Mumbai: The task seemed impossible. Lina Ashar had to teach English to a bunch of mostly male 14- to 16-year-olds, many of whom belonged to poor families in which conflict and abuse were routine. That was way back in 1989, when she lived in Australia.
No classroom boredom: Lina Ashar of Kangaroo Kids at a group school in Mumbai. A child who has to study in a restricted environment cannot be faulted for not enjoying learning, she says. (Photograph by Abhijit Bhatlekar / Mint)`
Relying on her instinct, she set aside the works of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and taught her students by getting them to croon the lyrics, “We don’t need no education”, from Pink Floyd’s
Another Brick in the Wall.
“Yeats was so far removed from the reality of their lives that I had to find some other way to get them connected to learning the language,” recalls Ashar, now 44. “Almost instinctively, I knew what would work and what wouldn’t.”
That instinct was at play again when, in India some years later, Ashar founded Kangaroo Kids Education Ltd, which went on to become a franchise-driven chain of expensive schools that focuses on “learning by doing.”
Kangaroo Kids runs 60-odd preschools and Billabong High schools— so named in a nod to Ashar’s Australian links. More than 13,000 children of well-heeled parents, including leading sports and film personalities such as the actor Pooja Bedi and former models Marc and Waluscha Robinson, are taught in the schools.
Ashar says her exposure to a multiplicity of cultures helped her win success as an education entrepreneur.
Ashar’s father, a textile businessman who traces his roots to Jamkambali in Gujarat, took his family to Africa and Europe before settling down in Australia.
The second of three children, Ashar spent her early childhood in Tanzania and Kenya and did her primary schooling in England. She moved to Australia with her family in 1973 when she was 9 and went on to acquire a degree in education from Melbourne’s Victoria College.
Eye opener
While at the university, Ashar took a one-year sabbatical and came to India, and landed a teaching job at a leading school in suburban Mumbai, an experience that she says was an eye-opener.
She realized the school—like most in the country—followed a straitjacketed curriculum, leaving children no room for creativity.
This was vastly different from the milieu in which she herself had studied, one in which teachers used the flexibility of the system to enliven the classroom, she says.
“A child who has to study in a restricted environment cannot be faulted for not enjoying learning,” says Ashar, who went back to Australia to complete her degree with a resolve that she would one day return to India to work in the field of education, set up an institution where learning would be fun and not drudgery.