7 August 2019
India is battling an educational crisis of unprecedented proportions. Half of the country’s Standard 5 students cannot read a Standard 2 level text in their native language. Seventy-six per cent of Indian students don’t make it to college. The list of alarming statistics doesn’t end there. But who are the faces behind these statistics? What are their stories? What would it take to alter their futures and subsequently, the future of India?
Grey Sunshine tells the human stories behind the national crisis we see—and yet don’t see every single day.
The epilogue to the book, written by Shaheen Mistri, is excerpted below:
I remember sitting in a large, dark auditorium, starry-eyed, as Muhammad Yunus began to speak. With a twinkle in his eye, he spoke of a day when his grandchildren would find poverty only in a museum. At first, I was confused. A museum of poverty? Then, slowly, lured by the gentle conviction in his voice, I allowed myself to envision the world he saw: a world where poverty exists only behind glass exhibits, video footage and time-stained photographs. A world where you’d take your grandchildren to visit each year as a powerful reminder that the painful memories of the past no longer haunt us.
In that moment, I had goosebumps. We can end poverty, I thought. We can end poverty for all of our citizens.
In my mind, I started visualizing the museum as Yunus spoke. It’s a museum of educational inequity. I call it the Museum of Grey Sunshine. I can see myself standing in a long queue to buy my ticket before walking by exhibits depicting things that I’ve actually seen in my three decades of serving children. While its displays won’t be relics of the past—we’re not there yet—perhaps it could serve as a powerful reminder of what our world holds today.
My hope is that you can visualize it too.
First, there’s a grand foyer. It is there that you experience how kids travel to school. You jump on a fast-moving treadmill to endure the five kilometres that many of India’s children walk, every day, just to reach school. On the other side of the foyer, you ride in a chauffeur-driven Honda City, which will show you how other children reach in just twenty minutes. You can even climb on a camel to get to a school in a makeshift tent or take a simulated ride in an overcrowded Kerala boat-school.
Once you enter the museum, you’ll encounter a big, bold sign which says ‘Classrooms of Oppression’. In the first room, secondary school students are seated on benches so cramped they’re forced to hold on to their backpacks all day. They mindlessly copy answers from the board. Their teacher diligently corrects every answer to show their ‘right’ answers to the education officer who will soon visit. The second exhibit transports you into a second-standard classroom where a seven-year-old is excitedly raising her hand, almost jumping out of her seat to answer. She speaks, makes a mistake, and is mocked.
‘Can’t you ever get anything right?’
In that moment, you see her face becoming a little smaller. She does not want to try any more. She has lost the will to learn.
The third room makes both you and I gasp with horror: a teacher marching up and down her classroom with a cane, using it liberally to keep control of the tightly packed class of ninety-three students. The rooms go on and on; they’re all versions of spaces that take a child’s natural eagerness to learn, and slowly and systematically, stamps it out.
The section’s last room has no teacher. Chaos prevails. Half the children run to a nearby classroom, the only one where a teacher is present and children are learning. They crowd at the door, pushing to peek inside, knowing that that is the only learning they’ll get.
We continue down the dark hallway beyond the ‘Classrooms of Oppression’. We’re asked to sit on a hardwood bench. A rod in front of us locks us in place. As we move through the darkness, headlines light up:
‘Fourteen-year-old Sunitha jumps off a building due to examination stress’
‘Depression in school children on the increase’
‘Mother thrown out of school when she asks why her twelve-year-old son Vijay can’t read’
‘Only half of India’s grade-five students can read a grade-two text’
‘Twelve-year-old Aditi runs away from home to escape marriage’
The bench halts and turns, slowly, before moving faster and faster. As it spins, I hear the pained voices of teachers, parents and students, overlapping each other.
‘Can’t you ever do anything right?’
‘Leave me alone!’
‘Do what I say!’
‘I hate science!’
‘Find something else to be interested in. You aren’t good at math!’
‘Can I ask a question?’
‘Stupid child!’
‘Why do I have to do so much administrative work as a teacher?’
‘Please help me!’
‘How do you expect me to teach 135 children?’
‘I can’t do it!’
‘How can I raise a family when my salary is 3,000 rupees per month?’
The darkness seems to grow. The same chills I once felt as a child in a haunted house run down my spine now. The ride comes to an abrupt halt and the safety rod lifts. Shaking from the ride, I stand up and attempt to ignore the voices still swirling in my head.
We’re soon guided to sit on the floor of a large, carpeted circular room. It’s the ‘Hall of Truth’. Within seconds, the stage in front of the room fills with actors dressed as trees. The room is filled with the sound of machines tearing them down. After a few minutes, we are interrupted by a jarringly loud bell, at which the second performance begins. This one is about rape. We hear the sounds of a screaming woman. Then the school bell rings again, and another performance starts. Reams of plastic bags fall from the ceiling, landing on us while the sound of waves fills our ears. You look at me and at the people in the audience before shaking the plastic bags off. My head starts to hurt with the incessant cacophony: falling trees, a woman’s screams, an ocean churning to rid itself of plastic. But the bells and performances continue. Bell, maternal mortality. Bell, malnutrition. Bell, refugee crisis. Bell, unclean drinking water. Bell, terror. As each new performance starts, it joins the previous performance. It’s deafeningly loud. My head starts to throb now. And then, as quickly as it started, the performers disappear, and on a screen in front of us, a question appears:
What you see is the truth.
What is the purpose of education?
Unnerved, we find cushions lying around and rest our heads for a while, looking up at the question while the crowd scurries out of the dome-shaped room. I feel hopeless. We are responsible for so many of these issues, I think. We created that world.
This contemporary museum may indeed be a figment of my imagination. However, it draws attention to the truth, to the fact that at this very moment inequity plagues India’s children. I still walk into too many classrooms and see kids copying mindlessly. I still hear the whack of a slap across a child’s head, or the threat of a bamboo cane being waved around. I’ve seen a child run away to join a group of eunuchs after his family shunned his homosexuality and I know that millions of children are fearful that their identities won’t be accepted. I watch too many children agonize at their apparent uselessness, when the student next to them scores a 97 per cent compared with their 85 per cent.
I see learning slip, slip, slip
And with this, children fall
Their colours fading from the bright neon of fun and sunshine
To the dull grey of helplessness and mediocrity.
And I know that in these moments, our children have hated school, and life, a little bit more.
As I continue to listen to Mohammad Yunus, he reinforces what I have seen up-close: we are raising kids ill-equipped to even function in our existing world. The need for education is far graver than ever; it’s the need to equip kids to change the very world that they live in. That is the purpose of education. That is what education has the power and responsibility to do. After all, if we’ve created the world that we live in, then we have the ability to design and create a radically better one.
Now, for just a moment, come back into the Museum of Grey Sunshine with me.
We catch a glimpse of a yellow light, right outside the door to the next exhibit. Leaving the ‘Hall of Truth’ behind, we’re now bathed in golden sunshine. The room feels warm. We sit down and close our eyes to soak it in. When we open our eyes, the number ‘1’ is projected, mid-air, in front of us. Curious, we look around. Through the yellow sunshine, more numbers appear.
Like a casino, they flash. They keep increasing, faster than we can count. 7, 26, 389, 2,937, 10,001, 55,679, 369,884, 503,388, 7,300,410, 28,933,342. This continues for several minutes, and we smile to ourselves, intrigued. Finally, there is a shrill bell and the numbers stop at the jackpot: 320,000,000 Indian children.
That’s it, you see. The 32 crore children of India are not our problem. They’re our hope. They’re our hope. They’re our hope. Our children are our country’s greatest hope.
We get up, reluctant to leave the comfort of the sunshine after rooms of grey. The delightful sound of children’s laughter comes from beyond, and we eagerly chase it. The ‘Hall of Light’ breaks into a series of warm, yellow rooms. In a secondary school classroom, children are excitedly chatting about the state of education—and how they can fix it. They’d recently read the RTE and surveyed their community. I shake off a sense of déjà vu. Now, they’re generating prototypes of solutions that will ensure every child receives an excellent education. They’re planning student-led conferences, where they’ll soon present their prototypes to senior government officials.
Eager to see more, we enter the next room. Again, I can’t shake off the feeling that I’ve been in this second standard classroom before.
‘Mistakes are how we learn’ is written in cheerful pink on a wall. The letters sit amidst a blast of colourful photographs of children. I smile at the captions describing each of them: ‘I’m very fast in math’; ‘I want to be a doctor because too many poor people don’t have good healthcare’; ‘I am courageous.’
The eight-year-olds in this class are seated in a circle, discussing love. ‘Love means not fighting with my little brother.’ ‘Love is when people make fun of my friend and I tell her I will always be with her.’ ‘Love is the only thing that will change the world.’
The kids in these classrooms are safe. Along with their teachers, they are crafting dreams. They’re growing to understand their strengths, practising values and taking ownership of not only their own education but also that of their peers.
We continue on.
I enter a room with ninety-three students. The children are sitting in stations of six, each one led by a student and each learning something different. The student facilitators anchor their stations with a learning style that best suits the group. There is joyful chatter in the room, fall-off-your-seat engagement and a palpable passion for learning. These ninety-three kids are actually teaching each other. The sense of déjà vu from having seen such exemplary classrooms before overwhelms me. These classrooms recognize a fundamental truth: each individual has something to give and something to receive. The teacher is both offering to help and asking for help. This feels like the future of education.
We pass the last room in the ‘Hall of Light’, wondering why the kindergarten class is empty. The front wall is adorned with a large arrow, pointing up to a young child’s scribble, ‘Be careful of our nest. We’re looking after baby birds here.’ I look up and smile at the baby pigeons, safe in the classroom nest. The seats have been pushed back into a large circle. In the centre is an elaborate, twenty-foot-long structure made of wooden blocks. We walk closer and see a carefully constructed space station. They’ve thought of every detail, labelled each section, created escalators and space suits. These children are learning advanced engineering at the age of five—all through play. On the door is another sign, ‘We’ll be back this afternoon. Our class is out learning from the world!’
I don’t want these rooms to end. They are the rooms where teachers and students weave dreams not just for the future, but for today.
Before long, we reach the museum’s closing stretch and find a room called ‘The Hug’. Intrigued, we enter. Visitors are sitting in a circle. A child facilitates the discussion with passion and energy, sharing her understanding of a hug, its power to comfort and connect. She then demonstrates a ten-second hug, looking into the eyes of her partner and letting her purest wishes for him flow through the hug. She invites all of us to do the same as she plays happy, upbeat music. We watch as people tentatively walk towards each other. I lock eyes with an old lady with thick glasses. With all the love I can muster in my heart, I walk over to her and give her a warm, tight hug. We stay like that for more than ten seconds; two strangers, motivated by a student to remember that ultimately, we’re all deeply and intricately connected.
We arrive at the final section: ‘The Space of the Collective’.
I’m seated in a large auditorium, facing a black stage. The hall is packed, similar to the hall I sat in when I heard Muhammad Yunus speak of the Museum of Poverty. Children, from all ages and backgrounds, are speaking and singing. They perform spoken word poetry, speaking of how they’ve been discriminated against as girls. They grace the stage with exquisite dance formations depicting what a reimagined education could look like. They rise up and share powerful stories of the things that they want to stop in the world—violence, inequality, poverty. They fill the aisles with their joy and hope, appealing to us to see them as partners who have the voice and conviction to change the world for the better.
I leave the museum in quiet contemplation. I marvel that there will be a time when we look back at a past where we allowed and perpetuated violence, apathy, humiliation and a deadening of the mind, heart and soul in our schools. I am convinced that there will be a time when no Indian child studies in one of the rooms that I walked through before I entered the ‘Hall of Light’. I am confident that with years of committed action and with hope, the status quo will be shifted.
I yearn to visit the Museum of Grey Sunshine one day to be reminded that we’ve turned the Classrooms of Oppression into Classrooms of Light. I yearn for the day the grey disappears.
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You can get the book here.