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ELEMENTARY EDUCATION
Beginning with the initiatives to spread the adult literacy programme as a capacity building centre, CYSD gradually undertook the responsibility upon itself to enhance the access and enrolment of children in schools through awareness generation, community mobilization, capacity building of different stakeholders like community-based organizations, statutory committees, teachers and children peer groups; and provision of material support and facilities to the primary schools in difficult tribal areas. The emphasis was then shifted to quality education through initiatives like Early Childhood Education, development of innovative teaching learning materials, teachers’ training, promotion of rights of children, community-led monitoring, institutional strengthening, and strengthening citizens’ initiative on education watch for appropriate policy-practice changes.
Indigenous communities in Orissa are governed with many characteristic features that have direct or indirect bearings on the educational developments of tribal children. They are more traditional bound and inward looking with their own worldview, ideologies, ethical/moral codes and ethos. Lack of entrepreneurial skill and a low techno-economic base with little specialization, adds to the rudimentary concept capital, they have. Kin-based production, communal ownership of land and such other features of the tribal societies, make the education scenario challenging and less susceptive to change. Despite the international commitment to Universalization of Elementary Education (UEE) and the Constitutional mandate of India enshrined in Chapter III of the Constitution as a fundamental right; the school is seen as an “outside” institution in tribal societies, with the feeling that community has no role to play and no responsibility towards participation in school activities. The scope of improvement in the scenario of elementary education was less due to the belief that ‘education would bring no direct or immediate economic returns’. Having examined the effectiveness of institutionalized elementary education in both inclusive and exclusive set-ups, CYSD took up three dimensional issues in educating the children of the Scheduled Tribes.
The major issues of access to school, uniform structure of subjects in a contextually and culturally diverse society; the cultural discontinuity, social discrimination and the non-conducive physical environment in the schools, the difference in dialect, inadequate and untrained teachers, uniform policy and procedural implementation with little sensibility to the contextual needs of the tribal children, and lack of proper mechanism of identifying children eligible for scholarships and other incentives, all came in the way of smoothening the complete process of education. It was therefore important to take the advantages like their distinct cultural identity and the higher degree of gender equality, into turning the dream of higher literacy rates into a reality. Inclusive set up, schooling conditions, drop-outs, school climate and incompatibilities there in, infrastructure, teachers and management of schools in tribal areas, were all brought under the five-point scale with regard to physical, cognitive, organizational and social dimensions, by the citizens’ group at CYSD, in its probe into the process.
