The Beautiful Tree (3 page)

Wajid’s mother had apparently established the school to serve the community out of a devotion to the poor. And when I first started visiting the private schools, I assumed that they all must be run on a charitable basis—for how else could schools that charged such low fees survive? This seemed fair enough and fit in well with my understanding then of how the poor could gain access to private education. But the reality turned out to be far more interesting. As I traveled from school to school, I jotted down details in my field notebook of the number of children, the fees charged, and the number of teachers and their salaries. Back in my hotel room, I did some quick calculations and it dawned on me that running these schools must actually be profitable—sometimes very profitable—whereas other times they just break even. I mentioned this to Khurrum. He said that profit wasn’t a great issue for them, but certainly they viewed themselves as businesspeople, as well as people who served the poor. This could of course explain why there were so many private schools—because it’s easier to attract business investment than philanthropy.

Typical of the schools that had clearly been started with a business motive in mind was St. Maaz High School, situated near the state prison. (As I passed the prison one day, the prison guard ushered me in and gave me a guided tour; I was accompanied by the large entourage of school owners who went with me everywhere during my visit. I’m sure the guards didn’t count us as we entered, so I don’t know how they were sure that we were the only ones to leave.) St. Maaz was run by Mr. Sajid, or “Sajid-Sir,” as everyone called him. Sajid-Sir was in his late 40s, and he clearly had a passion for teaching and for inspiring others. Teaching, he told me, kept him fresh, and it was his hobby as well as his livelihood; to him, he said, teaching was like acting. His aim was to instill a love for the subject he taught, mathematics. Mathematical allusions peppered many of his conversations. Interacting with his children and parents in Urdu, at a function organized for my visit, he had the assembly roaring with laughter, holding onto his every word. He told the gathered crowd: “There are three corners of the triangle, parents, teachers, and students, and this triangle must not be a scalene triangle; no, it must be an equilateral triangle. Am I right?” We all agreed. “Of course,” he said.

Sajid-Sir had begun teaching in his early 20s, inspired, he told me, by the way that he managed to teach his younger brother the basics of mechanics by demonstrating the principles on an old bicycle (his brother is now a mechanical engineer). At first, he began, in his own words, as a “door-to-door teacher-salesman,” traveling by bicycle to teach all six compulsory subjects to children in their homes, for a nominal sum. After three years at this enterprise, he founded a small school in 1982, with 15 students sitting on the floor of a tiny room in his rented house. From there he progressed over the next 19 years to an enrollment of nearly 1,000 students when I first met him, on three rented sites—one for the nursery and primary grades and one each for the boys’ and girls’ senior sections. The boys were housed in very cramped, dirty buildings on the periphery of a marriage function hall. (When it was not otherwise in use, the school could use the function hall for assemblies and other purposes.) The girls’ site was a more attractive, although still-cramped, three-story building, about half a mile away. But Sajid-Sir had just bought a new site nearby with his accumulated surpluses, he proudly told me, to develop into a unified school. And that is exactly what happened over the next few years; he upgraded his facilities.

Few of Sajid’s teachers had the state teacher-training certificate. The same was true of most private schools in the poor areas I visited. Indeed, it was a mystery at first why anyone would want to teach in the private schools, as their salaries were apparently lower than the public schools—perhaps only 20 or 25 percent of what the latter offered. So why would teachers choose to teach there when they could command much higher salaries elsewhere? The answer was simple: they couldn’t get jobs in the public schools. Sometimes, such jobs were meted out as a means of political patronage, I was told. Since ordinary people couldn’t get them, they taught in the private schools. But the lack of government teaching credentials was probably the chief reason. Many teachers in the private schools did have degrees; some even had higher qualifications, such as a master’s in mathematics or sciences. But these credentials would not make them eligible to teach in public schools. For that they would need a government teacher-training certificate. The private school owners were disparaging about this: “Government teacher training,” Khurrum told me, “is like learning to swim without ever going near a swimming pool; . . . our untrained teachers learn to teach in the well.”

Learning in the well for Sajid meant training his own teachers. He told me that he instructed his new teachers personally, in what, above the heavy noise of the traffic in his office, I thought he described as the “Beard” method. Later I realized it was the “BEd”—Bachelor of Education—method. A lesson must have five parts, he said: an introduction, where the topic to be explored is fit into the context of students’ existing knowledge; announcement of topic; presentation; recapitulation; and evaluation (usually through homework). Before he allowed a new teacher to teach in his school, he or she had to observe Sajid teaching. Then Sajid watched their first few lessons, made detailed notes, and challenged them on particular points.

I watched many lessons by teachers he had trained. One young woman with an MSc in inorganic chemistry, wearing a pale burka without a veil, taught about the derivation of salt and water from hydrochloric acid. I had never liked chemistry in school: if she had taught me, I think I would have loved the subject. She was very clear, lively, animated, and engaged her class throughout. There was nothing labored about her approach; the whole lesson moved forward smoothly. She taught without notes and seemed completely on top of her subject. At the end, she summarized the lesson, expertly managing the class so that all seemed to have understood, and set a three-part homework assignment. As she finished, Sajid stood and touched her bowed covered head. He had tears in his eyes as he said, “Thank you, wonderful.”

Not all the teachers were as young. The schools also had older, sometimes much older, teachers. One was Mr. George Anthony, who taught English at Khurrum’s Dawn High School. He was a marvelous, sprightly, civilized Indian gentleman of 91 years, with dyed jet-black hair and thinly dyed lines for eyebrows, moustache, and sideburns. He had retired from his government job years before, but was dedicated to learning, “to the passing on of the greatest that has been thought and said to young minds,” he told me, which is why he filled his retirement with teaching. He had this passion, and a passion for rationalism and improvement, along with a respect for tradition. (“Us old timers prefer the old names,” he said of the change of the city names from Bombay to Mumbai, and Madras to Chennai).

I first met George Anthony as I toured Dawn High School, where he was teaching the senior boys Bertrand Russell’s
Knowledge and Wisdom
. Then all the older children were called to a function to welcome me, and George gave a moving talk, which clearly inspired the children, about the value of discipline and self-improvement. He told them of the importance of punctuality, and of how, through pursuing their own self-fulfillment tempered with duty to others, they could make India great.

Back in Khurrum’s office, we sat down for tea just as the electricity in the Old City went off. In the dim light of evening, Khurrum showed George a
Reader’s Digest
manual, with a title something like
Everything You Need to Know about Almost Everything
. “They’ve brought this book out,” said Khurrum. “Oooh,” cooed George excitedly, flicking through the pages, “They bring out such excellent books.” My suspicions were raised by the condition of the cover; I looked inside and saw the 1986 publication date. It was a very sweet moment.

Another older teacher was Mr. Mushtaq, who ran Scholars Model School. Scholars was on a very narrow lane, right across from the Government Boys Primary and Boys High School. On the same lane, I could see three other private schools. So what’s the public school like? I asked innocently. Mr. Mushtaq laughed. “It’s a government school,” he said flatly, as if no other description or explanation was required. He was another refined, educated gentleman, of 66 years, who spoke with a quiet passion about his love for English literature. He had taught in college for 36 years, he told me, and “to keep my mind active, and to continue giving back to my people, I teach in the upper classes now.” He told me of the authors he loves to teach, from Shakespeare and Milton to Charles Dickens, and his favorite poet Robert Frost. “Did you know that Robert Frost was poet laureate in the time of President J. F. Kennedy?” he asked me. I didn’t know that. He continued: “ ‘I am not a teacher, but an awakener,’ that’s how Robert Frost described himself. If I can awaken a love of literature in my children, then what more would I want to achieve?” Then he quoted his favorite poem in full, in hushed, reverent tones: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:

When he finished, the other school proprietors who had accompanied me on my visit nodded their appreciation in the cramped, stuffy, noisy office, deep in the vibrant heart of the slums of the Old City. Mr. Mushtaq explained the underlying metaphor, that “sleep is death in the poem, and there is an implied character here of a hearse—‘. . . gives his harness bells a shake.’ ” “I’d love to see snow one day,” he said quietly.

These teachers seemed pretty good to me. But how would largely untrained, low-paid teachers compare with their trained, well-paid counterparts in the public schools? How would the children achieve under them? As I toured the schools, I realized it was something that I had to find out. And how many children did they serve, I wondered? What proportion of poor families used private education in the Old City? Clearly, the official figures would be no help here, as so many children were in “unrecognized” schools, operating below the state’s radar. Khurrum thought the figure might be as high as 80 percent in some areas. Again, I had to find out.

Clearly, Sajid and the school managers like him were businesspeople. But they didn’t seem remotely like “businessmen ripping off the poor,” as someone from the World Bank was to opine when I told her of my “discovery” on my return to Delhi. It seemed grossly unfair to characterize the school owners I was meeting in this way. On the contrary, they seemed dedicated to the children in their charge, going out of their way to help improve the education being offered. At my first meeting with Sajid, he invited me and several other private school managers into his office to look at some “play away” equipment and games he had recently bought, at some expense. The other school owners positively cooed about how these could help their children learn. And the first weekend of my visit, I was invited as a guest of honor to open a two-day science fair at M. A. Ideal High School, in the slums behind the high street of Kishanbagh.

M. A. Ideal, named after Mohammed Anwar, the founder, had been started when Anwar was a young man of 23, in 1987, when he taught about 40 children sitting on mats for 10 rupees (about 60 cents at the contemporary exchange rate) per month in two rented rooms. When I visited, his school had around 400 students (over half were girls) in his own buildings. For the science fair, the whole school was turned into something resembling a bazaar, with all the students, individually or in pairs, contributing an exhibit they designed, with guidance from teachers where necessary, illustrating some aspect of science. The exhibits included the dissection of a (at first, to my consternation, live) frog; a working model of the largest hydroelectric dam in Andhra Pradesh; a demonstration of how candles in different-sized jars burn at different rates; one showing how water is sucked into jars when candles burn, and why; another showing the boiling temperature of water; and yet another showing what happens when magnesium burns (complete with formulas for the chemical changes). Young children had exhibits showing different classifications of vegetables and fruits, brief descriptions of the differences between city and village life, or models of lungs and nervous systems, all cut out of polystyrene. For the whole weekend, people from the neighborhood and fellow members of the Federation of Private Schools’ Management came to see the exhibits and question the students.

And the following weekend, there was a two-day cyber-olympics, involving a dozen or so schools from the federation. On day one, it was sports. In the rough school playground, girls played a sedate game called
Kho-Kho
, and there was a girls’ jump rope competition in the street outside. The boys played a rough game,
kabbadi
, whose main aim was to pull one’s opponents to the ground, while holding one’s breath and emitting the phrase “
kabbadi
,
kabbadi
,
kabbadi
. . .” to prove that you really were holding your breath. If you stopped, you were out. Young Muslim girls, heads covered, were watching the boys and shouting excitedly to their favorites. Then there were straightforward footraces, with boys sprinting up the dirt street barefoot, the guest police inspector blowing his whistle for them to start. The second day of the cyber-olympics featured singing, drawing, essay writing, and GK (general knowledge) competitions. Sajid was one of the judges of the singing competition, endearing himself to the gathered students with his spirited performance of various songs in Urdu, including a moving rendition of “We Shall Overcome.”