Old School in a New Age

Imagine a school that doesn’t scrap music, art or culture classes because of budget cuts. Imagine a school that values the knowledge of your heritage over state-mandated history books. Imagine the ability to design a curriculum that incorporates your unique culture into the education you receive. A school like that is hard to find anywhere, but the Adavasi of Wayanad have been able to look within their community to educate their youth so that they do not forget who they are or where they come from.

Kanavu is the name of the school that we visited today that did all the above. It was founded in 1992 to bring the students of the Adavasi community together. Its emphasis is on the knowledge and wisdom of life that has been part of the Adavasi traditions. Classes are conducted in Paniya which is spoken by the four tribes are represented at the school. However, in the case that there is a communication barrier, they also speak Maliyala, the local Sanskrit-based language which is over 900 years old.

While Shirley, the director of the school, made it clear that it is impossible to grade the quality of education received by students, she urged us to note instead how formational it is to them as people. It goes beyond the numbers of successes or failures. Although the drop out rate is high (a problem that is true of many schools around India, especially among the poor community), the experience that those students took away cannot be measured.

Clearly, Shirley is very aware of what her work means for the big picture. Because of this visionary school, she has kept her culture from fading and those students will graduate with a sense of identity that they will perpetuate to their children in the future. However, despite this rosy picture, I can’t help but to think that numbers do matter to an extent. When these students graduate, will they be able to compete with graduates of public or private schools? Will the drop outs be equipped to transfer to other schools? Yes, it is true that the students that go to the Adavasi school will have a whole other set of skills that they can show others, but will they be able to compete for jobs in this quickly developing nation that pushes its students to be engineers, doctors and entrepreneurs?

Then again, what does it mean to be developed? The way we have divided the world is by equating the term “developed” to Westernized countries, and the term “developing” to those that have not been able to keep up with the Western market. With globalization, we are expecting that the world will succumb to a Western standard of living. A standard that is wholly dependent on the viscous cycle of consumption and waste that we already see is unsustainable. What happens then to someone like the Adavasi? He has his culture and way of living that has worked for centuries, yet he is expected to change because the world around him is rapidly Westernizing in order to compete in the global market. It appears to me that his culture gets wiped out as the world starts beating to the sound of one consumerist drum. Shirley opened Kanavu in response to that phenomenon, and it is essential that she keep it running for the Adavasi children. Though they too are part of this modern world, it is important that they keep their culture alive and prevent the extinction of yet another group of people.