THE FIELD
We’ve been around. Quite a bit in fact, always to help schools, school personnel, to make students’ lives less stressful. We’ve come to recognize in practice that education is more about growing than knowing. So we give talks on how to help children grow, relying mostly on the Maslow model. But the heart of our contribution is really the pedagogical system itself, Where the child is without fear.
When this was first adopted by the then director of SCERT in Delhi in 2000, Dr Janaki Rajan, her personnel having been trained by SERVE, it produced such unexpectedly good results that it was dismissed as a fluke. They invited us up again, we did our stuff a second time, and they went back to their classes – where the results among the children were even better, as revealed by a team of professional statisticians applying Before & After yardsticks. She introduced it to her training colleges, and by the end of her term, more than 9,00,000 children were being schooled in it, among them drop-outs who on hearing about it from friends dropped back in again!
In the years since then we have trained personnel in SSMI Delhi under Ms Sunita Bhasin, formerly of NCERT, who enrolled educationists of no fewer than 12 institutions for our courses there. She is still pursuing the system and calling on us from time to time.
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| Sunita Bhasin |
We worked in few schools in Rajasthan training their teachers in our systems. The Jaipur Blasts, as a contemporary terrorist attack came to be known, upset our apple-cart during our second training-bout there.
In Uttarakhand the training ran into the upsetting reality that teachers were being suborned for government secretarial work for huge amounts of school time, so sustained pedagogical developments proved too difficult to implement.
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SERVE CEO in Rajasthan... |
| ....and in Uttarakhand |  |
It was not only the SERVE System we were introducing them to, of course, but to basic structures that preceded the implementation of Where the child is without fear. That system requires basic literacy and numeracy to be effective, whereas in some of those centres we taught pre-literacy pre-numeracy structures.
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