When I told a friend that I know of a school on a boat in Varanasi, he laughed and replied, ‘Well, I know of teachers who hold classes under trees in the open air.’ Not that my friend was wrong, but the impression I got was that we tend to think literacy as some kind of a relative of stand-up comedy. Yes, we as a nation do not take education and literacy seriously.
To us education is either something taken for granted where the government’s responsibility is over once it has passed a regulation that no child should be held back because of performance. I personally take this to be a ridiculous law because we have a literal traffic jam of failures by the time our growing young population reaches the stage where they need to appear in a board examination to pass. We have successfully created a massive road network of literacy failures. So I am one who appreciates every small attempt to give our children the gift of learning… and not a mere push to the higher class to discover yourself standing on a cliff from where there is no way except to jump into oblivion.
Yes, we have some people seriously engaged in the task of gifting literacy and for them education is not a formal protocol but a heartfelt engagement. For instance, Guria, an NGO guided by Ajeet Singh has an innovative concept of a ‘boat school’ for imparting education to children who are otherwise drifting aimlessly after school. These children have no access to aids that facilitate learning and live in homes that are hardly learning or study-conducive. This boat school thus assists ideal learning as children can attend them after their regular school hours and spend time in post-school quality learning without the pressure of space or environment. This is nothing short of a magical transformation.
Yes, this concept of a boat school aims to create the alphabet of real and long-term learning on waves, quite literally. The children of Varanasi need them… but this Varanasi boat school too needs support. Like any good school, they too need regular phases of restoration and redecoration of the interiors… even this school needs the latest learning implements that include books, CDs, and toys… even this school needs us to step in and step up our support. Let such a support be our own journey of Doing Right as it is our involvement that will mean a lot to their survival. Not just this, if such initiatives succeed, they provide the right impetus for more such attempts to help the not-so-privileged to join the mainstream faster.
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The Varanasi Boat School is on its journey of Doing Right
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Arvind Passey
10 April 2015
