Under the Trees
A school can lose its walls and still teach. It can’t lose its teachers’ knowledge and still do the job.
The Starting Line · Part 2
When people hear “village school with no facilities”, they picture the missing things. No windows. No power for half the day. No lab, no playground, no library.
All true, for mine. I told you about the rooms in Part 1. I’m not going to list them again.
What I want to tell you about is the day I was in Class 10 and checked a textbook.
The page that said Australia
We were doing the Second World War in social studies. Our teacher read to us about the Jews being sent to Australia.
I remember stopping. Australia is on the other side of the planet from Germany. It was on the Allied side, not the Axis side. You can’t move tens of thousands of people across the world in the middle of a war. Something was off.
There was no internet where I lived. There was the textbook. I opened it, and it said Austria.
The teacher had been teaching from a guidebook, and the guidebook had a typo. He had taught it exactly as printed, to the whole class.
I’m not telling this story to laugh at him. A guidebook said Australia, and nobody in that room, including me until I looked, thought to question it. That’s the point. If the person at the front doesn’t understand the subject, there’s nobody to catch a mistake, and the children learn the mistake.
Maths and science got the teachers who knew what they were doing
In my school, maths and science had teachers who understood their subjects. Everything else was often memorised from a guide and handed down.
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That explains something. When a country has two subjects it takes seriously, it produces engineers and doctors. Not because every child wants to be one. Because those are the only two doors with someone standing in them. But sport, music, art, theatre, photography and dance were never even on the table.
What the numbers say now
My school is behind me now, so I went looking at what the data says about schools today. Some of it will cheer you up.
- A connection is not a supply. 93.6% of India’s schools have electricity, according to the Ministry of Education’s UDISE+ data for 2024–25. My school had a connection too, back in the early 2000s. What it didn’t have was power during school hours. The supply usually went at 6 in the morning and came back at 6 in the evening, and on a lucky day we got an hour or two in between, if it rained or the cities needed less. A number that counts connections can’t tell you that. The government says rural supply now averages about 22 hours a day, up from 12.5 in 2014. If that holds in schools, it’s real progress.
- Teachers are the harder gap. 104,125 schools still run with a single teacher.
- And learning is the hardest of all. ASER 2024, run by Pratham across 605 rural districts, found that only 44.8% of Class 5 children in government schools could read a Class 2 text.
That last line is the one I can’t get past. Walls and wiring can be built in a few years. Teaching someone how to teach takes longer.
What I take from the trees
My school was lined with eucalyptus trees. They stood very tall, in one long row, and they were full of life: squirrels everywhere, birds singing in them all day. Sometime around 2008 or 2009, the school head had them cut down. I still miss them.
Walls can go up in a year. Some things, once cut, take a generation to grow back.
I used to think my school’s problem was the missing rooms. The more I look, the more I think the rooms were the visible part.
The teachers I had weren’t careless. Many of them gave everything they had. But what they had was a guidebook, and no one had ever shown them what it looks like to understand a subject well enough to question the book.
So if I’m asked where a village school should start, I’d say with the person at the front. A teacher who knows when the book is wrong.
Next in this series: Part 3, Not an Army. Why a silent classroom should worry you, and why kids are supposed to be loud.
If you studied in a school like this, or teach in one now, tell me what it was like. I’ll get things wrong, and I want to hear where.
— Aditya Bansal · Bear on Love
