. Kamali reads complete sentences from a newspaper with another group. Of the half-dozen sitting circles, only two are supervised by a teacher.
Once their activities finish, both Devi and Kamali record their progress on individual blackboards. They then move up to the next activity: for Devi, fitting hand-made letters onto words, and for Kamali, writing words in a notebook.
The girls attend a government school in Chennai’s Thiruvanmiyur Kuppam, where most pupils are the children of fishermen. Yet their curricula—known as a “ladder system of learning”—has been liberally adapted from one of the most elite and sought-after private schools in India, the Rishi Valley School.
The experiment attempts to help Tamil Nadu teachers better educate multi-grade, multi-level classrooms. The ladder system is being introduced in the state’s 37,000 primary schools this year at a cost of Rs40 crore to cope with the reality of government-run schools—students from ages 5 to 9 crammed in one room to study the same subject.
Tamil Nadu, in many ways, represents the next phase of a much-promoted universal education programme, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), which has put 96.5% children in school with taxpayers’ money. Estimates of children in the state attending school vary between 96% and 99%.
But in recent months, bureaucrats have voiced concern over the quality of education being given, especially in classrooms where children of migrant labourers trickle in and out and teacher attendance can be just as spotty.
The beauty of the ladder system is that it is a “silent revolution”, says M.P. Vijayakumar, the top bureaucrat in school education for Tamil Nadu, who pushed for its implementation.
World of letters: Students in a primary school in Thiruvanmiyur in Chennai.
“The child decides to move to the next step, once an activity is complete,” adds Vijayakumar, SSA state project director. “They record their own progress.”
Valley of dreams
This democratic method of learning applied to the poorest schools of Tamil Nadu ironically evolved from an expensive school located in a neighbouring state. The residential Rishi Valley School, 150km from Bangalore and 300km from Chennai, seems like paradise, cut off from the rest of the world. Nestled on 220 acres of a lush green valley surrounded by fields, the school even has a dairy farm.
With the school’s acceptance rate of 10%, the elite clamour for admissions—annual fees are Rs1.1 lakh. It is known for a more holistic approach to education and a focus on nature, art and music.
Teachers here write their own books and evolve their own syllabi. History is taught by linking up the civilization of four cities—Varanasi, London, Athens and Beijing; environmental science is taught by visiting nearby villages.