The good thing about having social-work duties as a college course is that they get you good grades and help elevate your total score (some of us don’t really study and cram enough to help scores by itself). The bad thing is, it doesn’t do nearly half as good as the itinerary suggests. I worked two years for the National Service Scheme (NSS) social programme, as a part of my college course. Actually, no, I did not really work for it as much as I worked from it to realize what a dismal and dead-ended course it can be. Sure, it helped my grades where engineering mechanics couldn’t, but that wasn’t really listed in the programme.
In the second year of my course, I had to travel to a village that’s near my college, and teach the kids science and a language which I myself didn’t know the alphabets of.
I had to teach them for roughly an hour, once every week. There were around 20 kids in one room, aged seven through fifteen, all expected to learn exactly the same thing. Most of them were really, really poor, hardly having a proper roof to live under and barely managing meals. There was no point in calling out their names for marking attendance, because half of them wouldn’t be present at a time, what with having to work in the fields and in slightly more privileged people’s homes to earn a coin more. They were such little, unblemished kids, not really meant for the education lumped upon them. I got an A+ that semester.
And the kids? Nobody really graded them, because they wouldn’t know if it was a happy or a sad score. We’d go to class, and they’d be happy to just see us, hovering and looming and jumping around, fascinated by how we look and dress, and probably overwhelmed with the question of what we really are doing there.
They don’t know what education would do for them, heck, they don’t even know what education is. They might learn a chapter out of sheer curiosity of what their ‘teachers’ might be planning next – if it is something more fun than a textbook session of boredom. But they are so very enthusiastic – lively and playful, innocent and spotless, but also inevitably scarred.
After the class was over, some of the kids would run up to us and ask us where we are from and be ever so very nice, not the least bit bothered about what we taught them five minutes, or if that’s even important. They know they are eventually going to end up working as a maid, or ploughing the fields, scraping vomit off the floor or just getting married off to bear even more maids, field-workers and janitors.
The education isn’t really doing them any good, maybe one of the entire class of fifty is really interested in mathematics, but he probably cannot get into a very good school because he can’t afford it, and that’s that – end of dreams. The social programme isn’t really helping them very much if you ask me.
Sure, there are big-brand social groups that actually teach and help kids become something outside of their world of servitude and living in the fields. But under the guise of ‘helping the poor rise to their dreams and endowing them with education’, all I see is a course curriculum improving grades of those that can already afford the education.
