If the 150 million literate help the 150 million illiterate, the balance will be struck, enthused Geeta Dharmarajan at SGEF2017

When Geeta Dharmarajan, writer, editor, educator and founder of Katha, walked up on stage during the ScooNews Global Educators Fest 2017 to narrate her story of how she started Katha, the crowd awakened. Katha is the non-profit organisation she founded in 1988, that focuses on educating children, especially from poor families. For Geeta, educating children is not just a passion, it’s a promise that she has taken to see to it that each and every child in India gets an education.

She began her speech by talking about how fifty percent of what we are doing today will become obsolete 20 years from now. She spoke of how she knew of someone who had started a bakery in Iceland. It is all about the passion! She reiterated the importance of inculcating a sense of passion in our children, whether it’s about stones or about the world outside. We see ants climbing trees without ever thinking about the rest of the world, very busy doing what they do. Why can’t our children do that?

From her experience of visiting many schools, she stated that in most schools, children are waiting for someone to come in and discipline them. It is always competition and never co-operation. She explained that children are very smart and that there is a complete dumbing down that happens. A 2-year-old can learn by herself or himself. She spoke about a video that she saw wherein a child is trying to befriend a dog by putting out her hands gently. But there are parents who stop children from interacting with the dog saying that the dog is dangerous and then the child grows up fearing dogs! She suggested that we parents and teachers stop asking children not to try out new things, thereby creating a sense of fear in them.

At Katha, they wanted to know whether it was possible for a child to take forward her learning. So they started working with children in 250 slums, which are part of the 750 slums that they had been in. They found that in the 250 slums, there were children willing to come forward and teach others. So a seven-year-old is able to help a five-year-old and an eight-year-old is able to help a six-year-old and so on.

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In 2016, she wanted to know if it was possible for one child to teach another. They found at least 500 schools saying, “Yes, we can do this!” Explaining numbers, she said that we have 300 million children of school-going age in our country. A number of reports stated that out of this, 150 million can read and 150 million cannot. What an odd arithmetic! Clearly, all the children who are well off can read and those growing up in slums cannot read. If the former set helped the second set, in 20 years, India could be the most literate country in the world!

Teachers are not made by salaries, she pointed out, they are made by passion, they are made by exchanging ideas, by seeing their children get that knowledge. Teachers don’t care if their own children earn ten times what they earn. Everything cannot be run by economics and as teachers, she said, we need to believe in a larger goal. She focussed on taking up the ‘300 Million Challenge’. She said that if we truly work hard, we can get the 150 million to teach the 150 million who don’t have access to education. She ended her speech by persuading every teacher, principal and parent to take a pledge to bring our children into the 300 Million Challenge and make India a better place.

This story appeared in the September 2017 issue of ScooNews magazine.

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