The school around the corner

Usha Raman

For almost the entirety of my school-going life, I walked the one kilometer to the grey-walled institution that seemed to a big chunk of what I might now consider my extended neighbourhood. It wasn’t quite ’round the corner’ but required that I traverse two major roads and an intersection that at the time had no traffic lights but just a policeman whose waves and signals everyone attended to with utmost seriousness. There was a small community of children who ended up walking together, a ragtag bunch from across grade levels whose homes lay on the same side of the school wall. It wasn’t important that we were in the same class or were taught by the same teacher, or even that we played together (mostly not) during the intervals. But we recognized each other as occupying a common geography; we watched out for the younger ones as we crossed the street, and nodded to others who loped past us to be in time for a pre-assembly meeting, and shrunk away in awe when a senior looked back with a smile.

There were others who came on the school bus or were dropped in cars or rickshaws (no autos in those days), and somehow, there was a subtle difference in relationship based on those different modes of transport. The school was solidly in the middle of our (the walkers) territory, and we had nodding acquaintance with a significant number of those who lived within that circle. Our parents mostly shopped at the same kirana stores, watched movies at the same clutch of cinema halls, and shared similar water and power woes. We would run into each other on weekends and sometimes play together in whatever public grounds or gardens were available. This is not to suggest that there was no social or cultural stratification, but somehow the fact that we shared a familiar local-ity created some kind of common bond.

Looking back on those years, however, I realize that the grey-walled institution, as diverse as it was, did little to integrate itself into the fabric of its geographic location. Its purpose of education (such as it was envisaged at that time) was to separate us from our locations and transmit skills and concepts that would turn us into ideal subjects of the economy and nation. We had little understanding of our immediate socio-cultural environment and did not even think it important. We were governed by institutional norms that were set in a faraway diocese and by curricular norms set by a board in New Delhi. The cultural and social aspects of course were completely ignored in that pre-woke era.

The effect of this was that as soon as we crossed into the gates of the school, we lost the sense of local community that had held us together on our walk there. Inside the school, if we were tied together at all, it was by a different bond, one whose threads were fashioned by a culture quite distinct from anything that could be called a neighbourhood. But that is a matter for another discussion.

What does it mean for a school to be part of a neighbourhood, or indeed, as is more often the case in our country, what does it do to a locality to have a school in its environs? Can a school be considered an active neighbour, with all the expectations of conviviality that this assumes? Or is the school simply an occupant in an urban (or rural) subdivision without necessarily connecting to the world outside its walls? What are the possibilities offered by the former and the advantages to be gained from the latter perspective?

The school as part of a community/neighbourhood
A neighbourhood is a collective, and many of us hold also the aspiration that it would offer something like a community. Very often the sources of power, water, and other civic amenities are governed by the same zonal municipal entity, and so it is useful for units (or plots) within a specified colony or subdivision to present to these authorities as a single front when bargaining or complaining is involved. But a neighbourhood is more than just a civic grouping; it is (potentially) a social space as well. There are shared walls over which sounds and smells travel, people nod and smile at each other, they occasionally may trade newspapers and gossip, and borrow tools and sometimes even share space when there’s an overflow of visitors. It’s hard to imagine a school being this kind of neighbourhood presence, and perhaps it’s too disruptive a thought. But imagine a school playground that is available to the neighbourhood on weekends, or a library that opens up to the elders in the homes nearby after school hours, or the grounds used for community gatherings during festivals and holidays. These sorts of arrangements exist in some other countries, where the local public (government-run) school is a common resource that can (with permission and within limits) be drawn upon in times of need.

Such an attitude of neighbourliness would also imply that the school is mindful of others’ needs. When the school has a special event that is likely to draw crowds or cause vehicular congestion on the bordering streets, they would inform and prepare the surrounding community so that it doesn’t disrupt their lives too much. If there is an exhibition or display in the school, the doors could be opened not only to parents and families, but also to the community to participate in some small but meaningful way. One hears of stories where schools got involved in cleaning up surrounding streets or helping seniors with chores – and while this is often done as part of the mandated “socially useful and productive work” (SUPW) activity, it could grow into something more.

In the Indian context, while rural schools to a large extent function as community resources, these ideas may seem inconvenient, or even too radical, to implement. But at the very least, children could be encouraged to develop a consciousness of what it means to be part of the immediate ecosystem the school is located within.

The school as an island
More often than not, those school walls are a means to keep the rest of the world out. And for good reason, one might argue. Education needs to happen in an environment where the child can learn, unburdened of the pressures of the domestic, where she can claim a sense of ownership no matter what her background or identity. To this end, most schools set themselves apart from their surroundings, attempting to insulate children from the rest of the world, including their immediate environment.

In many cities, children ride on special buses from home to school, little capsular communities that are deposited inside the school grounds where they are then locked away for the purposes of learning until the closing bell rings and they get back on the buses to ride home.

This kind of insulation is intensified in boarding schools located in remote areas, or urban schools with large grounds on the city’s periphery. There is no expectation of interaction on either side of the wall; the worlds remain entirely separate. Some schools however try to consciously build bridges with the communities outside their walls, even if only intermittently and unevenly. This might most commonly involve volunteering to clean up local parks or water bodies, or run collection drives for charitable donations, but in such exercises too there is a sense of “doing good work” rather than getting involved in a common cause.

This tends to be the dominant model of functioning, no matter where the school is located. We have tiny schools wedged into residential colonies and large schools with high walls located on main roads, and both treat their surroundings the same way; as if they are irrelevant to the project of education.

So is the neighbourhood school just a dream?
Writing almost two decades ago, techno-entrepreneur Sam Pitroda noted that “Only community-based common neighbourhood schools can respond to the changing needs of the students better and quicker than the national bodies with built-in bureaucracies, bottlenecks, and delays.” A more recent article in the online magazine, The Conversation, talking about American schools, noted that public schools are the “hubs and hearts” of the neigbourhood, and could gain from as well as give back to the communities that they share space with.

But this is not just about generating such a feeling among the children, but also an institutional commitment to caring about the places and people the school finds itself within.

Some years ago, there was a concerted effort among some education activists and reformers to revive the debate and the hope around public (government run) neighbourhood schools as recommended by the Kothari Commission in the mid 1960s. The idea was that such schools would be able to bring together children from different socio-economic backgrounds in an environment that offered accessible quality education. But as we know, neighbourhoods – such as they are – in India are highly stratified not only by class but also along other parameters, and so this has remained a dream to which commitment has gradually waned. The government school in fact is the only remaining vestige of that idea, and to an extent it still fulfills the mission of accessible education in many parts of the country, catering to communities in a certain geographic radius. It is also the space that opens up to the locality when there are elections, immunization drives, or public meetings – as many of us may have seen during the Covid-19 vaccination rollout. But the flight towards affordable and elite private schools has weakened the promise of these schools particularly in urban areas, with parents caring less about proximity and more about status or upward mobility.

Given that we live in times that the school is more often than not, not around the corner, perhaps we could flip this idea, and consider how schools could become integral parts of the neighbourhoods they find themselves in. In effect, this would mean schools allow their walls to become more porous, that they extend their view to include the world immediately outside, and give children a little bit of a sense of being part of their neighbouring communities.

References
• https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/perspectives/do-we-need-neighbourhood-schools/articleshow/1956799.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst
• https://theconversation.com/schools-are-the-hubs-and-hearts-of-neighborhoods-heres-how-they-can-strengthen-the-communities-around-them-185946
• https://archive.org/details/ReportOfTheEducationCommission1964-66D.S.KothariReport